Oh. 2008.

This, two thousand and eight, has been a metaphor in its entirety. If I were to pin it to something concrete, I would say it has been a hand. The type of that that lifts itself briefly for a swift thwack on the backside of one’s head.

Its motives, though not altogether sinister, could not be considered amicable either. In fact, when I finally took my eyes from my shoes to look the year right in the eye, I felt the short beam of an ambiguous rhetorical question, thinly-veiled in high-brow sarcasm. The kind of question that Mr. Row, my 9th grade math teacher, once asked Brad when he attempted the pluralization of rhombus. Rhombi. A steady squint accompanied by a long pause. Then, slowly, meticulously even, “When you’re outside waiting for the bus to bring you to school, and several approach, do you say to yourself, ‘I wonder which bi is the correct one?’” Clearly, you do not for the correct word he meant was “buses,” but no one dared to offer an answer.

Two thousand eight was a Mr. Row type of year.

Though often despised, the year offered something I haven’t gotten in a while, change. Albeit rapid, it was a quick toss of my hopes and dreams into yet another mixed metaphor, a vortex of actuality. Suddenly, I found myself in a world where my ambitions are realizable, and speeding toward me, another slap-upside-the-head. When you have plans laid out years in advance (five, we’ll say), you have a long time to ignore the fact that one day they may be carried out. This year was a reminder that I can do what I had planned if I so desire. Actually, I must do what I have planned or find another way to wander along.

I can’t say that two thousand eight has been malicious year. Just as I can’t say that Mr. Row was a malicious person, but sometimes the techniques of teaching that are most effective are also the most abrasive. As time and experience have it, I later asked Mr. Row for a letter of recommendation (a task that would prove difficult if asked of a personified, arbitrary length of time).

So, farewell good year, I will see you around whilst browsing through numerous facebook photo albums and scouring the depths of my memory for remnants of biochemistry.

Snowstorms and Aftermath

This is slightly revised, post-champagne.

The living room and kitchen are dotted with half-empty beer bottles, blue moon and moose drool, standing ominously, casting shadows three times their length against the lights from Christmas tree. Torn from her belt, Kara has hung sleigh bells on the tree, haphazardly dressing it up like a holiday Frankenstein. We always take things a few steps too far.

I can't hold my eyes open this evening. erika and dan are upstairs, jenna has turned in and abbey is nowhere to be found. I ran the dishwater thirty minutes ago, when everyone left, but the glasses and pans are suspended surreally in the water. They'll be there tomorrow when I wake up, Charlie entangled with me in the comforter. These days, he's the only one cutting off the circulation in one of my legs, the only one I have to wake to slide away from.

Now, I'm home and reverting to everything I used to be. I'm not wearing black anymore. Drifting from the vampire I've become. Don't pick up the phone. Don't answer the door.

Complexities

My self-analyses are always so shallow, misted over. Everyone I've dated always tells me I have all of these issues, confidence complexes, but I'm ever-blind to them. I'm a racing horse that stares at the finish line, and no one's so far ahead that I can see them through my blinders. But God damn, they're kicking my ass. I recount stories radially, small things. Like I've said, I don't have a single secret. I let my hubris fly. It's this manuever I've done to convince myself that I'm good at lying, this gymnastical sidestep that defies all evidence of damage and exhaustion, unhappiness.

The key is that, when you lie, you have to believe yourself.

Folded down and dried up in the tired olive green chair in the cathouse talking to Amy and Jack about family; Kara about discipline. It's starting to feel like everyone has a complex, frayed ends hidden behind thinning cigarette smoke and scarves pulled across our mouths. It's starting to feel like we're all so jaded at 21. Is it because I'm already losing some of the hair that I used to work so hard each morning to shape? I've lost that perfectionist motivation. I can't remember what it feels like to feel disguisting when I haven't showered for a day. I could go weeks if it meant my skin wouldn't break out.

I wrote once that I'd sit with everyone and know them if I could, but I'm starting to think that I already know each single person on the Earth. At times, I can feel us all breathe in unison, somehow connected through reverberating atoms, pressure build-up in the atmosphere. I'm sighing and converting oxygen to carbon dioxide at an alarming rate, and some shrub in the rainforest will exhale brand new oxygen right back out, into the mouth of the next South American dictator, and I can already feel him, too.

Now, I'm drinking tea with sugar and milk, sweetening sweetening. I'm trying so hard to thicken the evidence, but I'm as transparent as I've ever been. The only difference is that I've gotten better at lying to myself. Everything is just a magic show, an illusion.

The Lost Week

Amy, paraphrased: When you're alone, the mornings are the hardest. Once your feet are on the ground, and you've started shuffling around, making coffee, scrubbing your teeth, everything's fine. When you open you're eyes, though, you have to say, 'Okay, I'm alone. This is was what I'm doing for a little while.' But when you wake up and you've got someone in your life, some of the responsibility is suddenly off of you.

I've been wrapping myself in layers and layers to keep warm when I sleep. Hiding. Charlie sits on my legs. I don't really have any secrets, not ones that matter. Every thing I'm feeling bubbles to the surface before it's even properly folded into a sentence, even when I sleep. I mumble things like, 'Everyone has a leather jacket.' Kara's around to hear it the most. I haven't ached with love for more than a year. I don't even remember what it means to give a fuck about anyone but myself. I go through men like denim. No no, this is much closer: I go through boys like jeans.

I'm starting to depend on the cathouse. The enforced study habits and constant outpouring of free food from one source or another. It's easy to feel like you matter when people clean up your dishes for you, when they let you sing a song they hate.

It's winter and suddenly its a blizzard out and everyone's hunkering down with some other warm body to hibernate. God knows I've eaten enough to live for a month or two in bed, and I'd never have to let my feet touch the ground. Everything around me would waste. The plants in my room. Charlie. Alone, starting and finishing are the hardest. Everything in between is just horsing around, keeping your pace. Momentum. With nobody in your bed, the night's hard to get through.