Colorado Vacation

I've been hesitant to write about my Colorado adventures. When people asked me about my vacation I tell them that it was "rejuvinating" and that is very true. It was incredibly invigorating but it was also emotional. I went to undergrad in Colorado (Go Tigers!) and hopping in my car and driving the long stretches of mountainous highways was my escape from the laughably ridiculously easy life of an undergraduate student. Those years were some of the hardest of my life and criss crossing the state, driving 70 miles an hour while singing at the top of my lungs has always been cathatric and inspirational. Its hard to make your emotions the center of the universe when staring at 14K mountains, faults, and breathtaking ravines. I always feel a bit like I'm tumbling to the center of the earth and feeling small and tiny in the universe is almost always a cure for what ales me.

I needed this. I needed time alone, in a car, Bon Jovi and Kenny Rogers in the CD player, singing, wind in my hair, feeling like I was being sucked down into geological time to begin to confront all that has happened in the past two years. The death, the life, the changes, all of it and after a relaxing week of vacation in Seattle, it weighed down on me like never before. And I cried, howled, yelled, and belted my heart out from Grand Junction to Denver and arrived, at the end of my week raw and exposed but feeling more like myself than I had in fifteen months. And that is exactly why I went there. I also can't really tell how but I know that I've been profoundly changed by all of this but in a way, feel that those changes have made me more mellow, less judgmental, and completely unable to process negative things that happen around me.

After my Colorado vacation, I arrived home very excited about my life. Completely and totally in love with my husband, very thankful for my family, and very appreciative of my friends. I've been excited to exercise again (after about a year of being a lazy bum) and impatient with myself for not replacing our stove earlier so that I can get back to cooking. All of this new found energy makes me excited to be alive, grateful for those around me, and so goddamn pissed off that I can't share it with two people who meant so much to me. Yup, the highs are high, the lows are low, but the middle has smoothed out considerably.