Stay Close to People Who Feel Like Sunshine

stay close to people who feel like sunshine, elaina avalos

It’s been gloomy here on the coast of the Carolinas. I can endure cold, bad weather, and I don’t hate snow or ice. But when it’s dark and you can’t see the sun for days on end, I get a little cranky and uncomfortable. Today, after multiple days of fog, rain, and misty spitting rain (consistently ruining my new haircut) – the sun finally visited. Tonight, it will be 22 and breezy. Tomorrow it will be around 43 & windy – chilly for the coast, for sure. But the sun will be shining and that’s all I care about at this point.

I grew up in Southern California where I’ve jokingly said all of my adult life that we don’t have “weather.” I mean, they don’t really. It’s sunny most of the time and rain is infrequent (except for lately). I love that I now get to live in a place with real weather. But none of this is really the point of my post.

Stay close to people who feel like sunshine.

Have you heard the quote – stay close to people who feel like sunshine? I was thinking about it today as the sun finally made its appearance through the clouds. The joy that fills my heart when I’m around people like this is . . . unmatched. I just want more and more of it. I can’t get enough of it. I can’t get enough of them. This is what it’s like when you find your match – in friendship or in love. They’re like a ray of sunshine that warms you from the inside out – even when it’s cold outside. Even when life is hard and weird and nothing makes sense and you can’t imagine how things will line up and come together, you just want more.

I just want more. Stay close.

Wild Things

wild things, elaina avalos, elaina m. avalos, a thousand years

It is untamed. Wild and unplanned. I wake deep in thought, recalling the mornings in the Redwoods – the air cold and damp. There was nothing around but the untouched forest. Standing there, facing the west, I saw the Pacific resting between the hills – the brush wild and untamed. So perfectly beautiful and lonely.

This is what it’s like to love you. On a day I least expected you, there you were. We are perfect partners. We think alike. But not. In that place in between, where we differ, you shine most.

There are more questions than answers. In the beauty of this wild thing, I long for you. What is and will not be follows me around like a coastal fog. Through the haze I see you. I don’t hold it against you – you can’t tame wild things.

I live here in this tension, with what will not be, settling into the cold, wild – alone.