Love in the time of corona

I think I miss telling stories. 

I used to tell them all the time. For 5 years I had a blog where I wrote about the people around me, the things I saw. I wrote about France. I wrote about Romania. I wrote about the trouble my friends and I got into in Utah. I wrote about my crazy, hilarious family. I wrote about my sisters and their weddings. I wrote about how my mom "accidentally" broke my sister’s arm. 

I wrote about the funny things. I told funny stories. 

And people liked them. At least, the (few) people who read them did. And it made me happy knowing these stories could make them laugh. Make them smile. Back then I treated life as a satirical comedy, where everything just had to be funny. Because it was just life. No one was getting out alive anyway. So why not laugh? Why take everything so seriously? 

That's not to say I haven't seen sad things. Because I definitely have. 

But I always laughed at them. 

One time I said to God: “Listen, if anymore of my friends die, I’m going to take up smoking because I can’t deal with this stress. So get your act together.” 

And I imagined God rolling his eyes at me and laughing and being like “Ugh, it’s just Kaitlin, she’s so dramatic. She’s by far the most annoying of all my kids.” 

“Well, yeah whatever, God.” 

A strange conversation. But also funny. 

Because everything was funny. It had to be. 

I think I still treat life like this sometimes. Like it’s all one big joke. Like we’re here just to have a couple of laughs, like we’re in an episode of the Office and when something goes wrong I'm supposed to look at the camera and be like “are you kidding, what in the actual hell?” 

So I express myself in superlatives. In extreme narratives. In exaggeration. 

“Prim, I stayed up reading all night, and now I hate myself.”  

“Prim, I’m literally emotionally distraught over how many people died in the Hunger Games, and I'm not chill right now. My life is RUINED.” 

“Prim, I literally had a mental breakdown when I saw the last Star Wars movie. The last time I remember my heart hurting that bad was when I broke up with my boyfriend whom I loved.” 

“Prim, my mom didn’t believe in doctors until she got cancer. Before that, I could be walking around with a stab wound, but as long as I was up on two feet, I was fine. I literally almost died from a burst appendix when I was 15 because my parents didn’t take me to the hospital right away. That’s borderline neglect."

So hilarious, Kait. Not at all dramatic or dumb. Just funny. *I’m just here to have a good time.* And to say whatever I want in the most extreme way possible apparently. To lighten the mood I guess. Because I don't really hate myself for staying up all night to read because staying up all night to read is my favorite thing to do. And the Hunger Games didn’t really ruin my life because it’s not real, and I didn’t have a real freaking mental breakdown over Star Wars because that’s not real either. And if you know my mom, you know she’s the best mom in the world and the farthest thing from neglectful. She’s literally perfect. 

And I’m obviously not going to take up smoking. *I have asthma.*

And has speaking this way gotten me into trouble at times? You bet it has. For those of you who know, you know. And as for the rest of you . . . maybe one day I'll share that story. But for now, you'll have to wait. 

I just want to be laughing all the time. I need everything to be funny. Because it just feels nice to laugh. To tell jokes. To tell funny stories. 

But there are so many other stories out there that are nice to tell too, that are important to tell. Stories can be anything we want them to be. Stories don’t need to have a beginning or end. Stories can be everlasting. Stories can be an experience, a small moment. Stories can be a person.

And I love this world so much, I love the people around me, I love every moment in life—even all of the bad ones—and I just want to capture them all and cherish them forever because they have meaning simply because they are, they exist. I never want to forget any of them. I never want to lose any of them. That’s my biggest fear—forgetting things. Especially the things that once made me happy. 

So I love being alive because I love life. I love feeling the universe around me. I love experiences. I love people. I love stories. 

So I want to tell them again. All kinds. Who knows what will come of it, who knows if they will even be good. Who knows if I will even follow through. But today-right now-is a story in and of itself. This has meaning—whatever I have just written. 

Some other stories:

My great-grandpa playing the trumpet in WWI.

My mom as a missionary in France.

Meghan’s love for cats.

Hillary’s empathy and kindness. 

And then there’s Prim—it’s back in March before Covid hit New Zealand, and I’m laying out on the grass in the sun, and she is picking wild cranberries off the bushes by our house, and it is just the strangest thing to me that she's out here picking them, but that’s because I grew up in a desert and you don't pick fruit off of bushes because there's nothing to pick. And this small story tells so many other stories: about the way I grew up, the way Prim grew up, what we would each consider normal or abnormal habits. And it leads us to the moment where I’m in the kitchen eating the fruit pie she has made, and it’s warm and it's sweet and it's gooey, and I’m glad she picked those berries because now I get to eat them in this pie she's made for me. Because she's just so good to me. 

All these stories, all these small moments. 

They tell us things. They tell us it’s a good life.