"...I'm a little kid, and so are you
Don't you go and grow up before I do
I'm a little kid with so much doubt
Do you want to be there to see how I turn out?"

I found this song along with a few others in a Noisetrade sampler (if you don't know what this is, go google it. Noisetrade is an awesome website. I've found so many good artists on there, and they are all ones that you probably haven't heard of. You help them build a fan base by giving them your contact information, and you get a sample of their songs). The first few listens of this song left me with the impression that it was catchy but not much else. Now it's growing on me.

Afterthought: Most of the music I listen to doesn't sound like this ;)

How do you comfort a friend who has been affected by a horrific, senseless tragedy?

What do you even begin to say? What do you do?

I don't think we are taught to truly be comforters. There are some people who have learned to fill that role. There are some who has been gifted with the ability to comfort in times of heartbreak, and then there are people like me who yearn with all their heart to play the part but feel so helpless.

Society overlooks the truth of life - nothing really matters except for the people we come into contact with during our lives - for a selfish substitute. It is built into us to selfishly look after our own needs and wants, and that bleeds into relationships. Many, many relationships have no depth because they are built on what the other person can do for you instead of the person. No worries if you lose one, there are plenty more out in the world. Lots of the time you aren't friends with a person because you think the person is genuinely wonderful, you are friends so you don't have to be alone. So you can tell them all about your life. Your achievements. Your annoyances.

Except, not necessarily about the things that really matter, and with that kind of foundation for a relationship, how would we be capable of comforting each other? To comfort someone else is to dig down deep, deep. It is forcing yourself to experience empathy and to acknowledge and sometimes to hurt. Why would we do that for someone who is just there to fill a hole in our social circles?

It's true - even when we try to truly comfort, our love can't always reach down to the deep parts of another's heartache. When true heartbreak comes, only God can heal. Only God can fill the hopeless void that appears in our aching hearts. The true Comforter is God and only God.

And so, because we don't have words or actions or we can't even fathom the sorrow, we say, "I'm so sorry. You're in my prayers."

Maybe this friend is in our prayers, but if we've experienced heartbreak, we know the depression, the hopelessness, and the aching sorrow continues on long after those seven words fade from our memory, long after we are remembered in someone else's prayers, long after life moves on.

I know these things so I don't want to be apathetic. Even if I don't see her for a week or a month after this tragedy has happened, I don't want to come up to her and pretend like none of it occurred because she will never forget this. It will always be a memory that makes her heart ache. What is the point of having a friend, of being a friend, if you pretend like everything is always fine and dandy? If that is what a relationship comes down to, then I don't want one.

I want depth, even if it means hurting.

I suck at discussing the emotionally important things face to face. I can encourage. I can do facts. I can do funny, but when it comes to genuine rawness, I can't. If it does come out, it comes out in a blubbering, stuttering mess, and I feel stupid. Sometimes I attempt to let people know what I'm truly feeling or how much they actually mean to me through written word, but I end up doubting if even the recipients of my sad attempts truly understand what I meant when I wrote what I wrote. Sometimes it feels like I am writing to a wall by the way my truthfulness slides right off and disappears. I'll spend money on gifts, hoping my love and appreciation will come through, but all of it ends up making me feel naked and like I've just thrown my pearls out to the swine.

I don't know if this is just because of my personality, but I don't think it is entirely. I think a lot of people don't know how to hurt together, to be broken together. So we hurt alone. Isolated inside of ourselves. We're not suppose to be islands, but we are, and that makes the hurt last.

When I had my wisdom teeth pulled out, a friend came over with a movie to entertain me through my misery, but when my grandfather was hit by a car and in a coma for a week before he died, I was alone. I cried every single night that whole week when I'd take the dogs on a walk. Sure, I had family around, but I don't even think families know how to hurt together. When he was finally taken off of life support, my parents were down in California with my grandmother, and I was here with my two older siblings, but I might as well have been alone.

We don't know how to say when we need someone. We don't even know when we need someone.

But I said only God can truly comfort another's ache? That is true, but we can be the way He does it. Of ourselves, we are nothing, but in each of us is a small example of His love, of His grace, of His mercy. We can't fix everything because of our feeble flesh and bones, but we can be part of the band aid or the stitches.

So what am I suppose to do to comfort someone whose friend was shot and killed at random as he drove home from a youth ministry he volunteered? What am I suppose to say to someone who is surrounded by the individuals who were witnesses to the senseless tragedy?

She bears her sorrows and the sorrows of everyone around her, and I only wish I could somehow help her bear the burden.

I could never hate you
Just because you are all I lack.
I could never hold
Your gifts against you.
After all, it's not your fault
That you are who you are.
I wouldn't feel this way
If I didn't like you a little bit.
It's just your sunshine-
I am warmed by its rays
Until you turn away,
And then I'm left so cold,
So cold and very dim.
No one notices me.
They couldn't, not beside you,
But it's not your fault,
And I cannot hate you for it.
I'm just cold, that's all.
I don't know how it is
That you can turn off and on your light
Or look completely away,
Leaving me so cold and all alone.
I stand at a distance,
Watching you among others.
I am hungry for your light.
I want it. I want you,
But really, I just want your heart,
Your joy, your laugh, your light.
I guess I do want you,
But my light is not a strong one.
It points inwards not towards another.
Maybe if I had a spark,
You'd see me alone in the corner,
And the spark would ignite your light,
But I am not the same as you.
I do not hate you for it.
I just wish I wasn't so cold
And could shine a little bit brighter.

I like predictability and normal and schedules.  I like being able to know what I am doing, what I'm working towards, and what is going to happen throughout the day, even if that is totally unrealistic. Spur of the moment isn't something I do all that great with. Most times my immediate reaction to things is definitely 'no', but given time, my negativity usually dissipates, and sometimes, I'll even see the positive in these random, sudden changes. It just takes time. I need time.

I've also found I like to keep things low-key. I don't like to draw attention to myself. I'll be perfectly content to be in the background where no one draws attention to me. Even in my clothing style, I've found that I am drawn towards dark colors that just blend all together in harmony. You won't find me in vibrant colors all that often.

Yet, every year around my Birthday, I get this strong urge to do something drastic. To do something utterly different than the normal. Everyone expects a certain thing from  me; so I want to do something that throws them off. It's a strange feeling for someone whose middle name is 'don't draw attention to myself', and most times these feelings bring nothing to fruition because my other 3/4ths get the best of me.

But this year, this year was different. What I did wasn't huge or terribly earth-shaking, but it was something I hadn't ever seen myself doing before, and now, after almost a week, I like the results.

I got these violet/red lowlights in my hair. The cool thing (which kinda fits right up my alley) is they aren't always noticeable. In some lights, it's just too dark to really know if the light is shining differently on my hair or if the color is something else. Other lights, you most definitely know. Right after I did it, we went clothes shopping, and the dressing room had a certain kind of light which made me totally do a 'What on earth have I done?!?'

Sometimes it looks pink. Sometimes it looks more violetish. Sometimes it is the red I was going for, but I'm happy with the results. Maybe most people won't notice, but I'll know, and once in a while, the color might catch someone else's eye for a brief moment. It's fun.

I also cut thirteen inches of my hair off at the same time, but that's a totally different story...which...is taking a lot more to get used to. I might post a picture if I ever catch the right lighting.

I'm 21 now.

In fact, I've been 21 for twelve days now.

It's not like I imagined - this being 21 thing. I feel about the same actually, and I truly wish I didn't. I'd like to feel a little bit older. A little bit more mature. A little bit more like I have this life thing under control (even though I know of pretty much no one who has it under control).

I have this small portion of me forever full of optimism, faith, and hope. It has a full time job combatting all my uncertainties and negativities. If someone should listen to my thoughts when I'm in a situation where I'm uncomfortable, they'd probably hear: "You can do this! You can do this! Come on. You've got this. You know you do."

No, I really don't know if I got this. Sometimes I have to start filling my mind with those thoughts on the silliest, stupidest things that everybody else would be able to do in a breeze. Inside, sometimes, I still feel like I'm 6 years-old, but...each person's path is different, I suppose. Some people take longer than others. I'm one of those who must be a turtle. It's just my pace. It always has been. I keep telling people I don't do quick, and I don't.

But it's okay, I think.

So, I'm 21 now.

I've grown so much. I've come so far, but I still have a long, long, long (10x) way to go, and it's frustrating because even though slow is my pace, at the same time, my mind (and the world) thinks I should be farther along in life. Externally, I might even seem less along than I know I've come internally, and it has to be okay with me so I won't care if it's not okay with the world. I have to define my own version of success, and I know when I do, it won't look anything like the world's version of success.

And that will be okay, too,

Because I'm 21 now, and I'm officially an adult.

People will disagree with my choices now. People will sometimes think the choices I make are utter mistakes, but except for a few people I trust the most, other people's opinions won't be more important than mine because I am not a little kid any more. This is the time where my decisions involve less people and more of just me and God.

I am 21, and it's scary.

And because I am an awesome 21-year-old, I went to the Seattle Aquarium for my Birthday with the parents (who were already going to be in Seattle that day for a medical appointment...so, part of my Birthday involved hospital waiting room fun), and it was awesome and amazing, and fish are cooler than I thought (probably thanks to watching Finding Dory this Summer. Still can't remember much of Finding Nemo but watched that one once 13 years ago). So are Jellyfishes.

This stuff fascinated me as much as the actual fishes. So colorful.

See? Jellyfish are awesome!

I think these are the fish where the males keep the eggs in their mouth until they hatch and baby versions of them come swimming out. Super weird but fascinating, right?

Another example of awesomeness.

Another awesome part of my Birthday was getting a large box in the mail from my Penpal of 9 and 1/2 hours. It was unexpected, and therefore, one of the best parts. Nothing like going out on your front porch and almost tripping over a big box addressed to you (that you didn't have to pay for).

It's been stressful over here lately, and I don't deal with stress all that well. Sometimes in the middle of the day I just need to escape. If I can put a pause on my own self, I usually can get away. There's a large rock just on the hill above our house. It has a good view and is far enough away to keep people from interrupting. Hopefully it also has limited distractions because I can get horribly distracted. My mind just gets so loud inside of it. Sadly, I always find these spots of peace in the wrong seasons. I don't imagine I'd do very good going out when there's snow on the ground.

Usually I spend half of an hour up there on my 'thinking rock'. Fifteen minutes of that time, I work on writing. I already section off a period of time to work on my novel writing; so this is actually the poetry type writing. Anything really that comes into my mind. I don't go seek endlessly for a perfect word or the perfect idea. I write the thoughts down as they come. After all, I only have fifteen minutes. The other poem I posted in the last blog was the first poem I wrote on the thinking rock. Here is another I wrote yesterday:

It will be cold in the morning.
There'll be a frost in the morning.
The flowers will die in the morning.
I'll have to say goodbye to the year.
You say there's two and a half months still left,
But it'll have ended in the morning
When the plants and the flowers fade.
The sun will rise up in the morning
And warm the earth and me with its heat,
But it willy only seem mocking to me.
Mocking me. Mocking life at its end.
As the earth warms. As the cold hides in the corners.
Corners of my garden.
Standing above where flowers have drooped and fallen.
My garden will be a graveyard in the morning
After the cold has crept and crawled through the night.
I'll wander through the ruin.
A glance here, a glance there, to see if it is the end.
The end of the year for flowers, for plants, for me.
The colors will be stolen in the morning.
All colors but the colors of leaves.
Summer's magic is over as another year goes dormant.
Another garden, another life, another me.
It'll be cold in the morning,
But I won't mind the cold.
There'll be a frost in the morning;
The reaper returning again.
The flowers will die in the morning.
I'll sing the funeral song.
I'll have to say goodbye in the morning.

Well, it did freeze this morning. Going into a garden after a frost is one of the saddest sights. It's the one morning that makes me dislike Autumn. We tried to prolong the life of some plants with blankets. I even put a sprinkler on my flower patch (cosmos, bachelor buttons, gazanias, rudbekia, etc.) to keep them alive a little longer. Unfortunately, they turned off our irrigation water for the year early this morning before the protective layer of ice melted. So, I went out to see a beautiful but very sad sight. Everything was covered in ice, reminding me of the glass art people do, and now they are mostly all frosted. It's sad business. I would have picked a gigantic bouquet of cosmos for my bedroom if I knew.

You said, "The snow is coming.",
But I couldn't feel it coming
In my room with the perfect view.
You said, "There's a bite to the air.
A nip that didn't exist before.
That couldn't exist before."
I guess you meant Summer was over
In your most round about way.
That Summer was over,
And you would be leaving.
You would be leaving before the snow came.
Before Winter was more than a bite to the air,
But you would not say that with words.
Only, "The snow is coming."
I didn't know the snow was coming.
I was still lost in Autumn's glow.
- A season you seemed to have forgot.
From my room with the perfect view,
The leaves were turning to gold.
They would drop when the colors were full,
And after a month or two,
Then the snow would finally come.
You would be gone when the gray turned to white
In a month. Two months and a week or so.
Still you felt the bite in the air
And confidently said, "The snow is coming."
I think I finally know why -
The snow was just an excuse for you to go.

It started out as a single character. A character with a funny name. The name wasn't suppose to be serious although it belonged to a character who was. It was suppose to be a contradiction of sorts, but as time progressed, her name changed to Rose Abigail Ningolsham.

Her.  Finally found someone who fit what I envisioned in my mind. The eyebrows and the cheeks fit perfectly. This makes my heart happy. People on DevianArt are awesomely talented.

I started wondering what exactly made her as serious and bitter as she was. That single question led me down an endless trail which I still haven't found the end of seven years later. I think I wasn't old enough to write the story yet, but I couldn't just let it go, even though I didn't have any idea where to start or what was the most important part of it.

At first I thought it had to be a three book series, beginning when the lead character was twelve and ending when she was thirty. I set the story in this world and spent hours and hours on researching different things, especially since I had her nationality German (I know the last name contradicts it, but that is a long, long story). Then I threw the whole 'present time, present world' thing out the window. I'm still working on how to fix a story world for it since I'm used to making Fantasy story worlds, and this really doesn't go under one. It's just normal...but not normal.

So, I wrote the first two books in the series. It came out to be 180,000 words or so and was mostly backboneless scenes. That almost made me throw the entire thing out, but the character wouldn't leave me alone. I wanted - I needed to give this character a happy ending, some way or another which meant all along I should've just written the third book in the series. As all stories work for me, a seat-of-the-pants writer, it did not go the way I planned. I had one idea, but it changed drastically by the time I finished the first draft, giving me plenty of ideas for a second draft.

I changed my ways on the third draft. I've been following the Go Teen Writers' Blog for years now, and they posted a scene list for the 3-Act structure. I used that as a guideline and figured out what scenes stayed from the second draft and which weren't necessary. Then I figured out which scenes on the list I still needed. I wrote them all out on little cards and divided them into chapters. That really went against every fibre in my being, but it somehow worked. I finished the third draft, and now I'm rereading the third draft and making notes for fourth draft edits. I never imagined I'd get this far. At all, but I feel like there's actually hope.

Now I'm wondering how many stories I can think about at once. I have two others that are hanging around in the back of my mind. Both Fantasy and very unlike this one. One (The Rain Cloud Forest) is in the first draft stage, and the other (The Girl by the Lake) is waiting for second draft outlining.

This is one of the other main characters in the Rose Ningolsham story. Pictures and soundtracks give me hope when all else fails.

I was going to do a 'September in Pictures' post, but as I scanned through my phone's pictures, I realized I had far, far too many for a single post. Looking back over the month, I didn't realize just how much I did get done. I only saw what I didn't get done, but that is an unfortunate habit I have...

In late August, one of my big brothers came home. He is in the Navy and currently stationed on the East Coast. It was the first time he has been back since he joined; so having him home was really nice. He and I used to do a lot things together, but since he has been away for 16 months, I kinda forgot what that was like.

The parents wanted to do something special since he was around. We decided to go to the beach for three nights. I'd been to the beach earlier this year, but we haven't gone as a family unit since my grandma passed away in 2010. We usually go to the Long Beach Peninsula. It's an incredibly boring beach (not really any rocks or shells, except we found a place where someone dumped their whole collection.), except for the North Head lighthouse on Cape Disappointment at the very beginning of the peninsula.

We stayed in the nicest cottage about a fourth of a mile from the beach. I felt like I could just live there forever. They have done so well decorating the entire thing with the awesomest pictures and stuff. These pictures are mostly from those three days. Be proud of me. I refrained and didn't post all of them ;)

Here are a *few* pictures:

A bowl of chili with cornbread probably doesn't seem impressive, but I made the chili from scratch. My mom wasn't feeling very well a day or two before the beach; so she wasn't able to make plans for our meals. I decided I would. We have never had that much food at the beach. I put together ingredients for pancakes, baked oatmeal, mac and cheese, frozen meatloaf (Also made that. Never have before. It's not very photographic, though), and the frozen chili. I've mostly grown up eating Nalley canned chili, and I was a little skeptical, but it was really good.

The first day we went over to Oregon and explored Fort Stevens. This was just a pathway to a bird observation bunker.

A random view from the bird observation bunker.

There was this rickety platform where you could see to Washington and then farther into Oregon. I don't mind most heights, but this structure was moving...that kinda got to me.

This was the real reason why I wanted to go to Fort Stevens. The Peter Iredale shipwreck from 1906 ( I believe). It wasn't quite as epic as I envisioned, but through the years, they have taken away parts of it. The bar where the Columbia River (which also divides Oregon and Washington there) meets the Pacific Ocean can be pretty dangerous, and they've had a lot of wrecks. I think the two lighthouses on Cape Disappointment are the closest of any on the West Coast.

This isn't an impressive picture. It's part of the actual Fort Stevens. This fort has been attacked by ships (I think submarines to be more specific) in two wars. In the Civil War and then by the Japanese. Neither of the attacks were very serious.

Finally a picture of the beach!! This was as much of a sunset that we ever got. It was pretty cool and rainy.

Second day we headed up the Olympic Peninsula because my brother wanted to see some rainforest, and places on the Olympic Peninsula get 144 inches a year (I cannot even imagine. We get 8 inches of precipitation). We drove up twoish hours to the Quinalt Rain Forest, but this was along the way. Just pretty places out the window.

The morning lighting was just so nice, and it was gray enough to disguise the car's dirty windows.

Green. Water. Cloudy. What more can I say?

My dad, brother, and I went on a four mile loop through the Quinalt Rain Forest. It was amazing. I love the moss. As a writer, I tried to dissect every sense in places like that to see if I could describe them with words, but man, a Navy jet kept going over and making so much noise...then the loop went around and past the lodge...so there was the food smell. Folks, evidently a rain forest smells like BBQ ;)

Along the loop was a marsh. This is the marsh area.

Everything was so beautiful. I started realizing how pitiful us humans are. We (at least I) try so hard to make beautiful places, and so often these places fall short, then we look at God's handiwork, and it's just so beautiful and perfect.

It's hard to tell exactly what this picture is of because so much is going on. But what happens in the forest is trees fall, and then small trees begin to grow on top of the old ones. Pretty soon the old ones decompose. Then it looks like it was just planted on the ground. In the meantime, though, the process can look pretty crazy. Example: This picture. I can't imagine that tree getting much bigger and still being held up by that other one. It's pretty cool all the same.