Friday, December 31, 2010

inimitable anxiety disorder and all


Twenty Ten draws to a close like a roller coaster car, hitting the skids after the final drop. Soon the gates will open and we will jerk by fits and stops back to the platform. The turnstiles will snap wide and we'll exit the ride, keeping our belongings in sight and checking our pockets for just how much change we've lost.

This week—what with the blizzard and these infernal balls in the air—I've mostly been trying to confine myself to my god given boundaries of skin and bone. Notable exception: yesterday evening, when I cried for approximately an hour then threw up an entire bag of movie theatre Skittles.

But I made it. I am coasting through the twilight into Twenty Eleven. I spent a good five minutes in savasana today, taking deep ass breaths in a room full of sweat and rubber mat smell, and so have managed to loop a few new years meditations through my tortuous psyche. God grant me the serenity, etc., etc.. I am listening to gentle things of genius, played on nylon strings or steel. I am preparing my heart for opening up and staying there. Because that is my resolution this year. To shuck the oysters of my doubt and find the pearls. To silence my one woman critical chorus of 'no'. To look before I leap, then leap the further, fall the farther, and reap the fruits of my nascent courage.

I will continue to pursue joy, joy, and abject joy, even if that means I spend my entire twenty-eighth year living in this sublet and cleaning someone else's toilets. I will stretch and dance and write and see the world, one day at a time. I will listen. Because live is a an action verb. I will no longer expect "to be" "to do" and "to love" to happen to me without my first cobbling their path.
Oh Divine Master, grant that I may
not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love.
Even now, poisoned from stem to stern by my own self-destructive spin cycle, I will take a shower, shave my legs, and trot off into the bowels of my city in search of my true love.

Maybe it will be Jack, maybe not. But I will not turn up at his door tonight like a deer in headlights. I will convert these barbed wire landslides into butterflies, and radiate that little princess part of me that really just longs to see him, to wrap my arms around his cherry red jumper, smell the wool, and hold him fast.

This too shall pass. Tomorrow will dawn one way or another. He will be there or he won't. It will be a new year, another swipe at the canvas. And the snowdrift in front of my apartment will melt, maybe not tomorrow, but next week surely, and with it will disappear the purple arc of Skittle puke, evidence of the worst of me.

So cheers. To auld lang syne . . . and second chances.


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