What are You Doing New Year's Eve?

In the waning hours of 2010, I considered going out in response to a solid invitation to one party and the probability that any number of my friends would be ushering in 2011 in the ATown. In light of last year's epic fail, I had compelling reasons to attempt to start off the new year in finer form. I considered the old superstition that what you're doing as the calendar starts over sets the tone for the coming 12 months, and I certainly wanted to be on better terms with the impending '11 than I was on its decade-capping predecessor.

It ended up that, even though Reese came down with the flu earlier in the week, the family was able to make it to my parents' house for our belated Christmas celebration. This holiday confusion (otherwise known as the Christmess) does tend to make for a difficult time truly enjoying New Year's Eve. And as it turned out, with relocating my bed to the new house and the kitchen remodel, we were short sleeping arrangements at Mom and Dad's, so Anna and me made our trek across town to spend the night at my house.

And so it was that the final moments of 2010 ticked off the clock. Anna went to bed, and I lay in my own bed, listening to the pops and crackles of fireworks outside in the night sky. I lay in the darkness and let the sad lonely year ebb away. In the silence that followed, I could almost hear the freshness of 2011's arrival. Like a sudden rush of warm air distilled in a soft white puff again the winter night, it came. And with it, sweet hope. I lay listening to the way the air changed, to the way that the light shifted, to my own breathing. I felt suddenly empty; but emptied of the heavy burden of so much sadness and tragedy. Hollowed out as it were, like midnight spooned out the lead and left behind a smooth, dark place for good things to settle.

In the stillness, I prayed for this fragile new year. I prayed that its tender newness would be allowed to blossom into something wonderful. I prayed to God to keep my hands reaching out toward Him, toward hope, toward the belief that there is plan so much greater than what I've imagined I missed or lost or let pass me by. And so I closed my eyes against the clean night sky that was already making its way toward the first day of the new year. And I fell asleep with a prayer on my lips. At home. With hope.

The Best Lesson in the Christian Faith I Ever Learned from a Buddhist

The Linguista and I recently found ourselves in one of our famous marathon parking lot discussions that occur when one of us drives the other to a mutual destination and then the return trip to pick up the car turns into a two-hour gab session that inevitably becomes deeply philosophical.

As we talked about relationships, I told her that I had to focus on being a better person and a better Christian before I troubled myself further to find the love of my life.

"Why are you so hard on yourself?" she asked. "I marvel at you every day."

I mumbled some sort of abashed thanks for the compliment but quickly turned back to my failings. All the ways I fall short of the glory of God that I should be focused on improving.

The Linguista, a Buddhist, asked if Christians were the ones who believe that we are made in the image of God, and I confirmed. "I read this part of your book," she said. "And I don't think it means that you have the face of God. Maybe you do. But I think it's that your soul is in the image of God. You have a God-shaped soul. And you have to find the beauty of God that's already in you."

I had never thought of being created in the image of God as more than a literal interpretation that we resembled God in some way. And as a Baptist, I've always been far more educated in the ways that I am not like God than in the ways that I am. But to think that, as she put it, I have a piece of God's soul, cleaved from the whole, makes me feel less like I am a broken thing in a constant state of repair and more like I have something amazing inside. And it makes sense to think of God desiring a relationship with a soul that is like Him, but this idea that God's soul was there all the time, is, well, to put it Buddhistly, enlightening.

Sorrow & Hope

To be remembered is our greatest hope when we die, whether that remembrance is due to our achievements or just because we are loved. The need to be remembered is never clearer than when strolling among the dead. Weaving in and out of cemetery stones, feet falling softly among the dearly departed, it is impossible not to remember them and wonder who they were. I love the idle peace of tracing script with fingertips and wondering how the dash between two numbers was spent.
I recently found myself among the dead in a number of cemeteries, photographing epitaphs and statuary, details of shells and flowers and leaves curving against monuments. When I looked at the pictures later, two faces emerged.

Sorrow

Head in hands, sorrow holds vigil over the graves of those gone too soon. Those who weren't ready to go, or placed there by those who weren't ready to let them leave. Over time, weather either shadows them, making them more stark and desperate. Or it erodes the tension and leaves a smoother, reluctantly accepting visage in its wake. Who could blame these anguished faces for their permanent mourning of what was lost? I looked into their faces and saw myself, the lines wearily etched into stone, marble - cold and unyielding. I saw their downcast eyes, knowing they had cried from heartbreak, from loneliness, from desperately wanting to change the unchangeable. I wanted to lean against them and give them my mourning, to let my agony over losing Kudzu fall into smooth white arms.

Hope

Serenely, they stand or kneel over the bodies of those gone before us, hands clasped in devoted prayer. Some of them bow reverently; others tip faces upward toward the light. Their faces are bathed in an ethereal glow, their eyes are knowing. These stone creatures have foregone their mourning and looked to the light, relinquished their woe and wreathed themselves in hope. Weather-smoothed faces look ever more placid or seem to be disappearing as though the predetermined time of protection is up and they, too, are melting into a vague half-state. Hope sometimes comes with angel wings, folded quietly behind or poised, ready to fly upward.

Cannonball

During the very long conversation between me and The Professor, I tried to articulate the impact of the last nine months. I spoke about it in the collective - this is what happened to us - or relative to Anna - this is what happened to her. Somewhere in my ramblings, he interrupted me. "But what about you? You lost someone, too, right?"

And as odd as it sounds, the way it seems like that permeates everything I do, somewhere along the way stopped thinking of it as something that happened to me. Me, singular. I stopped acknowledging that Ronnie's death caused a grief that was all my own. Even though he was Anna's husband, even though we have carried each other through as a family, there is a place where I stand alone with reality. And it felt like a cannonball ripped through my chest.

Like a stubborn child, I've been pushing and pushing and pushing against the knowledge of what happened to me, trying to pretend that it was outside of me. That it happened to Anna. At some point, I tried to cut grief off at the knees. I staunched the wound by accepting the truth of the matter and soldiered on - and yet, somehow I was still bleeding.

It wasn't really The Professor's fault - this sharp reminder of death and absence. But I couldn't seem to stop the few tears that trickled down my face, try as I might. I struggled against them; I didn't want him to see me cry. And why not? I usually cry without embarrassment or hesitation if I'm so moved. But this was different. Because the pain came from a place that I knew he couldn't understand. Suddenly I realized that The Professor had the misfortune of being the first person who's come into my life after Ronnie's death...the first person who has tried to get close to me since then. I didn't know until that moment how very changed I am by that grave reservoir of sadness. Like a physical mark, there's a scar inside me. It's made me different from who I was before; it's an ever-present tint to the world.

I'm not suggesting that I'm set apart from humanity now because of this tragedy; this was merely the first awareness of it. The first recognition that the emotional injury is still there - there's still recovery to be done, time and space required to lighten that tint, and heal that ragged, raw edge where the cannonball passed through.

Tumbled Thoughts from the Shoreline

Right now, I'm sitting on the, well, we'll call it a balcony of my hotel room and listening to the Atlantic fall on the sand again and again. There's enough of a breeze that it's sort of chilly in a way that simultaneously makes me want to go inside and want to sit here shivering just to feel alive. It could be that I'm tired - I was up til 2 a.m. working on our project and then up at 6:45 to get back to it - but I find myself staring into the inky darkness and thinking harder than I want to...

* About working too much. There was the trip to Orlando. And then another to Atlanta after that. I left yesterday morning to be on J.I. now. I'm headed back tomorrow, and then early Wednesday, I'll get up and head to Atlanta. And it's good...I'm proud of myself. But I wonder, what about everything else?

* I'm on this trip with two guys who have kids, and they're always talking about their kids. And I have nothing. I mean, I tell my Dillon stories like a good auntie and laughingly interject something about Kudzu, but sometimes, it just feels empty.

* I feel sad about The Professor and his ex. I feel sorry for her. And I feel sorry for me. It's just a weird place to be in for both of us - me and this girl I don't even know. I feel like she's having to go through the place I just was, and I'm looking at the situation, and thinking, "I'm glad that's not me."

* There's a quiet right now - besides the constancy of the ocean - that makes me feel so solitary. I can't hear anyone else talking, no signs of life. The quiet is almost eerie, and far more lonely than soothing.

* Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how we all think that happily ever after will happen to us. But the truth is, there are so many people who don't have it. For every happily-ever-after is an also-ran. I'm not condemning myself as an also ran yet - and this really isn't the part where I want everyone to tell me that my day will come. This is the part where I face the reality that you don't get everything. And I have stellar friends and a fabulous family life and a good career...and lots of wonderful things. I spend entirely too much time thinking about the missing pieces...especially in light of the fact that maybe - just maybe - they were never meant to be part of the whole.

Reflection: Angels and Lilies Among Glass

TTLY Syndrome

I've always had a particularly pronounced sense memory. Smells, sounds, even a certain atmosphere, light - all provoke the return of sharp visceral memories for me. This little trick came in handy at times during acting classes when I was in college. But on a day to day basis, this sensitivity piles up into what I refer to as TTLY Syndrome or "This Time Last Year Syndrome" (TTLYS).

The oppressive heat and humidity of the last fews days have thrown me into last year's frame of mind. Indeed, the past few weeks have brought on a bewildering myriad of memories. This time last year, I was interviewing for The Job. I was feeling bereft and rootless. I was waiting.

And inside, away from the shimmering heat, in the cool darkness of my brain, the chemicals were sliding out of the proper equation. My stomach was burning, turning itself inside out almost every night. The Panic was coming.

This time last year was a tipping point, away from what was and toward what is. It was a precarious lean into the unknown. Everything was tossed into the air, floating down in a slow-motion freefall with no end in sight. Everything was all questions and no answers. The unknown was my only friend.

It's back again, like a second wave. I am waiting. Waiting for a movement away from this stalemate of grief. This terrible endgame, all the pieces on the board and nowhere to go. The Panic is rising. I waffle on the edge of nausea, try to push it down, pray through it. The unknown is siddling up next to me...it's reminding me that in a year, I haven't made very many strides. I haven't built the life I envisioned.

The heat lashes down on me when I walk out of work each day. I stumble through the evenings, fight the TTLYS washing through my veins. I remind myself that I have moved down the road, made progress. That I'm waiting and panicking and befriending the unknown because I had not choice when life jumped the rails in February.

Tonight, Dad said to me, "I feel like...we're never going to be normal again." And somehow, seeing the weight of it on his face, hearing the crushing reality in his words, I thought, "Not any time soon."

As I stare down the barrel of TTLYS right now, I rue the next season of it - the last season where everything was normal. And that season followed by the one where everything fell apart.

The -ings of the Last Week

* Getting my hair cut - my favorite thing - which involved talking to my stylist about the line dancing craze of the early 90s

* Attending the farewell show of The Rockstar's band at the 40 Watt. He's moving to Barcelona to pursue his music. And I am sad.

* Putting together a photo book of San Francisco on Shutterfly. It's so awesome, I can't stop looking at it.

* Meeting up with my dear Jenny Ray and her husband Nick for drinks on Friday night. She got to see the aforementioned red shoes, and we caught up on all sorts of things - like hugs!

* Winning my first account for the firm on Thursday. Hooray!

* Enjoying lunches with my parents while Dad spent the rest of the week at home recovering.

* Missing Dillon. I didn't get to see him Father's Day weekend in all the hospital madness.

* Catching up on blogs.

* Sorting through old photos - Jenn, I found some oldies, but goodies. Like your college graduation party?

* Taking many, many photographs to complete the photo game. 20 photos down and six to go.

* Shopping too much - I am enacting a moratorium on new clothing purchases.

* Thinking. A lot. About life and love and the pursuit of happiness.

* Gaining perspective on the here and now.