So this is the New Year.
Just 3 minutes shy of 3 hours in now.
My head has been full of the ghosts of New Years Past all day.
All week, actually. This seems to be a recurring pattern of mine. I’m trying to remember a New Years where I was content to live IN the year that was currently occurring, and I find myself back in a small apartment with an even smaller group of friends, eating homemade food, watching terrible movies, drinking Don Francisco coffee with vanilla creamer. When the countdown came near, the shoes went on and we took to the hills, climbing one of the many grassy peaks. We stood in the brisk night air. I can still feel it – still see myself in my green shirt and brown coat, standing next to him in his rolled up sleeves with his tousled hair, watching the fireworks light up the sky over the cities beneath us, reflecting on the beautiful face of the bay below. The explosions of light made the harsh city seem soft and beautiful by night, and everything was enchanting somehow. Every star shone brighter. Every joke seemed funnier. Everything about that night seemed perfect, and I can remember the feeling still – because that night, my heart was hoping for a future that it didn’t know yet that it would never have.
That was the perfect New Years.
Just last year, my life couldn’t be more different than it is right now. Exactly a year ago, my house was full of people preparing to celebrate the joining together of 2 lives. We hit a local spot and listened to a band called the Skablins, and I felt my face grow warm as I looked around a crowded table at others that I loved, trying to memorize the details of them before they went their separate ways away from our Northern state. I knew the one beside me would soon be traveling far. I had no idea just how far he’d truly go. If I had, I don’t know if I’d have looked at his face longer, or not looked at him again.
My head has been full of the ghosts of New Years Past all day.
I had an invitation to celebrate with a group of people I’ve recently become somewhat acquainted with, and my heart was torn. Mostly because a good portion of that slippery, bloody red mass was stuck in last year. Stuck in the years before that. Stuck in my favorite local dive hearing horns blare while a man held my hand and a promise that he would wordlessly withdraw within just a few months.
High on a hill watching the bay, smelling the salt on the air and a bright future that would dim before the year could turn again.
I had the urge to turn down the invitation in favor of my animals and my favorite pajamas, simply because I was sad and in a terribly mood.
But then I saw this quote: “You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.”
I started thinking. How can I possibly be heartsick about my situation if I don’t ever do anything to make it better?
I have to start trying to make it better.
I have to start trying.
I have to start.
I feel like I’m always saying something similar to this within these blogs, but isn’t that what “getting better” is? A constant pep-talk, a constant attempt at getting over some kind of hurdle? I keep wishing this will be automatic, this could just be a “snap of the fingers” recovery into emotional wellness, but I don’t think it ever really works that way for those who feel so thoroughly and utterly broken at times. It’s a heartache that can’t be put into words, and yet I keep trying through these entries. I keep seeking a form of escape, hoping to be free of what I feel inside of me. Maybe one day, I will be. I pray for that day. I pray one day I’ll be able to stop re-reading my old chapters, and I’ll be able to start a new one. Appreciate the New Year. Stop thinking of that crowded table. That hilltop. Maybe I’ll always think of those things. If I do, I just hope one day they don’t bring the same pain.
I hope this New Year brings something new.
I hope that I become something new.
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