in spite of everything

Sorry I disappeared for so long. I didn’t mean to be rude. I’ve just had my hands full the past few months. I’m not complaining though. Best hands-full-ness I can imagine. Her name is Lucinda, most people call her beautiful, some people call her amazing, others Luci, I simply call her mine.

Complete and total adoration,
My gift to you, my heart was yours,
In ten weeks you shaped it,
In one night you murdered it.
Torn from my chest and laid at your feet,
That first step you took was the worst.
Since then you’ve walked a thousand miles in solace and short remark,
And I still have these memories,
But we’ll never see what we could have been.
Remember when we talked about where we’d be a year from now?
Remember when you held my hand like you’d never let it go?
Remember, cause that’s all you can do.
We’ll never make another memory,
We’ll never make another memory.
I wish I’d have died in your arms the last time we were together,
So I wouldn’t have to wake without you today.
This time I thought things were real,
You said they were,
What happened?
You were a priority,
Was I an option?
I let you see a side of me that I don’t share with anyone.
Promises are just words unless they are fulfilled.
Knew from the beginning all I had to offer you was my heart,
I’m sorry that it wasn’t enough.
So, we’ll go our own ways,
And hopefully you’ll remember the things I’ve told you,
Hopefully you’ll understand that everything I said was in sincerity.
A broken heart is not what I wanted from this,
But I guess I’ve learned from it.
But aren’t you supposed to learn from your mistakes?
I don’t consider this a mistake,
I just wish the story didn’t end this way,
Cause I’m still in love with the person who helped me write it.
Remember when you held my hand like you’d never let it go?
Remember when we talked about where we’d be a year from now?

Amanda made it through the night in her comfort of her own bed (She insisted if they could do nothing immediate for her she would rather wait to be admitted. She may be as sweet as they come, but she is also very stubborn.)

It wasn’t an easy night. She was constantly waking up and in pain. She keeps asking for Ryan and we don’t know what to do for her. She doesn’t want to make decisions about her own health without him because it affects the health of something they share and she feels the decision isn’t hers alone to make. So if any of you know him, or Ryan you’re reading this yourself, please encourage him to at least come and support her through this time. We know you don’t want to lose her.

And for anyone else, any submissions that may make her laugh or smile are appreciated. We feel it’s time to give back to her what she does for us. 

Amanda, author of this blog, known to friends as Mandy, Duckie, Keebs, has lead an extraordinary life. She may not be able to drive. She may not have saved the world through any great political, medical, revolutionary solution. But at only 21 years old she has touched the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people. Through her service with multiple summer camps, special children’s programs, geriatric outreach, peer tutoring, nursery leadership, vacation bible schools, motivational speaking, community service, support systems for rape and suicide, and just living her daily life being herself she has spent everyday working to give people a gift she considered more important than all others - the simple gift of a smile. To her, smiling means everything. Smiles are symbols of life, hope, and of victory. She has a way of seeing into people, past facades and into the pain kept privately in people’s hearts. Perhaps this is because she has been through more pain than most people will ever know to experience and because she has felt it, she feels the need to melt it away from the lives of others. Smiling is her victory over the pain, her way of seeing that whoever inflicted the pain did not have an eternal hold on her. Smiles are her way of fighting back, of taking away the past and brightening the future of the world around her. 

Tonight she is lying sick as her friends and family look on, hoping that tomorrow she will being us another chance to smile with her. But even if she cannot we will always smile for her and we ask all of you to take on her cause and legacy and carry into the world her simple gift.

Today I walked almost 6 miles in this dead August heat. It made me sick. My belly hurt and cramped and the pains in my back brought tears to my eyes. My feet bled from shoes that don’t fit. And my mind suffered awful confusion through the heat. I walked over overpasses, through broken glass and roadkill, around used condoms, a wasteland of cigarette butts and McDonald’s cups, a big patch of poison rashy leaves of some sort, through busy intersections where drivers don’t like to look.

But I did it all because I love you. And I want to restore your trust in me. It’s a testament to my devout belief in my honesty and my commitment to righting this.

And I was right. I’m not crazy or a liar. Because of everything that happened there are several reasons the memory could be gone in a blur. And we’re going to work through it all to find out how I forgot. We’re going to prove to you that I’m worth your trust and you made the right decision to stand up for me and our baby. You won’t have to be hurt and ashamed much longer. 

And knowing that is worth any price I may have paid in the journey.

And much more bitter than sweet. I hope that you can swallow the awful taste long enough to make my memory sweet.

When I said that I would love you until the moment I died, I didn’t think I would mean that I would spend a few short, happy months with you, be torn away from you, and love you quietly with all that I had left in me for a few more months as my kidneys failed and my life faded away, with both of us helpless to change anything for the sake of the new life we made that grew inside me. I didn’t think we’d have to face a goodbye so permanent before we’d even gotten to sort it all out and establish ourselves. I never could have imagined that forever with you would boil down so fast that we’d never see a year change in each other’s arms. I feel blinded by the dreams of all the birthday candles I will never see lit - mine, yours, and ours.

I remember thinking that we didn’t have alot of anything but time and love. And now those feel like the things we’re getting shortchanged on. I’d give anything else we ever could have had just to know the full presence of what we had again. 

Love is something we seem to be bleeding away and time is something I only have enough of to heal the wounds of the other. And that is what I am committing the rest of my life to doing, healing your broken heart so that maybe once my time is gone, it will be whole enough that I can at least live there for the rest of the time you have.