2017 - Reverse Bucket List

2017 was, for me anyway, full of a lot of firsts. So I made a list of all the things I did this year that I have never done before (I WAS BOOOOORN TO DO...oh...sorry...).

KT’s 2017 Reverse Bucket List

This year I…

Performed in my biggest Shakespeare dream role - Ophelia in Hamlet.

Saw one of my best friends make his Broadway Debut.

Finally saw Walk Off The Earth live.

Wrote a novel.

Spent the summer teaching and playing with some pretty awesome kids.

Joined a band.

Learned to like my body.

Repaired my relationship with the gym.

Wrote enough songs for an album and started making one.

Survived a hurricane.

Played in my first ever ukulele festival.

Had the best birthday.

Went to California.

Put my feet in the Pacific.

Lived in a van.

Travelled across the country for my favorite band.

Met my favorite band.

I hope your year had some good moments, and if it didn't, there's always next year. Sometimes we have bad years, and that's okay! The cool thing about life is that it just keeps going. 2018, here we come!!

Peace, Love, and the Best of Times,

KT

If I wait for summer to begin...

Holy wow, it's been a while, hasn't it?  I was even joking with my sister, who has a blog she actually updates regularly, that blogging is not my thing.  But writing definitely IS my thing, so I'm going to keep this little website in my back pocket for whenever I need or want it.  It's been with me through a whole heck of a lot.

So it's the end of May, you guys!!  Isn't that...crazy?  I feel like time is always flying by so fast.  I'm getting sick of saying "I can't believe it's *insert month here*", but I can't!  So anyway, SUMMER.  I have always loved the summer months.  Even after I graduated and became an ~adult~ there was just something about this time of year that put a tingle of possibility in my bones.  Growing up, summer meant being in a production, or at musical theatre camp, or going on a fun trip.  It meant new friends and new places and dreams as big as the sky over the arboretum.  My favorite memories are summers. Living in the musical theatre bubble of GSA, spending twelve hours a day at Lexington Children's Theatre, performing Rent or Hair or Once on this Island, moving to St. Pete and doing The Burnt Part Boys.

Around this time of year I get an itch.  It's the feeling that something BIG is about to happen, and I know that it's just my body saying "heyyyyy you're about to do a project or go on a trip"  even when it's not actually the case anymore (adulthood, am I right?).  So I guess my challenge to myself, and to all of you, is to USE that itch.  That summery restless feeling where our fingers and toes tell us that school is out, time to do something that we could write a YA novel about, but our brains know that we're still going to have to get up for work every day.  Use it to pick up an old hobby, or go to the beach, or go on a day trip, or spend a Saturday reading adventure novels.  Or...you know...actually do something crazy. Realize that dream you've been thinking about all winter. It's summer, after all.

I don't want anything.

She’ll spend sleepless nights wondering how a soul with so much love inside of her has found herself so lonely. 
How someone who cries tears of joy at daffodils blooming, laughs at her own mistakes, and peers into people’s energies has become so lost. 
When she looks you in the eye her mind is not elsewhere, and if she smiles wistfully it’s only because she spots the same powerful green her father carried with him until the day he died - his heart open and willing until the end.

She makes up love stories in her mind, the details so real you would swear they were borrowed from the novel she just hungrily tore through, but they are of her own making. The look across a crowded soirée her hypothetical soulmate casts in her direction. If you’re too slow you’ll miss it. But her head is always tuned in to his brain waves. 
The electric energy that sparks each time her feet strike the city pavement reflected in the bright marquee shouting her name. 
The pride that swells in her chest as the audience leaps to their feet and the glowing flame of pure, unconditional love when she sees him…whoever he is…clapping along. 
There would be no need for words, because in God’s final draft of us, she believes we will not speak. Words only ever complicate things, and life could be lived as it was inside the web she travelled nightly as a child. Inside that web she never spoke. 
She only felt. 
She was only understood.

The feelings are so real to her. So utterly tangible and although she knows she’ll regret investing in them, at this point it’s the only way she can fall asleep anymore. 
It’s the only way she can calm the thoughts of hatred that course through her body all day, and focus her mind on love. 
The kind of love that needs no words.
That sings her lullabies off key and lets her ride her bike with no hands…because although it’s more dangerous, it’s the closest she’s ever been to flying. 
She dreams of this soul and feels guilty when she realizes how much he is just a permutation of the man she misses every day, taken from her too soon. 
She drifts off nightly, hoping she’ll be visited by her father.
But that too is dangerous. 
Seeing as she’ll only be disappointed when she wakes up.