Holy shit, boys and girls, it’s New Year’s Eve.
In just a few short hours, I’m going to start 2010. I wonder if I’ve come any further than New Year’s Eve, (some time in high school that I don’t remember the exact year of), where my closest friend at the time slept over in the den. At the time, my parents had allowed me to paint whatever I wanted on my once blue walls, and they were completely covered in a mishmash of random paintings (one reason I’m probably going to stay away from getting too many more tattoos, as it eventually looks pretty disjointed.) We added one that night, marking it with the year, a quote by the beatles (the one with the love-taking and the love-making) and a purple swirly design, and everything felt so significant.
So what about this year? Where’s the feeling of gravitas, significance, of being older, wiser, and more grown up?
When I was a kid, I lived in Alabama, where tornadoes are so common that people that people would sit out on their front yards in metal lawn chairs and watch them go by. When I look at the conflicting, often confusing circumstances that make up the end of this year (and particularly the last month), I see a funnel, things just spinning around and around, getting faster and faster as they get close to the end, closer to “touching down.” Unfortunately, I have no idea where touching down is or where it would leave me.
Case in point, at 12:01 am on New Year’s Eve Morning, I was weak from giving blood, drunk because I hadn’t thought properly about what happens when you give blood and then have a few margaritas, and bailing cold water with a bucket out of a flooded washing machine while trying to fish my clothes out of the six inch deep pool on my bathroom floor. At this point, my whole body is a mass of pain – a sprained ankle, a low-sugar headache, pms exhaustion, sore muscles from a hard workout in judo the day before, and my uterus is kicking me, over and over, to remind me of the fact that I’m a woman.
At this moment, wading in the freezing, soapy water, vainly trying to wring my clothes out with my hands, I want so badly to call boy, to just cry and throw my emotions all over him, because I know that in about 20 seconds of talking to him, I would feel better. But in the interest of becoming more emotionally independent from him, as well as being less selfish and less self-centered (I mean, fuck, he’s at the hospital taking care of his fucking failure of a father (I have absolutely no remorse saying that)) I instead break down and call my mom, someone who I have not asked for advice since I was nine, only to go crying to her three times in the past week. And cry I do. I mean really, really cry. I’m swearing at the top of my lungs, crying my eyes out, and it seems like the only words that will come out of my mouth are “FUCKING WASHING MACHINE!” and “THERE’S WATER EVERYWHERE!’ I’m not sure if calling my mom qualifies as me being more independent, since it’s probably a step backwards on the take-care-of-yourself scale, but at least I know my mom would never look down on me and I don’t really need to feel looked down on right now.
Not an auspicious start. Not an auspicious ending, either.
And really, what have I gained this year? I want to say that I’m more emotionally mature and stable, except that I keep crying randomly about every little thing. Something is dragging shit up to the surface, lots of shit that’s making me better but at the same time worse. I hope it’s the “muscles are being built after exercise pain” and not the “you have an oral infection that will eventually abscess, infect your brain, and kill you pain”. I want to say my family is closer now, because my sister and I are messaging back on forth on facebook, which seems like a really small thing, except that it’s the most communication we’ve had in years. Facebook almost killed my relationship, drives me insane, and makes me jealous and a stalker. But knowing my sister doesn’t hate me after years of fighting and then almost no communication definitely counts as a saving grace.
And in the end, I can’t think of a single way I truly achieved something or progressed this year. My upcoming holiday celebration is a perfect parallel for everything else in my life – I’m going to go to a new city I’ve never seen before, with a friend I barely know, to stay at the house of two people I just met. And in the end, while it sounds adventurous and fun to the uninitiated, the truth is – I haven’t built anything. I want to spend New Years with someone who matters, doing something that matters. I want roots, a family, a home.
Yet for some reason, through all of this mucky shit, through the tears that constantly spring to my face, I do not feel defeated. And thats true of me, all the time, even when I am defeated, ironically, I am not defeated.
I wish I had some nice ending to wow you with, but the truth is that it’s time to get on the bus. So I’m gone.
Best wishes for 2010.
Me
