Have you ever wondered what it is like to be your friend? I was wondering this yesterday as I sat across a small round table sipping a late-blooming Winter's Dream tea latte in March, and enjoying a conversation with a lovely red-haired girl with happy eyes. Sharing an intimate space in the midst of strangers--and sharing our selves in simple ways--I know instantly what kind of friend she is to me.

She has a light about her, and a sweetened, gentle spirit. She makes you feel valid and important, because she thinks you are. She is clever and funny, and these traits usually present themselves in delightfully cute ways. She is an expert at active-listening, but I don't think she ever had to teach herself how. She just is. She asks the best questions and is the one of the best clarifiers I have encountered. And while she loves to hear and learn from others, she has bright passion of her own (it's more of that light I mentioned before). Her consistently brewing sense of focused drive and motivation always startle me at first because I don't always associate those traits with intentionality and warmth. But with her, they are not a dichotomy, but rather a pairing of two authentic parts of her self that come together to form a sort of ambitious humbleton. So, when you hear her talk about her goals and dreams, they don't seem selfish or short-sighted. They seem authentic because they reside in a good person who wants to see those around her succeed as much as she wants to succeed herself.

Sitting across from her and noticing all her mannerisms--her signature hair flick, the way she stirs her tea bag back and forth in a seamless motion, her identifiable light-filled laugh, how she readjusts her shoulders with a simple sort of settling motion... I know what it is like to be her friend.

So, it made me ponder to myself, what it is like to be my friend. And it was amusing to think about the irony of how your own self is the person you know best in the world because it's you--but you are the one person who can't really know what it is like to actually be your friend.

And it's funny to think in little reversals sometimes.

m.e.k.

© kimberly k. taylor-pestell, all rights reserved

In the late night, all I wanted to do was drink cold water and let the tranquil darkness drink me. The pillow was too warm and the night shadows were too welcome, especially for fading away from them in sleep. My mind was awake and active, and I wanted to do something having to do with written words whether it be reading or writing or drawing.

Jason was sleeping and my cat was exploring somewhere downstairs. My stomach was uneasy. (I think I got seasick from all the cool drinking water with unknown time ticking by in silence.) The fan blurred out any sounds for imagining and tempted me to rise and dishonor the obligatory sleep-casting of the darkness for a spell.

But, I stayed beneath my covers and tried to lie still so not to wake Jason. I twirled the new shortness of my hair between the thumb, pointer and middle fingers of my left hand, feeling the silky texture of freshly liberated hair, and let it lull me to sleep.

iphone | ceiling beneath my feet

© kimberly k. taylor-pestell, all rights reserved

Sometimes, I am moving in quicksand, and it is exhausting and makes me anxious. At others, I am in a blur of fast-motion consciousness streams, and everything around me is speeding past on shiny red bicycles that I cannot ride.

Today, I am in between. I am middle-of-the-road with my deep breaths and thickened thoughts and expectant hesitancy. Floating around in a perpetual thought bubble without any nearby tree branches to run into and spill me free.

"Race against time" is an odd way to put it because we don't change Time. We can ignore it for instant victory, because it only has the meaning that we give to it. Or, we can adhere to its ways, and it will win every time with its cyclical years and months and weeks and hours and minutes and seconds and such.

iphone  | conscious streaams
© kimberly k. taylor-pestell, all rights reserved