Open your eyes, dear child, your dream has arrived.

I feel like I'm living in a dream. Which, oddly enough, is true. I have dreamed for this moment, this turn in my life for years. Years and years and years. I have longed, hoped, wished, and cried many silly tears to reach this turn into adulthood. I am engaged, but in my mind I already think "wife". In my mind I call my fiancee, "Husband" and it makes me smile. Husband.
To have a man who loves me so very dearly to want to share his life, the rest of his life with me thrills me to my very core. I admit to not thinking very highly of myself. To discrediting my talents, my personality, my beauty - even that word applied to me gives me pause. I am beautiful. Four years ago I would have scoffed at such a statement. Pretty, maybe. Beautiful? Please.
Then I met my love. He looked into my eyes and told me I am beautiful. I am wanted. I am worthy, I am loved. A year later I believe it. Mostly.

It has been a whirlwind three weeks. One week I was moving in with the darling man, the next we were engaged and now? Now we're setting in to living with another person. I'm settling my things into his apartment, he's adjusting to having a "roommate" for the first time in eight years or so. Lots of adjustments.
Lots of small flickerings of temper ending with a conversation of better understanding. All couched in crazy love. It makes me happy to know that while we're both driving each other batty, we can still look at the other with a knowing smile and say, "You're crazy, but I love you."

A wise man once said, "the greatest moment is when you're living your dreams, awake." It is so very true.

Image:Stiletto Heights

Pure Squee. . .

My apologies for the poor lighting, but I'm just too chuffed to really care. He proposed. It was the cutest proposal in the history of cute proposals, and of course I said yes.

I'm also still pinching myself. I can't quite believe it, and then a glance down at my left hand and start grinning like an idiot.

In the meantime, there are Christmas gifts to finish knitting, Thanksgiving to prepare for, and many many things to be thankful for.

Cheers dear friends!

The Pirate Sweater

Voila, Mon Coeur

Life is crazy, and wonderful all at the same time right now. I feel older inside, crazier, different. Top it all with a generous helping of stress, and I wake up tired, I go to bed tired, I work all day tired only to fall into bed, and repeat it the next day. One of the things getting me through all the crazy is this man. The one who holds me when I cry (frequently), who kisses me when I'm lonely, who is becoming my best friend and trusted buddy. He is the one who cooks me dinner when I'm sick, and follows me into yarn stores when I need something to knit.

I cannot tell him how much I love him. There aren't words, but that's okay. We have the rest of our lives to say "I love you" and that works for me.



p.s. knitting update to eventually follow.

A Tussle and The Status Quo

If you haven't noticed, I struggle, fight, and tussle with depression. Only I don't call it that. I call it my Black Dog, in reference to the incomparable Winston Churchill. During the spring I grappled with the Black Dog, and I won, for a little while. It's a constant war with minor battles going to one party or the other. And now I find I have turned my back on him for too long. He's bitten me again, only it's gentle. There's no blood, just a bruise. Just his teeth on my throat reminding me he's always there. Only this time I don't feel the overwhelming urge to wallow in uselessness, I am merely saddened by events in my life. They aide the Black Dog in catching me with my guard down. They put me in bed in tears for all that has occurred, for all that I have lost and am missing. I almost, almost didn't go to work yesterday for want of staying in my bed. However I find my spirit is strong and stubborn, two factors that have helped me fight the Dog for so long. I stubbornly walked up the hill to where I catch my bus, had a cup of coffee and wrote in my journal for the better part of an hour and a half. It eased the ache inside, just watching my hand put letters on the page, pouring out my inner thoughts and emotions. I was able to go to work, and perform decently, and was blessed with laughter. Sweet, carefree laughter. I would have rather gone home to my lover that night, than to my own bed, but not yet.

I woke today to see that Fall has officially arrived. The leaves turned without my knowing. The fog blankets Puget Sound, and all is chilly and perfect woolen sweater weather. Perfect to curl up with a good book, a cat, some knitting, hot cocoa and company and just be. Take time to be.

Six

I miss my mother. She's been gone for the last fifteen days and isn't likely to return until the weekend. I understand that I'm a (mostly) adult and it seems that adults don't miss their parents in the sense that they want to curl up in a lap and be hugged and told that everything is going to be okay. When, if ever, comes the moment when you are strong enough to stand alone and be okay? Or does it just never happen? I feel like it's weak to want my mother at twenty-three, but I can't deny the ache of missing her. So I console myself with some knitting ( I am, alas, pictureless) talking with a couple friends and reminding myself that she will come home this weekend.

Time

A wise friend tells me, often, that "It Takes Time". All good things take time, they take time to make and time to break, but time is a must. So I sigh, knowing she is right (she usually is) and wait for time to pass. Suddenly I look back and find it's been two months, and I feel a little better. More alive, ready for a new adventure, new meetings and places. I'm just not sure which direction to go from here, so I wait just a little longer.

Pardon the rather overwhelming amount of "sad" posts, but that's what I'm feeling. I feel alone. I feel like I have to throw up constantly. I feel so squished and open all at the same time it's a little maddening. I've lost him and I'm not sure how to proceed with my life alone. There is a lump in my throat that is not going away. There is an ache in my heart that cannot yet be relieved. I wonder if this is how old empty houses feel? Those achingly lovely turn of the century confections that make my heart happy. How do they feel when there are not people inside them? Rather like I do without my boy. I know it's going to take time, and I know I'll have good days again (like yesterday), but the bad days come and take all the sunshine away. All the hope I work up throughout the week to make it to the weekend that the next day won't suck as badly as this one does gets stolen away in one breath.



I have been told by some to have a meaningless fling with some random person as some party. That will ease the loss. Perhaps that would work for some people, but I am an artist. I feel things differently than some, and not at all for others. Music moves me, it surges through my very blood and makes me shiver. I told a friend once music does to me what alcohol and drugs do to others. That same heady, reckless, restless, feeling that sits in your heart and makes you move. You can't sit still. I can't sit still.
Relationships with people are similar. I ache with love when I watch someone I love sleep beside me. I drink in moments and save them for later, for winter when I'm cold, for being alone. The happy blissful golden moments that are kept in my soul. Mothers know this feeling, they drink in the ephemeral moments of their babies. The first words, first steps, first smiles, laughs. They soak it up and save it for later to soothe them when the child has become an adult and left.



Sitting alone is dangerous right now. Having no where to be, and nothing to do leave me restless and empty. Everyone is at work, or school, or running errands before I woke up and I'm left alone in my room with only the ghosts for company. Trying not to go crazy thinking about what I've lost, and hoping, praying for what is to come. If I had a cat, I would being cuddling it a lot right now. It makes me want something to care for again. A cat, a baby, something, anything. It makes me want to do a play or go to work just for the excuse of having to be somewhere. Sitting alone, something I relished when I was younger, is deadly to me now.

She trudges on

I am in a bubble of space that isolates the outside world from my senses. Touch comes slowly, sounds are the first to assail my battered mind. Thoughts, words come last. I am drowning in my own despair. I know I need help, but don't know if I will get the right help, or if the help will fix my despair, depression.
I pace my floor at night consumed with thoughts of feeling alone, ugly, worthless, useless and concluding that I should leave this world. What's the point of going on? I'm not sure if this stems from loosing love I thought would last forever, in addition to just being depressed anyway, but it hurts. It's affecting my work, it's affecting my life, my future. There are too many people who love me for me to be so selfish as to leave them all, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about it. I want to take the pain I feel inside and make it physical. I want to hurt as much in my skin and muscles as I do in my heart and soul.
So I go to work because I know it will distract me from my pain, but it doesn't cure what hurts. Which makes me wonder, what does hurt? And why? Where do I get the idea that I am ugly, horrible monster of a person to the point of not valuing my own talents? To the point of considering wasting my talent in forcing my own death. Death comes for us all, it's what you do with your precious life in the meantime that makes legends or fables or changes in the great wide world. I am just silly enough sometimes to want to make my death come sooner so the world will no longer be troubled with trying to keep me here.
I am sad to loose love I thought would last forever. It weakens my faith and hope in the future. In the fact that there is someone, made especially for me to spend the rest of my life with. I am shattered in this resolute faith of the hope of love. I want to drink until I pass out just so I sleep through the night. I want to beat my body until the bruises show, purple and black, badges of my heart's pain. I want to cry until I can't cry anymore so I purge all the pain from my soul. I want to be happy again and dance in the sunlight. I think I know how to accomplish this, but it's going to take time and patience and hope. Trust in the future, in the promise that the future will be different and that difference will be better. Please, God, let it be so.

Demeter's Daughter

She was drifting again. LIke the wind could pick her up and blow her away, up into the clouds. She only wished to be with him, he was her anchor, her two strong arms that wouldn't let her go.
But it was Spring and Demeter's Daughter had to, once again, emerge from Hell.
Her thoughts glide sluggishly, slick as oil but still brackish and torpid, praying to find that thing that clears her head and allows her to return to the light of day. She remembers dancing in sunlight and embracing the dawn. When life was innocent, placid, naive.
Now things are of a gritty, worn out, greyish cast, crunching under feet unpleasantly. She desperately wants to wake up. She begs for God to make it better again.
She slips from night to day, day into night again, stiffly, slowly like a sleepwalking zombie.
People ask how she is and she lies so well now she forgets to tell the truth to people she loves. She forgets to tell herself she's lying. She hates telling because she feels like she's complaining, and that's never been allowed in her childhood. All she can wish for it for it to end. And soon.
Please, oh please, just let it all stop long enough for me to breathe. My soul is tied to a string and dragging behind me, shards of glass and rock piercing it's core, to lodge without leaving, scarring forever.
She she collects herself, scraping together the blood and bones into a passable girl. Opens her eyes from the mist to squint at the day. To work faster, better, harder, stronger. To pray for Saturday to come, and soon.
She forgets for a few scant hours to press against the dark smothering sadness and simply allows herself to be. Filling coffee cups with inky brown liquid and taking baptized dishes from the washer. She merely follows along, doing what she's told because the robotisim is soothing to her ringing ears, her twitching eyes. She doesn't have to think except to give the correct change.
Until she has to take a break, until she is done with work and standing on the street corner feeling the buses buffet by her grey and black form.
Her entire body is consumed with the desire to mount the steps of his bus, to allow the metal dragon to spirit her away to a place where it doesn't hurt quite so much. Her self control is second nature now, and it burbles beneath her dewy face, claiming dominance. Winning without fighting, and fight for control.
She ducks into her novel, and a fresh Southern Carolina breeze steals her away to another world until her mother calls and she raises her wet head from the literary waters. She wants nothing more but to duck under again, let the world go passing by until things stop hurting. But life grabs her by the soul and won't let go.

Have Sleeves...

...Sweater to Follow?
It seems I have a wee problem.











I have begun two sleeves with only enough yarn to complete ONE SLEEVE! Gah. How silly it that? It's quite silly in terms of knitting but as my budget is severly limited to enough for two skeins of Noro, it's understandable. So my sleeves sit in a knitting bag, on my work table, tempting me with their loveliness and promise of cozy warmth in which I might wrap myself up in come their completion.

I am alive, really!

Wow. That's all I can say. Wow. Like, "How much is wow?" "Right between 'ouch' and 'boing!'" "Wow." (White Christmas) It's been months! Months! Since I wrote here. I am still here, however I'm no longer at my school. It was a wonderful experience and I've learned (rather expensively) that I'm not cut out to be a fashion designer in the fashion world. Maybe on Etsy where you aren't going to die if DVF doesn't like your designs. Someplace where things can be my own take and if you like them, that's cool.
This is all to say that I'm still here and more silliness, honesty, and my crazy life is to follow!

Big League...

I start school tomorrow. And it's nothing simple like Highschool or Community College. This is the big league baby. The Art Institute of Seattle. Ack! I know I'll be okay, and I'll get the hang of things, I just wish I knew which books I need to take and if anyone will be nice to me?

Goodness. I may be an adult but I still have the same worries I did when I was in grade school. I suppose some things never change, then eh?

Autumn Child

I don't know why, but for some reason I am most pensive in the Fall. Perhaps it's because I was born then, and I've come full circle for another year. I can't say exactly, but I don't mind it. I'm in love with the lush colours, the smells, the crispness of the air. It's all so much that I feel like I want to explode with happiness.
Perhaps it is simply the turning of a season, because I feel in love with the new, upcoming season in the Summer and especially in the Spring. Of all four my two favourite are Fall and Spring. They are the most turbulent, the most alive, full of colour and life and wonder. And rain. I love rain.
In the meantime, I knit away, working on gifts for family and friends, product to sell on my Etsy ( Hibougirl Crafts ) and marvel at the wonders around me.

~ What seasons do you like best, and can you say why?

So this is where I work...

...if you want to argue about the virtues and evils of Starbucks, take it elsewhere. I don't care. I mean that respectfully because I'm not here to debate how wonderful or awful my employer is. I love coffee. Plain and simple. I don't really care where I actually get it as long as it's good. Anyway. I digress.
I was searching for a picture that captures Starbucks/it's logo and I stumbled upon the below blog. I was so delighted and amused I've put the link here for whomever stumbles into my wee corner of the blogisphere.

Linkey Linkey, here it be!

As I was walking home today, it struck me that, in Seattle, Summer is ending. No one really wants it to end, even I, a firm Autumn, am mourning the end of summer. It's inevitable. Seasons change when we don't want them to and refuse to change when we do want them to. But when we just move from one day to the next the change seems so sudden because you haven't been paying attention. I think an awareness of the word and it's weather around me are a result of being homeschooled and raised in a family where life is taken a little slower. We take time to dig in the good dark earth, to feel the gritty grains under our fingers and let the brown stain our skin till we can see the ridges of our fingerprints. We play with the earthworms and tenderly transfer new bulbs to safer growing places. I think with an upbringing such as this one may never loose sight of what is happening in the changing of the seasons.
So I walk home feeling the sun on my face, almost too warm but I didn't want to care because it felt so good, and the wind telling me that colder weather is coming. I can smell a barbecue somewhere and the scent reminds me of the beginning of summer when you could smell some of the first barbecues. I can smell the heat evaporating the water on a lawn as I pass it, a lawn mower in the distance putters for some of the last times until the spring. Thinking ahead I realize I'm starting school in a month, I've got a paid theatre gig coming up, and I can't wait for it all to get here. However such emotion is tempered with savoring the last few moments of summer. Soak up the last bits of good sun (but please don't get burnt! :), drink some of the last lemonades, lick your popsicles, and play in running water until it's too cold. Then snuggle up in a warm sweater and grab a cup of something hot and enjoy the cooler months knowing it will all come again. Soon.

Memories...

..no, not the ones in the street light. But ones I treasure now that the force behind creating them is gone. I would give my right arm to spend my sleepy saturday mornings in rehearsal, half awake, taking blocking notation for future reference. To move on to the set, to graduate, as it were, into performance. I feel as though I have lost a part of me, vital to my happiness as a person. I feel incomplete without some faint promise of rehearsal, of the performance stress that I hated then, but miss now. So, for all the complaints, for all the tears, sweat, and curses beneath the breath, I would have it all back again. And that's a good thing to know about oneself, if it's frustrating right now. So please enjoy the memories if they are meaningful to you, and if not, please enjoy the look into my treasured past.

No fruit for you!

I feel ungrateful. Why's that? Well, I've got a good job, I'm working on becoming enrolled in a good school that has an astounding post-school employment rate (for the field in which you studied), I've got a good life, but I'm still unsatisfied somewhere amidst it all. There's some part of me that is totally neglected and it's crying for attention, only I don't know which part. Or at least, I can't decide if it's my theatre crying or my crafting, both of which have been sorely neglected of late.

Maybe I just don't like the transition period. The place where you can see everything lining up for you, only you can't touch it yet. It's there, slowly becoming tangible, you can practically taste it, but you can't take a bite. Maybe I don't like that. I can taste the show, I can see the school, but I can't bite into it and give it my all just yet.

Knit Meme

Knit Meme
Originally uploaded by hibougirl

So, Icve finally caved and jopined the wide world of memes I guess they're called. Here's one for knitters. Head over to my Flickr page to view the answers. :)

The questions are:

What is your first name?
What is your favorite yarn?
What was the first thing you made with yarn?
What is your favorite color?
Which crochet or knitting designer do you have a crush on?
Favorite handmade gift you have received?
Dream project?
Favorite notion?
What will you crochet/ knit next?
What do you love most about yarn?
One word to describe your craft.
Main inspiration to craft.

Goodness, but it's been too long since I posted! There hasn't been phenomenal anything lately until I cleaned out my studio and got a "new" sewing machine. Just wanted to poke my nose in. More later, as I'm not able to type very well tonight. Too much good dinner and Riesling.