• There is a song at the end of this.
• My wonderful friend John is giving me his apartment in NYC for March through June. I will be living in Chelsea. By myself. Whoa. Awesome. Scary. But more awesome. And I will be coming back to good old PA quite a bit, too. And I will still be playing Paper Janes shows. And I will still be me (just in case you guys wondered).
• Speaking of the Paper Janes, we have two shows next week: one on Wednesday at Lickety Split on South Street in Philly. And one on Thursday at Mojo Main on Main Street in Newark. This is exciting. There’s not much I’d rather be doing than music. Like, ever.
• I lost my deodorant. This is not exciting. It is actually annoying. Luckily, it’s pretty cold outside, so deodorant is not as necessary as it is in, say, August. But still, I danced a lot last night. And then I went to the gym today. And sometimes I get embarrassed and get kind of hot feeling. And well, all this adds up to me purchasing new deodorant when I have some perfectly fine deodorant somewhere, which is annoying.
• I will not be moving to Austin, TX in the fall. I did not get accepted to that school. I read the no thank you email and actually felt relief. I didn’t want to go to Texas (no offense, Mandy! I do want to see you, however!). It felt just like: thank goodness God doesn’t want me to go either.
• My pop gave me a tutorial on how to hear God’s voice tonight. It was really kind of him. It reminded me of homeschooling back in the day. Only the lesson wasn’t in the morning, so I didn’t yawn quite as much as I used to when he taught me lessons. Sorry pop, it wasn’t that you were boring; it was just that you were teaching me in the morning.
• And now I am gonna see if I can bullet a song.

• just be
• Turns out, I can.

And because I was negligent in documenting the last time I mentioned getting out of bed with some mad bed head to show for my night, I decided I’d at least capture it today. Cause it was good.

And you’re welcome, Mandy Hornbuckle.

So this is what morning looked like.
And yes, bed head comes in many different varieties. Lately I have been showcasing the kind with roots.

And once I tamed my bed head with a headband, I went on a hike with some lovely people who share my last name.

Judah caught a frog. Or maybe a toad. I don’t think there was a final say, so they ended up calling him Frog-Toad.

And what a lovely little Frog-Toad he was.

And for a hot minute, Judes and I swapped accoutrement. He wore my pink headband while I wore his hat and it suited us well, I think.

Oh, and my brother and I stood on a log together.

And we talked about life and how good it is now, and how unbelievable it’s been and how, man, we’re not sure how we made it here, exactly, but it sure looks a lot better than we ever thought it could.

And we didn’t particularly mean the log, but we could have cause that was nice, too.

Oh, and also, you might not have realized this, but I have a fairy for a niece.

And the woods suit Cosi just fine, I think.

And then tonight Shane and I sang some songs at two different places and with the exception of me messing up just a few lyrics (sorry, Shane!), I think we did well. We added two new songs to our set, which is fun–and now this means that we don’t even have to play every one of our songs to fill out a set. We can pick and choose, which is a nice little luxury.

It was a pretty good Friday, I think.

Oh! except my poor brother and nephew wandered around Newark looking for us to hear us play and never did find us, which is probably not exactly how they wanted to spend their friday night.

So, except for that sad story, it was the kind of Friday that I didn’t mind at all.

I cried by myself, lost in my thoughts, and then a small red fox ran through the snow, in front of my car, and I smiled despite myself.

It’s the same red fox who seems to have chosen the end of my parents’ lane as one of his favorite spots to hang out. Sort of like how, unbelievably, Burger King has become that way in nearby Newark, only I give a lot more credit to the fox for his choice because at least the lane is surrounded by trees and there aren’t too many florescent lights to compete with the stars and the moon.

Actually, I think that the fox has chosen the lane as a date spot. Because twice now I’ve seen him cavorting with a black cat there. I know, I know, I thought it was something about the lion and the lamb too, but hey–the fox and the cat kind of works for me.

But what I meant to say was that I saw them when I was sad and suddenly I did feel better. Stupidly and mostly inexplicably better. Did the cat and the fox change anything about the actual shape of my reality?

No.

But they brought some other things to my attention, things that really helped. They surprised me with something good. And thereby reminded me that those kinds of things still happen. Good surprises, I mean. They reminded me of whimsy. The side of life that doesn’t look like math and isn’t so easily erased as equations on the chalkboard, but there they are. The part of life that keeps you laughing at the same knock knock joke you heard ten years ago, but this time it’s your niece who’s saying it and this time you laugh and it’s genuine. It’s playing. It’s innocent fun. I’ll breathe that in, if you don’t mind. And then I remembered that sometimes things don’t make sense in a good way. And it’s like the opposite of getting the wind knocked out of you because suddenly you’re breathing and it’s deep and it’s like your lungs remember they can expand and also that you have all the air you’ll ever  need to say whatever it is you need to say, my dear. And really? A fox and a cat? In real life; this isn’t a cartoon. Okay, then. Makes no sense, but I’ll take it in.

And tonight, I stepped inside to practice music with a friend and then when I stepped back outside hours later, the world was transformed by snow. And here I thought I had grown tired of the winter, but then when I saw that, I realized I was wrong. That an apology was in order. Good thing the snow has a habit of falling on the grateful and the ungrateful alike; good thing I am not exempt from that kind of beauty.

The truth is, nobody is.

And to me, it seemed like all that covering up of the nakedness of winter happened in just a few song’s worth of time. And well, it can happen like that sometimes. Good things coming into your life. They can come and take your breath away just like that in the same way that bad things can come and knock you off your feet just like that.

And like my friend John says, Miracles happen, so why not to me?

Why not, indeed.

It’s enough to make me curse.

The other day I had a friend over. He wanted to look at some papers on my desk but these weren’t just any papers: they were the papers I was using to meticulously hide my divorce papers. And so when he nonchalantly reached to grab them, I jumped.

I jumped like I was a starving child and he was trying to take my last piece of bread. It was weird and out of character and he looked at me like it was weird and out of character, but neither of us said a word.

The truth is I was embarrassed.

I didn’t want him to see what I was hiding, but an even greater truth is that the entire world is going to be seeing what I’ve been hiding.

Because it’s real.

I sang at a funeral a few weeks ago and ran into someone I haven’t seen in a few years. The conversation was casual and eventually got to Drew as she asked me how he’s doing. Trying to give nothing away, I apparently failed miserably because right after I said, He’s…okay…with no fewer or no more words than just those two, she abruptly asked, Are you guys still together?

And it took my breath away. But not in the way that most ballads mean, not even close.

Nor did I know how to recover.

So I said the party line that has since become old. We’re going through a hard time. He’s made bad choices and we’re separated.

And then she said that was too bad. She said it like I told her my old Aunt who last I checked was 108 had just died peacefully in her sleep. She said it with distant compassion.Then she mentioned someone else we both knew, a mutual friend, who had just gotten a divorce too.

She said too and the importance of that word was not lost on me.

I hadn’t even mentioned divorce and now a friend of ours had just gotten one too.

I wasn’t ready for that conversation. And I sure as heck wasn’t ready for commentary on the fact that I was a gaping wound who had managed to put on a dress and sing Ave Maria that morning. I wasn’t ready to tell people that I was bleeding from the jugular and then be offered a band-aid and a pat on the back.

You better believe that my response to the question, How’s Drew? got a lot better when I was asked the same thing at the reception for the funeral. I actually may have overcompensated, to be honest, because as soon as I heard the words I answered loudly. Cheerfully. Like there’s nothing I’d rather be talking about then how Drew is doing.

Oh, he’s great!!!!! I said.

But then when this woman asked me where he’s working, my oscar winning performance lost the oscar. I couldn’t for the life of me remember where he was working. Not even the city he worked in.

As I was deliberating, taking too much time to answer such a normal question, my friend Christian jumped in like a champ.

He’s doing the sleep tech thing in Dover, he said with a smile.

Yes! I said. In Dover! He’s working in Dover!!!! And I am pretty sure I sounded like I was one stop from the loony bin.

Well, maybe I am, actually.

The thing is, I just don’t always know quite what to say. The truth is a start, but how much of the truth? And do I really want to get into it? All the time and everywhere?

No, I don’t.

Not at the gym. Not when someone I haven’t seen for years asks me how Drew’s doing, if we’re still in Newark. I’m on the bike and the last thing I want to be doing is communicating that I am going through a divorce, that what seemed like one of the couples who would definitely make it is now definitely not making it. That I am a cliche just like all the others. That I might as well have had a reality show called The Newlyweds and then made a country album that flopped. And the fact that my name is also Jessica? Well, perfect.

So I don’t tell him.  And I don’t know, maybe that is wrong, but I don’t know how to do this at all, least of all perfectly.

And while the man at the bank today was fumbling through my divorce papers, trying to figure them out and then notarize them, he apologetically explained, I’ve never been married .

To which I said, Well, I’ve never been divorced.

Which is the truth.

And I have no idea whatsoever what I am doing.

And it sucks to be attaching stupid papers to your heartache; as if the facts of our marriage, the details of our intertwined lives could ever encompass who we’ve been and who we are now. And how trite that this thing that is negating us could give me a paper cut.

But God, this is real, and I will feel my way through the dark until somebody turns on the light.

I just hope that happens soon.