Back In Style.

It’s amazing how quickly things can change in the blink of an eye. With summer come and gone along with fall here we are slowly falling into winter and into the New Year. My life had changed drastically once the warmth of summer had left the air. I found myself settling comfortably into my new home with my roommates Cash Clifton and Humberto Pillado, I was loving my new role as “Uncle” with my beautiful nephew; Marcos Nicolas Martinez who brought me to tears on more than one occasion just by smiling at me and even my social circle had changed. Sometimes life is about walking down your own path and spending time in that path even if that means spending time away from the friends you’ve grown to love. With Anthony thriving in Tucson it was up to Michael, Desiree and myself to keep our little clique together, but as the weeks went by we started to drift apart. How did this small group of friends divide into four separate people? How did it happen and how could I fix it? Truth was there was nothing I could do. We were all making the conscious decision NOT to put forth the effort. And with that, we lost Desiree. Not physically, just socially, but losing a friend is never easy and by October I had lost two of them.

          It was Halloween by the time we had given a co-worker of ours a chance. Megan Thomason was a fellow server who had moved here from Chicago. Megan had a very expressive, fun and warm energy about her which we all responded to and liked a lot. We had also gotten very close with a CSR named Ashlee Sanchez. The youngest out of the four of us and reminded me a lot of myself when I was her age. So when Megan invited us to a Halloween party that she was hosting, we all gladly accepted. The party itself was great, Megan’s punch a.k.a. “Ninja Juice” packed a pretty big punch indeed and like any ninja, it snuck up on me before I could react. Because of that night it was decided that the new “Fearsome Foursome” had been formed: Megan, the happily married Chicago native, Ashlee, the baby of the group and a diva in training, Michael, the bitchy one with a libido too high for even the tallest person and me, the incurable romantic that believes that love conquers all. There was something about our new little clique that gave me a warm feeling that I hadn’t felt since the summer.

          How can I describe the next change that I had gone through? Let’s just say that it had some very interesting moments. Love was always something that I believed in ever since my first relationship and having that experience be a stepping stone that opened my eyes to all the good and bad things that happen when you give your heart out. During this year, I had the honor of meeting and caring about two amazing people. While both of them were different in each way, they both made me smile and helped bring out a side of myself that even I didn’t know I had. But if it’s one thing I learned twice it’s that sometimes we have to let go or be let go in order to come across something that might fit us better. As much as it pained me sometimes to see other happy couples together I kept a faith in my heart that love isn’t exclusive, we’re all entitled to it. I wasn’t looking for perfection; I was looking for someone to give me butterflies again. It was that gut feeling that I possessed that told me how far someone was going to get with me, that feeling of weeding out all those “Just friends” from “More than just friends”. I went through some emotional changes that seemed seemingly negative at the time, but turned out to be such a positive for me in the long run.

          I like to think that life is like a dressing room. We’ll spend days, even years trying things on to see if they fit. We’ll keep going through these changes until we find the one that fits us. Whether it’s too big, too small or not in our price range it doesn’t mean that we should stop trying because you never know when that change could lead to something great. It’d be kind of like giving up on the shelf items then turning to the sales rack and finding that outfit in your size for 60% off the original price. Time had somehow put all these emotional layers on me and I found myself stuck in my dressing room. But as soon as I started to take them off I started to see all the ways I could mix and match key pieces to create an outfit that I was happy with for the season. In a short amount of time I had changed the way I had seen my family, my friends, love and even myself. I was no longer burning up underneath a bunch of stuffy layers that were suffocating me. I could breathe again and after feeling like last season’s fashion victim, I somehow made a comeback and felt back in style again.

Xoxo.

B.

“Brand new groove, brand new shoes, brand new muse spread the news.”

-Joss Stone.