Bright Yellow Flashdance Sweatshirt

Some days you just have to wear a bright yellow Flashdance sweatshirt.

Some days you wake up with the full weight of adulthood on your chest. It sits there and idly spins your brain like a coin on a table while it waits for its coffee. It etches the graffiti on your face a little bit deeper and highlights your hair with its silver spray paint. It makes gruesome faces at you and taunts you about all you have yet to accomplish while it plays keepaway with your confidence. Some days before you even throw back the covers, you find yourself out of breath, near tears and ready to sit down to in the dirt and wait for someone bigger, more capable to save you from this bully.

So what do you do? You close your eyes and say your prayers. You take your mental list of worries and ask for help, for patience, for remembrance. You picture the people you know who are sick and hurting and who have somehow lost their way and you ask for blessings for them. You picture the people you know who have chosen to hurt, to blame, to destroy and you ask for blessings for them, too. You draw up your bucket of shame, regret, disappointment from the deepest well where it hides and you ask for forgiveness and for new opportunities. Most importantly, you scan the horizon of your life, you empty your pockets of treasure, you lift the stones and turn over the dirt, you check the dark corners and behind the sofa and you say thank you for all that you have. And you say thank you again for things you might have forgotten, for things you mis-categorized, for things you have yet to receive. You draw a deep breath and you say thank you for that, too. And then you throw open the covers, like opening a new book that you will write today.

Some days you wake up and the complexity of life hits you. You count up all of your years and you wonder how it is you can feel so old and weary and so young and ill-prepared all at the same time. You count up all of your weeks and wonder where the last two seasons of your life went. You count up all of your days and you wonder what you have been doing that took so long. You count up your hours ahead and wonder how you can get it all done. You count up your minutes and wonder if you can still hit snooze.

So what do you do? You stop counting. You stop keeping score. You tell that siren, the snooze button, "Not today." You start moving. You realize that all of those years, those lost weeks, those forgotten days, those misplaced hours, those scattering minutes have brought you to now. And now is all you have. This now and the next now and the one after that. You take this now and fill it with something good, something right, something productive, something useful. You'll worry about the next now when it comes. Which is now and you get to choose all over again. You realize that the only place you live is right here. The only place you will ever be is with yourself in this moment. You'll do this now, now. Next you'll do the next now. And the rest can repose in its past and its future and wait its turn.

Some days you need some help with this. Some days it's coffee in your cup. Some days it's a smile from a friend. Some days it's a note in the mail. Some days it's inexplicably a box of fingernails on the sidewalk or the sight of an ancient couple laughing together in their car. Some days it's an alarm, a fire to put out. Some days it's a significant loss that reminds you of all you have.

Some days you just have to wear a bright yellow Flashdance sweatshirt. The one that makes you giggle when it slips off your shoulder because it reminds you of how you thought that was the sexiest thing in the world before you even knew what sexy meant. Because it is so bright and not your color and that's funny. Because in the wearing, it reminds you that your mother hates it but you can wear it anyway because you're plenty old enough to choose your own clothes. Because in the wearing, it reminds you of a time when you were young and longed for this day when you would be grown up, no one to answer to but yourself, no one to tell you what to do, no one to impress. Because it makes you smile and brings back youth, because it bucks convention of any responsible sort, because it asserts your ridiculous adulthood and because it's oddly comforting.

Some days you just have to wear it on the outside to remember the things on the inside. Some days you fight  the overwhelming tides of life with disreputable pants, mismatched socks and a sweatshirt that by all rights, should never have existed.

Some days you just have to wear a bright yellow Flashdance sweatshirt.