the slow fade

I was hoping to make my triumphant return to the blogging world with an amazing story about how my life has changed in the last few months, but alas, all I have at the moment is that it's been so long since my last post that my computer didn't even remember the link...I had to type in the whole thing by hand.

The last few months have had their fair share of insanity. Since my last post I have started a new job, survived my own wedding and one of my best friends' as well, made it to Hawaii and back with a motion-sickness-prone husband, moved completely out of my old apartment into our home, and begun the settling in process. It may seem that I have been busy, and some days I feel that way. But Lucas and I both said yesterday that it feels like our wedding was much longer than a month ago (our one-month anniversary is this Tuesday).

But what has struck me lately is how life often fades from one day to the next without my notice. My life as Charissa Holland has slowly faded into my life as Charissa Motley--I still am not entirely a Motley, I have yet to change my bank account and credit cards, but my driver's license declares that I have forsaken my former name and claimed another...and cue Motley Crue jokes here.

But it's more than that. Watching the change of seasons has a similar effect; the slow fade of summer into fall, as the leaves change and drop, the combines lay bare the landscape once more, predicating the impending winter; waking up cold, turning the furnace on for the first time and turning it off in the same week as the climate debates its allegiance to fall and summer in a matter of days.

I measure my life in weeks these days, waiting anxiously for weekends when I don't have to wake up at 5:30 a.m., when I can spend more than a few hours with my husband, when I don't come home from work with a headache and a crazy story about my day. Monday through Friday has become nearly intolerable as I attempt to adjust to the new schedule, the sharing of life with another person, and on top of it all feeling like I am constantly waiting for more, like I will feel more productive, whole, complete once I go back to school in January, once I finish my degree two years from now, once I get the house organized, once Lucas and I figure out how to live together instead of just in the same house.

And as I type this now, the day slowly fades into dusk, toward evening, into night, slipping, slipping ever-so-gently into tomorrow, and when I wake in the morning I will watch the night slowly fade into morning, the process so breathtakingly smooth that it passes before I can absorb its grandeur under the ritual of it all.