Goodbye to All That – And Hello to Other Unknown Things

It feels right to end the year writing something, because writer is who I say I am and to act as I self-describe is a comfort.

I have hesitated, recently, to write, though, because all thoughts have come to me malformed, reductive, trite:

Life is bad.

I hate everything.

This is stupid. This is so stupid.

Tomorrow is the start of the Think Kit 2016 month of blogging and I have earmarked it as a moment of new for myself. In the past few months, I have sort of put myself away. Forced myself only to make sidelong glances at the contents of my head, at the state of my life. Don’t look too long or too hard at yourself because you’re not going to like what you find, Jackie. So just–skip it. Set aside that real thinking for a minute.

Endings are weird. They are both fast and slow, both prolonged and instant.

In a way they are like crossing a state line. You’re in one place one second, then, suddenly, another. Where you were is so near but it is not where you are anymore. You are someplace else, a place with a new name and a new zip code, and when you tell people you are no longer in X, but instead in Y, they will have a new mental response to your statement. Y means something different. Y has different associations and preconceptions. This is all fine–you almost don’t even care about any of that–what you care about is that fact that mere inches can amount to a chasm. And somehow these inches are not ones you can re-traverse. If you turn around, you are pressing your face to a new, clear wall. You can’t go back. You can never go back.

But you can see everything that you left. That you lost.

I am ready to move forward with 2016. I am, for once, delighted to embrace the arbitrary beginning that we so love in this flip of the calendar page. I want to believe there is something for me on the other side of this. The new year. A non-exclusionary fresh start, proffered to all.

Goodbye to the parts of my life that couldn’t make it out of 2015 with me. I’ll probably be back to the glass wall between here and there again, just to see. Maybe to understand. Maybe to help with what’s next.