the airport

I was scared out of my mind in the ten minutes before I met you in that airport. I paced in and out of one of those news stands that sells magazines I know I shouldn't buy but almost always do when I'm in airports on my way somewhere, that sells packages of peanut M&Ms and gum. Once I bought a pair of headphones for way too much money because I couldn't imagine flying all the way to Baltimore and then taking the train to DC without a soundtrack (I almost always imagine my life to a soundtrack, as if somewhere someone wants to capture scenes of me with my head against a train window listening to The Civil Wars). I paced in and out of it, over and over, running one hand over my shoulders in that gesture of comfort you've now seen a half dozen times and through my hair, which wouldn't be tamed no matter what I did, thinking about what I would do? The possibility of you, walking toward me in that airport terminal, the possibility of really seeing you...  I was so scared and so excited, and I paced in between packages of peanut M&Ms and People hoping that I'd figure out how to hide from you that my heart was beating a thousand times a minute, because I'd been waiting. And if I had known it, I'd have played "Dust to Dust" on repeat as I waited.Sometimes I think we're afraid of the beautiful.The airport is this place I'd always imagined I'd meet you. In between a few of the times I imagined flying to Scotland in March or driving to Texas (I imagined sitting in my car outside your driveway and just hoping you'd be curious who I was, that you'd walk outside barefoot or your garage door would be open and I would walk in, halfway, and you'd be there painting) - I've always kind of hoped it would be the airport. It carries the ache of leaving and the joy of arriving, the familiar and the new. Somehow, in the long hallways and the too-bright lights, in the incessant announcements of delays and baggage claim carousel numbers, that's where I always find myself again. It is the place where I cried about my sister getting married while eating a bagel from Dunkin' Donuts. It is where I first left home - flying on Air France as an awkward and gangly 9th grader. It is where I first came home - England and Boston, oh, how I remember sobbing my way home from DC in the Baltimore airport at 6am realizing that I left, no certainty, no promise of return to that place.The airport is where I meet that beautiful I am afraid of.That beautiful is living in the carry-on bags courtesy of Virgin Atlantic they used to make for us with crayons and coloring books of airplanes who had friendly faces, in eating too many Twizzlers looking at a bridal magazine in a Houston terminal. The beautiful is in how I pace waiting for you in the basement baggage claim, how I check my phone so often, how I played Horse Feathers in July and country in August, how I used to fly to DC on a whim because something in me was aching for friends and cupcakes and the memory of me, there, and how I would come home, confused and remade.The beautiful is here. Isn't that the point of this long winding post? That the beautiful is arriving, is closer than we think?That first time I found you running with my phone half out of my hand and losing track of the people I ran into on the way, searching for you in the crowds of late afternoon tourists and umbrellas, that was the beautiful.And now, I anchor myself to it again - the beautiful is close to us. Love,hilary

I pray with the animals

I'm at a loss for the words this early in the morning, sitting as I am at the gate waiting for a plane to bring me home and away. Those lines have blurred, God, I think half-heartedly, and I am impatient for the days when it is no longer the slow waltz of leaving and arriving, the dance outside terminals and in airport parking lots and along the back roads of Newburyport and The Woodlands. I am impatient for the hands clasped, for the dishes drying in my hands and the soft hum as we waltz through the night laced in each other's arms. Impatient, I grip the pen tighter, ask for the right words, ask for the prayer. But I don't know how to put this in words flung up to God this morning as August begins, and my words flee from me the moment I lower my eyelids in the ordinary, obedient way. The fear of leaving, the joy of arriving, they crowd in and I hesitate.I remember that I brought the book with me at just this moment - a ghost of a whisper to remember that Carmen Bernos de Gasztold offered prayers, those of the lark and the bee and the old, tired camel. I crack the spine slightly in my haste, smooth the pages with my fingertips. The flight attendants call those who need to board with small children - but aren't I just such a child? - and I read. The Prayer of the FoalO God! the grass is so young!My hooves are full of capers.Thenwhy does this terror start up in me?I raceand my mane catches the wind.I raceand Your scents beat on my heart.I race,falling over my own feet in my joy,because my eyes are too bigand I am their prisoner:eyes too quick to seizeon the uneasiness that runs through the whole world.Dear God,when the strange nightprowls round the edge of day,let Yourself be moved by my plaintive whinny;set a star to watch over meand hush my fear.Amen.--I was only seven or eight when I first wanted a horse. My grandfather in England gave me The Very Best Book of Horses and I read it so much my fingers smudged the ink of the headings, wore the pictures to almost nothing with my fingers tracing the outline of the girls in their riding outfits and English saddles. I met a pony once in a field in England, an old white one with grey spots scattered on her body, more from age than a dappled beginning. I fed her sweet grass slowly from the palm of my hand, and just once, Dad let me touch her nose. I startled as I felt her breathe, my hand calmed by her slowness, my heart hushed by her deep eyes.--When I was trying to explain my fear to her in the dark of the upstairs in the student center, on the chairs we always sat in when it was that kind of conversation, I told her I was like a horse. Steady and skittish, born at once with gravity and with wild movement. I was afraid, and eager. I felt God ripple through my heart like the zephyrs in late spring here, which trace the edge of the water, but I was scared, running for the hills, afraid of such closeness. I was always eager and afraid.--And then, that winter night I wandered through the bookcases in the attic, searching for the old story, for "If it's a colt you want, I'll give you Starlight" - for Almanzo and Eliza Jane and Royal, for the Christmas and the schoolyard and the year that Dad first read me the story out loud. I found our hardcopy sitting in between other old and musty books, remembering how I, like Almanzo, had always wanted a colt, how I had wanted a farm like his and to build a sled and train two cows, Star and Bright, and plow my way through waist-deep snow into school. I remember being lost in the story, in the somehow realness of it, just because I knew how much Almanzo had wanted a horse, for I wanted one too.--I read the prayer on the plane again and again, closing my eyes only to open them again. I remember how God cherishes the creation of the animals, how He teaches us to love them in Adam's naming. I remember how it is good to imagine the conversations they must have with God, for this whole earth is bursting with songs back to the Creator. Right before we land, I write:Dear Lord, may I ever remember how Your creatures, wild and tamed, young and old, yield their life as praise of their being, of Your creating. May I give the same praise lark-like and with the canter of the horse, for all that You give. For Yours is the world. And Yours the glory. Amen. Love,hilary

you free my heart, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girl and all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,We're sitting in a Starbucks together, alternating putting our hands to our faces in excitement or frustration, as we try to shape our words just so, keep them honest and true, write theses and personal statements, work out this life in the way we have for so long - in the syllables sounded out silently by the reader, heard again and always for the first time.Your last letter to me. Can I say any more - but we both know it was something wondrous and I'll leave it at that.But your being is a better letter to me, always was and is - the way you look at people when you think I can't see you, when you smile at them gently, when you rage in the car about all the things but you soften, always, and you remember out loud for us both that there is good and we are to seek it.You're a seeing, and a seeking, man.You teach me. When you write to me, and I smile at you and we lock eyes over the screens and the white noise of this Starbucks, you ask me what it is, and I shake my head, and I tilt it just so and take a sip of my coffee and you return to your words, and me to this letter, and I know that you know I am still smiling over you - it's that you're teaching me something about the best story that we've been told that makes me want to tell it better. The way you tell our love story is the way we should all be telling His - fearless and free.You're a seeking, and a seeing, man.When I was in France the last time, just before senior year of high school, we had this one day at the musée Rodin, my favorite museum in Paris. We had a picnic, I think (there is a picture of us all in the grass, me in this grey and white striped shirt with sunglasses perched awkwardly on my head) before we spent time in front of the Bourgeois de Calais and were sent into the museum to draw. There is this sculpture there, The Kiss, and I remember walking by it, over and over, too afraid to stop in front of it for too long, because there was love deep and wild and true, there was love alive in the stone, as if Rodin had freed something, his creating work a work of revelation more than conjuring. Sharna drew it - she was always good at art - but I was too afraid to put my pencil to the paper. I drew instead a sculpture in the same room, called the Hand of God, and my shading was, as it always is, not true to life, and my pencil wobbled and so it's mangled on the page. I wasn't brave enough to draw The Kiss, to be near that kind of love (because it's there, alive, a gesture I think, towards the wildest love of all) but I longed to be Sharna that day, sitting at the feet of that moment writing it over and over as my pencil traced along a moleskin journal page.I've thought about that afternoon a lot in the space here, where we are together. I think if I were to find myself there, I would be brave enough to draw it. I would sit down at the feet of that sculpture, look at how the two lovers grow up from the stone itself. I would let my pencil hit the page and tilt, scratch the shadows and lines in the way I learned but never mastered, because though I will never draw like Sharna did, you free my heart to be in the midst of love like that. You free my heart to see it and to seek it.You're a seeking and a seeing man, and you're freeing me to see, and to seek, those things which years ago in a museum in Paris I learned I wanted, and was afraid to know."Mais cette transposition de ma restitus ne fait rien à mon amour car je t’aime à minuit comme à midi ; les heures, les jours, les mois, les années glissent sur lui sans le ralentir ni l’amoindrir. Au contraire, chaque minute qui s’écoule est un siècle d’amour de plus pour l’éternité, c’est ainsi que mon cœur thésaurise depuis le premier moment où il t’a aimé." - Juliette Drouet à Victor Hugo, 1 décembre 1860.Love, always,hilary

i offer us a memory, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girland all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,Do you remember our first Skype conversation two years ago? You had said it would be good to meet, I ran 7 miles I was so nervous, down the winding road we walked down a little ways your first afternoon here, two years later. You had said it was probably about time we met, given all that we had already shared, all the words that had tumbled out between us, that very long analogy I'd given you about my friends as doctors in a hospital (I still don't think we know what I am, actually, maybe that's something to ponder), the lists of books...Before I got on Skype to talk to you, I listened to "Tonight, Tonight" by Hot Chelle Rae. Yes. It's true. It had been a song of the summer up in the office where I worked, the way we cheered ourselves up for a long afternoon of answering questions about Orientation, the size of the mattresses from frantic moms in Target holding two different sets of sheets. I listened to it in my car loud on the way home sometimes, and something about it made me feel, for a second, foolish and completely unselfconscious. So I played it three times after that long run and then you called.We already know this story, but I think memory has a funny and beautiful way of moving between people, passed back and forth, and it is never quite the same memory. Maybe that means it always hid more than we thought it did. Each telling changes what it was; it isn't the same story. I don't know if you listened to music or if you ordered a special kind of coffee to impress me (I was drinking iced tea out of a plastic cup, so, nothing too fancy for me). And the details that we labor over as writers, the things we aim to pin down with our words - things like, the night here was a deeper blue than it normally is, the kind that inks the spaces between the stars, tracing their outlines in the sky maybe those are the things that escape us on purpose.Maybe as writers, we have to be bested by our stories, work as hard as we can to capture them on paper only to realize that they are already away, laughing a little as they tear up and off, into the field, into the future, into the retellings that we don't know how to enter just yet.I think when I am asked in a kitchen somewhere, with faces and eyes that are widened in surprise that I ever lived a different life than the one I'll be wrapped up in, when they (the crowd of them, whoever they are, whatever they are named) ask me, I will tell a new story. Every time. And it will be new to me in the telling and the retelling.Writing is good for us, Preston, probably more because of what it teaches us we know nothing about and cannot say and we have spun this tale around and around and around again, how it is good because it brings us nearer a better silence. But I think about it with memory - that memory of listening to "Tonight, Tonight" in my bedroom before that first Skype call, now as we round our way towards what must be dozens (dare I say it, hundreds? it feels like that), even now -the memory is a new story.I think about the Law God gave, how much was about the work of remembrance. Establish this as a memorial, He declares, knowing that in an old memory is new life.All of this because the song played on the radio, and I remembered two years and a handful of days ago. All this, because I think we must be a people who practice the work of remembrance, who make things new by their retelling, who are bested by the stories more alive than we think them.Love, always,hilary

dear hilary: gather the threads

Dear Hilary,All I ever see is the clock ticking. Time is always running out. There's never enough time to do it all. When this season ends, a new one will begin but what about when that one comes to an end? Why do all good and beautiful things come to an end? I'm so scared on missing out on things and losing those who are precious to me.Hilary, how do I live alive in the moment when all I can think about is how quickly the end is approaching? How do I deal with the clock that keeps ticking, and a heart that desires to live so fully, experience so much, and spend time with so many people? My heart feels ready to explode.Love,About-to-GraduateDear About to Graduate,Why do all good and beautiful things come to an end? I feel you on the edge of your seat with this question, maybe tapping a pencil on your desk, wondering, worried that the answer might be something trite like, "because that's the way things go," or "that's life," or even, "it will all be okay." I want to steer clear of those words, not because they are untrue (actually, I think they're terribly true), but because sometimes it helps to hear it sounding in different words. I want to tell you a story.I was sitting in a kayak in the middle of a French river. My friend and I were in floppy sunhats, my skin already a solid pink, our arm muscles so tired we couldn't even admit to ourselves that we didn't really know how to "feather" or "J-stroke" back to the group. It was early afternoon, just after lunch, and the group was eagerly paddling ahead while we floundered. It was summer, and in the south of France there is a sweetness to the air itself, a dull humming from all the things coming alive: lavender and bees and olives. We were in search of the Pont du Gard somewhere down the river, further into the afternoon. We were in search of ourselves, as soon-to-be seniors, in search of love at 17, in search of everything. I can almost taste that day, our laughter pealing out over the water to annoy a stray duck and a solo Frenchman, convinced that we had arrived at the beginning and this was, and must be, a kind of forever. We floated under the ancient Roman aqueduct singing a madrigal we had learned four years before - "All Ye Who Music," All ye who music love, and would its pleasures prove, O come to us, who cease not daily to warble gaily...As the days in France, and later that summer, meandered by me, I began to panic. It was senior year, I whispered, the end of high school. The end of the daily relationships, the walks to and from the Barn, the end of singing "Wade in the Water" and "I'll Fly Away" in voice lessons, the end of whispers and note passing and French. I stayed busy so I wouldn't see the end coming. I convinced myself it would be fine. Or that I wouldn't miss things. Or that time wasn't really moving at all.But, dear heart, time was moving. And I moved with it. And you, where you are, have moved with it too. We cannot hide in our feathers or in our schedules. We cannot convince ourselves that absence is a word without meaning or the life, so rich in front of us, is not going to change. We are not given permission to do that.I want to tell you that my story in France, which I type as if I am still in the kayak in the south of France, it was six years ago. All of its richness has entered the wider tapestry of my story and now, when I plucked the thread to show you, it brings with it a thousand others. Stories I didn't know about until four years ago, one year ago, Sunday afternoon. It's bound to the things that haven't happened yet in my life - just as your threads from high school, the people you love, the things you love, all that feels most alive in you - they are bound to your future. I promise you do not lose the things you love, and the good and beautiful things that go through the first ending now have a life beyond it.Gather the threads, sweet pea. Run your fingers through these stories of high school, of deep friendship, of strange awkward school dances and movies you didn't need to spend the money to see in theaters and essays and languages and family summers. Hold them in your hands, feel their weight and length. Write them down, or tell them on the phone late at night. Or relive them with your dearest friends.They have a life beyond this first ending.They live among the thousand threads of your one beautiful story.Love,hilary

a meadow, and time

The gravestone is just the same as the others. I slide my back against it, feel the warm sun bleach the ends of my hair. What is special about this man? I barely noticed his name, more interested in the twisting Spanish moss over my head, the heat shimmering around me, the gnawing in my stomach. I don't feel watched over, haunted by the dead in this graveyard. It's the living who follow me: the things I so desperately want, the fourteen year old self I cannot begin to understand, the braces that I don't get to shed yet. It's the friends I can't seem to keep. My head swirls, all the same problems, all the year full of them. I trace circles in the dirt instead of writing in my journal about this Selma graveyard. I don't care about this. I don't have anything to say. I look over to where Elizabeth sits, her dark sheen of hair rippling in the sweaty sun. I want to be that beautiful, and my body shivers with the thought. She is writing, a head full of good thoughts. I imagine that she paid attention to her gravestone. That she is telling their story, whoever they are, the bones under her feet. I imagine that she understood what the assignment was.I am at the beginning of high school. I wear strange knit pants and too many collared shirts with a couple of buttons that always strain against my chest, because I haven't learned how to breathe in and out inside my own body, and I keep imaging I'm shaped like the girls I see around me. I don't know how to put on any makeup, but I believe I should, so it's stashed in between underwear and socks in my duffel bag. It has stayed in the same place for the whole three weeks, because I'm afraid of it. It's not really my makeup anyway, just the free stuff from a Clinique bonus, but I took it in a moment that felt brave, and now, I'm paralyzed.The sun streams through the moss, and I can hear a bird calling out for its mate, but the call goes unanswered. It drops off into silence, only to screech louder, more desperate. I imagine the bird has come home to the nest and she is missing. The cry rings out over my head - where are you? Where are you? I still haven't put a word on paper. I feel thirsty and tired and the sun keeps beaming on me and Elizabeth at her gravestone with her rippling black hair writing in her Moleskin journal and my shirt sticks to my back, finds all the shape in me that I wish away. It reminds me that I am not a slender gazelle. I feel my braces and in-between hair, all my fourteen years.I know the teacher will call us soon, will want us to go over to the meadow across the street, next to the graffiti concrete wall full of the heroes of the 1960s. He will call us to step into a field and sit in the dust next to each other, sharing our stories and experiences. He will tell us to breathe deep the Selma air, to imagine Martin Luther King walking across the bridge. He will ask me a question about A Rose for Emily, about the man whose gravestone I sit next to now. He will call me out of myself and into the past, which is not quite past, and into the future, which stretches too far ahead of me. He will whisper to us, our eyes rounded in surprise, that we are all in a meadow of time together, and our pasts which are not past will someday meet our futures which are present, and not. He will tell us time in a mystery. He will tell us that perhaps, in that meadow of time, we will recognize these selves we are now next to the selves we will be.Tonight, as I write, I am next to her - and all her braces and all her jealousy and all her writer's block. Tonight, I watch her struggle to put her pen on paper, struggle to live inside the curve of her hip bones, struggle against the longing to be a slender gazelle with white blonde hair. I watch her try desperately not to care about things. But there isn't a cynical bone in my body, and she never had one. I watch her stand, brush the dust off her shorts, and turn to read the gravestone.This is the beginning of loving ourselves: simply the recognition. That girl, she is me. And tonight, I walk through the graveyard in Selma to meet her. Our insecurities are not so different eight years apart. Our fears and longings, not so different.I think that high school self, she has something to teach me.