A piece of cinnamon toast, please

Lately I feel a lot of feels.

If you're not hip on it, feels = feelings. Like the emotional kind. I am not actually out and about touching strangers, perhaps inappropriately, as that first line perhaps implied. Nope. I'm busy as usual avoiding touching 99% of people in general.

So back to my emotional feels.

I feel good ones. And sometimes tumultuous ones. And deep ones. But mostly good ones....ones that are good and deep all at once.

I love the moments in life when happiness just washes over me. It's like I pause, and have a brief out-of-body experience, and look at that little slice of my life right then and there and just....and just don't feel like breathing for a second, because it's so so good and if I keep on living and let time keep on marching, then I don't get to be in that moment anymore. I often just want to stop the clock and dig my heels and toes into the ground and refuse to budge for a minute because wait life is delicious don't make me finish the last bite of this part.

Lately I think a lot about the fragility of life.

My mind just drifts back to the topic, many times a day. How it can all just be over....in a flash. So fast. So unexpectedly. People come and go, or you come and go, or maybe sometimes you stick around for a hundred years, no one knows! None of us know. And when that feeling of "this is all so fleeting, oh no where is it all going wait please I want to keep it" washes over me, it can go one of two ways. Sometimes, it cripples me. I feel frustrated that things and times can't last. I'll just suddenly miss a good friend from back in the day, or the electric feeling of being a freshman in college, or the days back when I was in like 5 choirs and sang endlessly all the time, or I'll have stopped into Kohl's to look for a pair of shorts and then, oh man, since when did Kohl's smell like my mom? What? And suddenly I'm back-to-school shopping over a dozen Augusts while she pulls all those coupons out of her purse and my heart doesn't know why I'm not on the nearest flight home to watch HGTV and eat cinnamon toast on my parents' couch. Can't every minute of my life just be warm Arizona nights and cinnamon toast on my parents' couch? Can I bottle that up and keep it somewhere where time can't take it from me?

And then other times, the mood shifts and the fleeting nature of life fuels me forward. And I want to live now! Act fast! Don't waste a minute! Express my feelings! Pick a 2016 presidential candidate! Get that tattoo I've always wanted! Apply to grad school! Make a 5-year plan! Make a 10-year plan! Invest some money! Save some money! Have long-term goals! Go on all the trips! Do all the things!

And I think it's a balance, really.

I feel like I've got half my body in either direction, most days -- hanging on tight to the good ol' times while also going 90 mph toward what's next, next, next. And really, I want both. I want progress and I want youth. I want to be an established adult and I want the quiet calm of HGTV and cinnamon toast. All at once. All mixed up inside me.

My life is deliciously good right now. I feel authentic, and happy, and free, and independent, and loved. And sometimes that's because of some grand adventure that looks nice on Instagram, and other times it's because I'm watching Law & Order while eating a tuna sandwich in bed and I'm deliriously happy about it. And always, the feelings. The feels. I feel passion and rage and tenderness and courage and fear and ferocity and frustration and sweet, sweet joy. Every day. All of it. All bundled up together. All part of this life I'm building.

It's kind of like I spent a lot of years picking plots of land and changing my mind and digging and excavating and repositioning and pouring foundations and crumpling up blueprints just to write new ones over and over....and now I feel like I'm laying bricks. Putting up walls. Seeing things take shape. It's like I've caught an architectural vision in my head and I'm finally thinking, "Yes, there it is. Put that thing together and live in it."

And time marches on. And I'm just some kind of emerging adult with fire in one hand and cinnamon toast in the other. And both hands hold me together.