"Mexico" -- Jump Little Children

Despite the half unpacked boxes strewn across the living room, the house seems impossibly big for her. Cooling evening air after a warm, sunny August day on the heals of a day of pouring rain. Damp air mixing with the dry breeze ruffles the flyaways around her face. Does the house seem so big and empty because her possessions seem too few to fill a house (they barely filled half of an apartment!) or because the task of unpacking and finding new niches for everything is so enormous, monumental, permanent? There is one couch facing the hyacinth bushes outside the windows. A hand-me-down end table matches the hand-me-down couch and the hand-me-down everything else. Does it seem so large because none of it seems like it belongs with her yet? Too many hand-me-downs still stinking of former owners. This place is still too much of a house, and not yet a home.

Perhaps it's the delicious unknown in front of her. Not just the job and the future, but him. Her body thrums with anticipation, fear and relief. The questions that have been cowering in corners, wall flowers in her mind too shy in the light of new horizons and possibilities to show their face or make too much of a fuss until now. Questions that, while wallflowers, have been constant companions, keeping her company along the pathways of discovery.

A deep breath of the warm air reminds her that it is not quite yet time for the first dance. There is unpacking and adjusting still to happen. Simple things like breathing and forward motion seem too terribly mundane in the face of this sweet anticipation. But until then, she pushes herself forward, glances toward the street a constant syncopation to the steady rhythm of the music.