Alice Buell Lawrence

I’ve done some wandering this week, taking a bit of time off of work to go and see things. And people. And moments. My work has a very generous PTO policy, and I’ve been encouraged to get away from the office a bit more.

I have also done some wandering in my writing. I’m working on a piece right now that, well, has kind of meandered on me. I started with more of a notion than a complete concept, and I’ve let it guide me on where it’s going. So far I’m not really convinced that it’s a story, but it’s going somewhere. Each day I’ve been working to put in a little bit more, getting closer and closer to a completed draft. It wanders.

This all stems from pushing myself a bit lately. I feel like I’ve been in a rut writing about relationships, the spark of meeting someone new and the wreckage when things fall apart, the feeling of getting to know your partner and how that evolves or what happens when your heart wanders elsewhere. I think the connections we make are the most important part of being human. I tend to love easily and fully.

I don’t want to be one-dimensional, though, and I’ve been trying to explore other topics. But this story, the meandering one, the one that wanders, has come back to a relationship.

I’ve rarely been brilliant at being in one relationship, as much as I try. I don’t cheat. Let me be very clear about that. But I have a different conception of what relationships are, too. I tend not to readily adopt labels like partner, friend, acquaintance, etc. They are all connections that we have, ones that evolve and have different parameters. I love so many people in my life, and I love them in different ways. How that can be expressed changes from person to person.

I don’t like the gatekeeping that comes with calling someone a friend. Like that keeps them in a particular orbit. It’s harder to have co-conspirators that way, and I’ll use a term like dear friend or lovely human or something that maybe belies how I feel about them. Or maybe we just aren’t that good at telling the people in our lives what they mean to us when we have the chance. Being explicit can be a good thing.

Maybe that’s also how I wind up in the interesting relationships in which I tend to find myself. Meandering. Wandering.

We’ll see where this piece goes. Where my connections go. Where it all winds up.