What Was, What Is, What Will Be...

Thank you, Cele, for this interesting idea. I have been plagued with thoughts of what to write since you posted the idea a couple days ago....

As I say goodbye (and good riddance!) to 2007, I feel myself shudder and shiver. It is the end of yet another year in my life. And, even so, today, December 31, 2007, it is simply another day. Nothing miraculous or catastrophic will happen when the clocks tick over to one second beyond midnight tonight. No. The night will yawn and stretch, just like it does on September 20th or February 13th and then it will go on as before, not even noticing that a year has ended.

Marking time as we do with watches and calendars and palm pilots and blackberries, it is easy to be aware of the fact that it is passing. For years, as a teenager, I collected watches. I was obsessed with them. I had some of the most incredibly wild-looking wrist adornments - about forty collected in a three-year span - from all around the nation. I even had one that my Missionary had sent me as a token of his love and his promise to marry me when he returned home. He and I were really steeped in the LDS religion back then and he found this most incredible watch... on the face it had an imprint of the Salt Lake Temple. Instead of numbers marking the hours, it had in teeny print, the names of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. On the back, it had a Catholic Cross and Jewish and Arabic markings. It was the most intriguing combination of religions all there on my wrist. I cherished it.

And then, one day - probably near the time that my heart shattered to pieces and was swept under the crack in the front door when he delivered, via the phone while I was at work, the news that he was marrying another - I looked in my jewelry box and realized that I was marking time way too closely. I no longer was interested in time. Nor was I interested in watches. And they all went into the trash. Even the religious fiasco.

Since that time, I have floated in and out of time, caring little for being "on time" and, yet, always being so. It is something innate, this feeling of time, within me. And I am usually spot on when it comes to time, until "they" change the time and then I get all messed up for a bit.

Looking backward, it seems that my experience of 2007 can be summed up in three words: West Nile Virus. Even though it struck in the last 1/3 of the year with the symptoms starting right after Labor Day and completely knocking me flat by September 13th, I feel as though that entire ordeal is the sum total of my perception of 2007. I feel sad about that because prior to that fateful trip to the mountains - and even including that trip - wherein I was nibbled upon by some sick bug, my year had been extraordinary! I feel sad that all I can remember is feverish nightmares and disjointed, exacerbated aloneness. After walking through the Nile, I sat in a room full of people who had been my people and looked around feeling as though I was in a foreign land. I no longer fit there.

It was as though I got out of the river and was sent to wander alone in the deseret, without a tribe. It was a scary place to be and I have found that the need to be alone has lingered around me in the weirdest way. I long to be alone and to not be alone, at the same time. I am in this juxtapositional stance, precariously balanced with one foot here and one foot there. The need to be alone emphasizes the aloneness and loneliness which deepens the need to be alone. It is a spiral which I fear has no ending.

Along with the sharp-edged need for aloneness/togetherness, I have developed a tongue with acerbic power. I snap when snapping is not needed. I lash when a snap would have done the job nicely. I explode when a lash would have been enough. It is as though I no longer know who I am, where I am or where I am going. I wonder if there are missionaries for that kind of experience. Someone who can come knocking on my door, traveling not two by two but, instead, singularly. Someone who can stand there and face the fires unleashed within me and say, "I see you. I know you. You are here, as am I. And this is where we are going."

I look in the mirror and see a woman I do not know anymore. I am a woman heading quickly toward death because she is afraid to live. I am a woman who is haunted by a love that she cannot have and a man who walks in her dreams wearing watches that tick with promises broken. I am a woman that is held so closely, so suffocatingly close, by fear that she is bursting at the seams which stretch around her ponderous figure. I am a woman who, for all intents and purposes, is no longer alive but is simply... existing... waiting... hoping.

By God! I hope! And, yet, I do not. How can I hope when I long so deeply, so darkly? How can I create when there is no space to do so? How can I answer yearnings and questions for which I have created a lack in solutions? How can I go forward when I am so rooted, so stuck, so longing to go back to what once was and do it right this time?

And, what is right?

How do I know that what I did do, the way it did turn out, the way it looks now... how do I know that that isn't right? Why am I so hellbent on making it be wrong?

I sit here in the quiet of my brother's house, at his computer, writing this. Upon his computer screen there is an incredibly sensual picture which I have been staring at this entire week, whenever I have sat in this chair...

I have a story that she is a woman well-loved. I look at her and know there is a man somewhere that loves her to the ends of the earth. I imagine she has warmth and acceptance and the world at her feet. I see her dancing at masquerade balls and hosting extravagant wine parties in the home of her dreams. When I look at her, I write her a story of success and completion and fulfillment and, as I have done so, I have listened to my thoughts. I imagined I would hear expletives or loathing or comparison to my life or "danger" or that I would feel threatened. Instead, I have been surprised to hear sighs and to feel my body relaxing into the beauty of her.

She looks nothing like me. I look nothing like her. However, she is me. I am her. Somewhere inside of me is her. I am that beauty and that sensuousness. Somewhere inside me is that woman living the story I have written for this Goddess in pink.

During this holiday break, I have stayed inside my brother's house, feeling more at home here than I have felt anywhere in a long time. I have nestled in, not wanting to leave. Ever. I feel content to be alone here. I feel content to be quiet and only in the presence of my daughter. The constant nipping need to have someone does not plague me here. And I wonder about that. What is it about this space that feels magical and comforting? It is something I want to capture. It is something I want to bring forward with me, make it my own.

Make it my own... I so long to make it my own...

I am going forward. If it is merely one step forward, followed by another, I am going forward into tomorrow. And I will step forward into the new day and I will remember, soon, who I am, where I am going and why I am here. And I will take this year day by day, remembering that each step forward brings with it a new dawn. The sun unfailingly shines, breaking through any clouds. Each day it rises and hope shines anew.

And, with it, I rise. I will rise to be who I am meant to be and I will believe with all the naivete of youth that this year will be the year. It is my year. It is my year to shine and be magical.