Girl's Gone Child: Liner Notes, 10/24

Oh hello, Fall. Hello babies first pumpkin patch! Hello, boots on feet and hats on heads and... okay, so it's still pretty sunny here, but pumpkins make it feel very festive around these parts. Pumpkins and those cinnamon scented brooms that Hal keeps bringing home from Trader Joes even though they smell like taxi cab air fresheners. In a good way, baby. We love your scented brooms!

I was in New York much of last week doing a Sattelite Media Tour for ChildStyle (which goes live with ten new episodes November 15th.) A media tour, I now know is when you speak with a couple dozen cities within a very short time frame, all in a row. It was my first experience doing live television, let alone twenty-two cities worth of live television in a row. Exhausting and slightly terrifying but also kind of a little bit fun.

The set they built was amazing, based on one of the spaces we featured in our first batch of eps and I feel super fortunate to have been able to partner up with HGTV on this series. We shoot our final episode of this season Friday and it's been, just, the best. Such a good time.

I was fortunate enough to get to see a handful of friends and family while visiting NYC, even though I only had a day to do so. It was kind of like speed dating with loved ones. First stop? Fifteen minute coffee with my cousin, Pearl, master storyteller, woman of my dreams, who was able to hang with me for a few minutes before setting out to shoot another story for the paper. Leaving me to wander across the street and into the arms of the boyfriend of my teenage self. Not, like, "into the arms" into the arms, just into the arms. As in, let's hug for twenty minutes and I will cry in your shoulder because of time.

***

The night Cheyne and I met, 4798890 years ago, he fell off my friend's tire swing and into a pile of cactuses. It was one of my most heroic teen moments. Surely, this boy needed me! HE NEEDED ME! So? I flung myself on top of him to save his life! Threw him over my shoulders and with a bottle of my friend's mom's antiseptic and a pair of tweezers, nursed him back to health. Next came love (obviously) and a summer filled with frolicking on beaches and making out in my parents' backyard while watching meteor showers with my entire family. Awkward.

We don't make out anymore, unfortunately, but we do talk about those days. We talk about remember this and remember that and then he orders me a beer and then I order him a beer and when we play pool he wins by, like, a million, and like, I keep talking like this because that's, like, how I used to like, totally talk when we were together and I have a disease called Regression and it's, like, totally chronic, especially when I get together with people from ye olde army days.

Our lives are hilariously different now. He tells me about his life traveling the world and I tell him about my life traveling the hallways and we're both as shocked and awed by the lives we have created for ourselves - happy lives, exciting lives, lucky to be here lives but WHOAAAA so different.

I see Cheyne every now and then on billboards around town. He was discovered in high school, bagging groceries at our local Ralphs. He had braces back then so he had to wait to get them off before they put him on the cover of Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs and since then he's been everywhere. In every magazine and catalog, paper, place. And every time it's like, oh hi. What are you doing here? Is that... Oh, um... hello. Like running into a reality in the middle of a fantasy except the reality is dressed like a fantasy and smells like perfume ads.

We stayed in touch throughout the years. Crashed at each other's apartments when we needed a place to stay. It always strikes me as odd that we have these relationships with people and then go our separate ways and then find our way back to each other for an hour or two and then we're off again.

Before last year, we'd gone eight years without seeing each other in person. I was pregnant with Archer the last time we met up. He was in LA for a shoot and I was swollen with pre-eclampsia and somehow nothing had changed then either. We were sixteen then and we are sixteen now and we will always be sixteen when we're together.

Time travelers riding two different sides of the coin.

In a good way.

***

with Maggie and Ashley who are wonderful.

(Maggie is doing some really incredible things and I'm so totally excited for her and in awe of her awesome. GO, Maggie!)

This is Rob. He is my friend. I will write more about him soon because there is so much I want to say and it will not fit in this post so I will write a new post with the whole story which deserves its own post and time to sit down and write it. Also the neon piece behind him? Rob made that. He makes incredible things. He makes incredible friendship. Incredible. Everything is incredible amazing incredible.