End of my Beginning…..
Happiness is important, but so is every other emotion. After reading this book, I want my friends to know that anything that comes with love is worth holding onto.
For the most part, I’m used to writing about love. My stories typically highlight a girl and some boy who’s incredibly irredeemable towards the end.
As I stretched into the brain of my new characters, I found so much white space. I knew I wanted to write about love–I just didn’t know it would be a different kind. Female friendships became my pink paint.
The “panic years” is a term I often hear regarding a woman in her early twenties. There’s a panic to be perfect. A panic to not have a baby before a career. A panic to put yourself out there when everyone around is falling in love. A panic to prove yourself academically while panicking to hide all the brown and thin letters of rejection. A panic to kiss the boy or to forgive. A panic to fix the friendship with flowers or to cut the once so cosmic connection off by the umbilical cord.
This whole ordeal of being a woman gives me distress and dandruff. My scalp is flaky with change. My heart has Brembo brakes.
I wanted to capture how healed and held I had been after the woman in my life tucked me back into the bed of my dreams.
Change gave me water to swim in instead of sitting by a diving board in a pink swimsuit. Change gave me honey for the deprived beehive in the back of my brain.
Everything I know is a touch away from change, and love is work. Love is a choice. I’ve applied this statement to friendships–female friendships in particular.
As much as I think I was born with some divine, innate knowledge about love and people, I was also cursed with the burden of self-loathing and staying stuck in one place when I’m rejected. I talk to myself in my head and sometimes out loud. I talk to my lover and my friends, and I’d like to think I’m a double. I can be here, but I can also be elsewhere.
I’m terrified of wanting something that I’ll never get. The purpose of writing this new book was to tell people how good it is to be a friend. Some people go to confession or order a coffee in the early morning. Some people pay a therapist or dance til dawn. But me, well, I go to my friends.
I’ve never been the type to settle for a fraction of a friendship.
When there’s a sudden downpour and you’re walking in the rain, it’s cold, your sweater is dripping wet, and things are just awful. Friends come in with an umbrella. They come in with a warm raincoat and walk with you in the rain–the right ones, at least–the kind that everyone deserves.
Until the Sun Seeps is meant to represent the light that rises the next day–even if you still desire to sulk in the dark.
I wanted readers to see that even though suffering is a splinter that only gets deeper and deeper, it eventually stops. Your pulse returns, and the wound is never as eternal as it may seem. The new year is full of promise, and hope comes by fast.
It’s a gift to be a friend, and it’s a gift where the sad history of my skin is exposed, and I do not care at all.
