for what it’s worth

I knew some time ago back in August that today would come, that my month and a half of travels and plane rides and road trips and weddings and funerals and old friends and new houses and late nights and early mornings, would lead me here. Something about airplanes makes me feel like crying and something about crying makes me feel like writing. I am at the end of that, and the start of this: a few very welcome sedentary months in my new loft in Boise where I will read and write and drink coffee and write some more. I look forward to finding out the different lights that filter in my new windows, the sounds of my beautiful new roommates laughing downstairs, the simultaneously new and familiar feeling of fall creeping down the streets of the North End. I welcome some peace, some stillness, and some silence. However, in the wake of what was this summer and all this madness I am reminded of how eternally lucky I am.

I spent the past four days back in Minneapolis for the wedding of one of my dear friends to a man who I could not have imagined more perfectly for her. We have been friends since the seventh grade, and the bridal party filled with women I have known for even longer, some of which I haven’t seen in years upon years. I have been blessed in my life with these insane, wonderful, truthful, and beautiful friends. Spending these days with them felt like a lifetime in the making. It is incredible how we are still at heart the same girls we were in our childhood. We still laugh at the same stupid jokes, talk about the same surly boys, and fall asleep in the sun on each others shoulders. Not a beat has been skipped, not a note out-of-place. I love them to the ends of the earth in a way you can only love someone from having known them most of their lives.

And with all of that, I also must recognize how much space life takes in the interim, how much has happened that I could not be there for, how much will happen that I will miss. We become these new versions of our old selves and we must carefully carry this friendship folded in the back pocket of an old pair of jeans. The truth is we will get older, and some day we will look at photographs and comment of how young, how lovely, and how promising we all were. We will laugh the same laughs and tell the same stories and drink far too much wine. We will continue to marry and gather, and have babies and gather, and hopefully not die so often and gather, and once in a while for no other reason than we are able and we love each other, we will gather.

For what it is worth, my love for you is always.

wedding photography by Jenavieve Belair