It's gonna be ok.

Mid-afternoon showers for the win. Keeps me from napping, gets me ready to go outside of my apartment, and I have time to shave my legs, which is necessary because it is summer now and the air-conditioning she is broken (at work.)

I discovered tonight that I'm a rather abysmal Nerts player.... or is it NERTS? Well, regardless, I'm bad at that card game. I think it is because I am not that great at snap hand-eye-mind coordination. I'm bad with snap driving decisions as well... I make a far better navigator than I do a driver. The pressure. I don't like it. I don't do well with it.

I think I live in a strange world, that many people would not understand. For example, I stood around for about 15 minutes tonight while the finer points of a D&D campaign were discussed around me... and I go to a church full of hipsters... and I'm a small town country girl who loves musicals and video games... yes, my life context is kinda quirky.... and yet, I find kindred spirits seemingly everywhere I turn. It's rather nice, actually. To know that even when you don't share any of the same background, when something clicks it just clicks, and you wonder how you ever got along without this friend.

So much has changed in my life... but one thing I'm insanely grateful for is all the new people that have become a part of my circle (and the ones who have been there for a while as well). I just know Nathan never would have guessed the some of the integral people who are helping me learn to be ok, but I know he'd be so grateful.... Unfortunately those people missed out on hearing it from him.

Now my country Pandora station is playing "If Tomorrow Never Comes" by Mr. Brooks. The one thing that I can rely on when it comes to Nathan and I is that we both knew exactly how much the other person loved us. There were no regrets between us...no uncertainty. We loved with our whole hearts. I think that's all you can really do.

Sometimes I'm struck by just how blessed I still am... even without Nathan, now, I still had him. He was mine. And we have incredible families, and equally incredible friends, and I have an amazing church family (in two separate locations), and I have you, of course. Blessed blessed blessed, and I maintain what I wrote the day after Nathan died. I'm so incredibly grateful for his life, so incredibly grateful that I was given the opportunity to be loved by such a man. It's hard, now, but it was worth this. And I intend to live the rest of my life to be worth the hard parts. I won't give up on my dreams, even if they are both blessedly simple and utterly complex. I'll find love, I'll give our parents grandchildren (one way or another), and I'll be ok.

When I was student teaching there was this cute pixie gal of a senior at Marshfield. She was delightfully goofy and something that she used to say in this strange gruff and silly Louis-Armstrong-esque voice became part of my vernacular. I say it in as close an approximation as I can manage to how she said it, and Kara will say it to me in a normal voice, just because she knows I will then repeat it in the "right" voice. What Elizabeth always said, and I now repeat is, "It's gonna be ok!"

and it will be.