Beasts.

The door thumps like there is a raging beast behind it, and tonight there is. In a matter of moments she morphed into something else, a hunched animal, all claws and screams and wild, brute force. She picks words as big as boulders and hurls them as hard as she can. We duck and dodge. We shut the door and hold it shut. We try to tame the beast, but despite having birthed the beast ourselves, we are no beast-tamers. THIS ISN'T TEACHING ME ANYTHING roars the beast and we try on our smallest, most useless voices. Calm and quiet, we remind her, but she can't hear us over her screams, or she chooses not to. PLEASE I'LL DO ANYTHING I'LL DO ANYTHING I'LL CALM DOWN IF YOU'LL OPEN THE DOOR. But we can't unlock the door because we have already told her she has to calm down first. That she needs to do this. For herself. Because it's a skill she should have by now, to reverse the onset of the beast. To bring herself back to normal.

Later, the reverse. She's curled into a small ball in her bed, burrowed under the blankets. She's talking in the smallest of voices, and hers is particularly useful. I'm afraid I won't be a good parent because my parents aren't teaching me the right things, she says. I wish I was a different person, she says. I wish I could be a calm person, she says.

I wish I was never born, she says.

I wish I could say I knew what words to say then. That they were right there in my pocket the whole time. That they were hiding behind my ear like a shiny coin. Instead of the tired goodbye. Instead of shutting the door.

You have to be in this world, I would have said, because what would the world do without you? Magic, I would say, is all around you. I would say: You are the very existence of magic.

I would say: You are everything.

I would say: We are all beasts, sometimes.

The magic of the universe and the first day of school.

In the polished corridors that smell like new things and nostalgia, sharpened pencils and chalk dust, the stars are flinging themselves forward with the kind of reckless abandon usually reserved for pinballs and bumper cars. Those bright, shiny points of light guide you from the crowd into the crowd and out of the crowd, and you follow them like a smitten moth, your old wings fluttering and brushing a trail of dust and shoe prints. You're this tired, quiet thing and you're feeling this feeling that comes on in a sudden burst, the kind of feeling that stretches an absurd smile across your face. Following your fate, those pinging points of light, and it's a funny kind of hope and doom you're chasing: Life at its essence, some kind of brilliant eternity, and your own looming lack of it. You're just holding onto the tail of a comet, chasing down stars as best you can. But wait, little star, let me tie your shoe. But wait, little star, just a quick hug.

These stars won't wait. These stars laugh and gasp out of your reach, these stars are rocketing forward at a breathtaking pace. They're taking your breath and turning you inside out. The cosmic forces are working for you. The cosmic forces are working against you.

There is a moment outside her classroom door where you see her hesitate, looking at the little lights so much like hers pulsing in chairs and around lockers. You see the pause, the interstellar scintillation, before she plunges forward to join the rest of them.

You head down the hall with your heart orbiting Mars.

The stars aren't yours, but the stars never are. They belong up in the wide-open sky, in the glittering, smiling mouth of the universe.

I leave the lights on.

I've seen this bounced around all over the internet lately and avoided watching it for exactly that reason. But then I did watch it and it knocked me dead.

Deciding to be brave.

I haven't decided if my old journals and notebooks are an embarrassment or an embarrassment of riches. I flipped through them the other day and was actually surprised by my teenage self. The first is that I was kind of an a-hole about certain things. The second is that I was so, so lonely.

The third is that I don't really seem to have changed a bit. I mean, I've certainly grown and gained maturity. But some of the deep-down, this-is-who-I-am sentiments are exactly the same. In an entry dated January 26, 1994, I complained of feeling stuck. Mired in a routine where nothing changes. In another entry I just wished something great would happen to me. Something dramatic and wonderful. In another I said I wanted to wake up to a raging thunderstorm or even an earthquake, because it would match my mood -- which would somehow be very comforting. (Dramatic? Me?)

I read the January 26 entry to my husband and he immediately commented on the similarity between old-me and present-day me. I could only stare at the page for a moment, agreeing, wondering how I felt about that. At the time, I decided to laugh -- because, come on, that's funny. Funny-ish. But then, I don't know, now that I've given it some time I am struck mostly by the fear that underpinned every single thing I wrote in those notebooks. I lived in a small world. I was afraid to reach out, to do more. I was scared of who I was or who I was supposed to be. And you expect that from a teenager, I think, but from a grown up lady?

Not ideal.

Driving to work this morning, feeling that familiar sense of dread rising up in my chest, I stubbornly pushed it away. I listened to Walk the Moon sing, "I can lift a car up all by myself" and thought about strength and the strength in bravery. Because, for me, it is an act of bravery to believe in joy. To lean toward the light instead of cowering in the shadows.

Bright sunlight, falling rain.

Here is the trick. The trick is to remember to notice things. The trick is to notice and be there. There, in the place and the moment you're noticing. I knew driving home yesterday that the rain was coming. I could smell it before I could see it off in the distance, all heavy gray and the searing slap of lightning. The promise of thunder. I slept and was pulled from sleep by insistent rain. This morning the hot, wet air. On the way into the building, a hazy rising light through the spaces between leaves, punctuated drips from rain-heavy leaves. Each little drop catching the light, a bright spark there and gone like a dawn's version of a shooting star. A miracle of sorts. I felt it rise in my chest like a secret wish, so I did. Let me remember to see this again and again. Bright sunlight, falling rain. Nothing is more perfect.

Iceland for the win AGAIN.