lust for life

I want a new tattoo, a big one, and I want to go places and have adventures and live an interesting life. I want to be with someone who will pick up with me on a whim and get on an airplane to anywhere without doing the laundry first or making sure the weather will be fine on the other side or that the hotels aren't all booked up already because of a cycling race. I want someone who wants me around all the time, even if there's nothing much to say, just so they can look at me and know that I'm real and as much theirs as anything is anyone's. I want someone who knows what they want and will make sacrifices and take steps to get it, or at least to try to get it. You must always try. Life does not fall into your lap, all neatly wrapped in ribbon and bows. If I've learned anything, I've learned that you have to work and work and it never really gets any easier and no one can really help you all that much and you have to want it and never stop wanting it and -- often most difficult of all -- keep on wanting it after it's yours. I learned a long time ago, too long ago, that you don't wake up one morning and suddenly enjoy doing all the chores, big and small, that make up the hard work of living, you just get up and you do it anyway and that is what is called being a grown up.

I want to make my own traditions and rules and feel however I feel about them and stop doing what doesn't work. I want to climb things and then jump off of them and I want to live beside the ocean finally and I want to dance and swim and breathe. I want to look into the faces of my babies knowing they are the first thing that has ever truly been mine and that they will never be mine at all and that's okay; that's as it should be. I want to move through my life in this world as a force to be reckoned with, as the star, as the heroine, as the main event.

I don't want to sit in the back. I would like to sit in the front, alongside someone else -- sometimes driving, and other times holding the map.