Then I Guess I'll Be Alabama Bound

I have started writing this five different times and cannot find the words.

The closest I have come:

I wish I were a better person.

All in All

Now, with 2.633 hours of perspective, I feel that I am better able to do 2010 justice. Yes, there was a lot of school. A lot. But there was also so much more.

Much of it is in the dark (which led to such a mundane list yesterday), but the things that shine through are worth noting.

I ate a lot of instant noodles, be it in the form of soup, KD, or chow mien.

I lived in another basement, with very different people from last time. It held some of the best times, but I wouldn't go back.

I went on two roadtrips. One ended prematurely in Jasper, leaving us stranded and cold and hungry and alive. The other brought me through five states and five thousand kilometers in three days, and left me crying and praying and breathing again.

I checked, there were two car accidents this year. January and November. After January and the two roadtrips this year and one last year, November finally did in Cameron. Poor Cameron.

I had my heart broken enough to need several transplant surgeries, and then I broke my own.

I had front row seats to the demise of my personal civilization; everything I worked for, gone.

I have had the most wonderful year of seeing the most wonderful man. Please don't read too much into that.

I watched six seasons of Gilmore Girls (fourth time through) in less than two months, and watched countless other series from my bed, the smoker's couch, my creaky chair and my good chair. Oh the days.

I went to Toronto and made it back alive, despite many desperate phone calls, skype dates and tearful outbursts, which, at the time, suggested I would not be so lucky.

I fell in love with God again. Even without feeling Him. Then I lost it again. I am going to get it back again.

Heh. Right. I also survived. It is 2011 and I am still here.

I'm Too Young to Feel this Old

I spent the weekend with a dear friend doing the most wonderful things. It was so lightening to just be in the presence of someone who I'm so comfortable with, doing whatever the heck we wanted in the moment. It was a nice reprieve from the last long while. Lately I have felt very, very old.

The amount of life experience I have had in the last five years alone feels like enough to make me ancient. Someone asked how old I was the other day and I actually had to do the math. I feel as though I have had at least thirty years of life, if not more, but I am selling myself short by at least a decade. There is still so much to go.

Devastating loss takes so much away from a person. I found my first white hair awhile ago, and another one yesterday. The stress of life as it is has literally been aging me before my own eyes. I have acne, which is the strangest thing because I rarely had more than one pimple at a time until now. Wrinkles are appearing. My metabolism is slowing down. I am sure that if people heard me say these things they would laugh and tell me to stop over-exaggerating, to quit being such a drama queen. This is no hyperbole, however; I am aging far faster than years are going by.

I am no longer afraid of being alone. I'm not. I never have been, I never will be, and that goes even beyond death. I am tired of being the kind of alone that was God's first declaration of "not good," though. That kind of alone is exhausting. I am whole by myself. I am a fully functioning human being without a man. I can survive this way until I die. But now I want another whole person to walk through all of this with. I want to enjoy it all with another person by my side. And I can wait. Patience, over the last several years, has been growing on me. I can wait.

I feel eons old. Maybe when people talk about the day-age theory, this is what they mean: days go by but it feels like forever. That doesn't mean it actually is. I'm not stupid enough to think that I am a billion years old just because all the evidence I can see looks that way (not that I'm making jabs at day-age theorists...much). The point? I am so, so old. Maybe one day I will find an old soul like me.

He Sees Everything Black and White

Two days ago - the day, that is - somehow, miraculously passed without incident. It was like it did not exist. I was vaguely aware the day before but did not let myself get caught up, and then a few minutes past midnight yesterday in the wee hours I realized.

Five years to the day.

I have alluded to this day of the month in the past, but never this day of the year specifically. As with most of my pain, I am realizing, I never dealt with this day. I cried once, then shoved it away for good; any tears that came after were private, shocking, and only caused me to shove the feelings deeper. October 29, 2005...where do I even begin?

I guess I could start at a random conversation over blood in a hot tub summer '03...or a rainy night February 2004...or the last weeks of grade 11...or August 31, 2005. The last was the day things went from bad to horribly, horribly wrong. I was in love with my first love, and he loved me too. He "loved" me enough to pretend I wasn't a mistake. He "loved" me enough to lie to me when it was convenient. He continued to "love" me through the convenient right into the despicable. He "loved" me enough to sleep with a fourteen year old freshman. He "loved" me enough to allow his answer to evolve from an immediate "I'd marry you" to an "I think I would" to an "I just don't know anymore." He "loved" me enough to try to have break-up sex with me. He "loved" me enough to celebrate our break-up with a girl named Brooklyn in her hot tub. And he "loved" me enough to use me one last time when I was at my most vulnerable.

So I look at this day that still cuts like a knife, look at my life up to that point and the decisions I made, and wonder why it still hurts. I can guarantee with absolute certainty that at this moment, he's not thinking about me. He probably hasn't thought about me in months...years if I haven't popped up on his Facebook News Feed. The last thought was most likely regarding the next awful thing to say about me to his favourite group: another ex-boyfriend who used to be mortal enemies (just ask, one still has a battle wound), his friend who was always trying to convince me to be with him instead, and his friend who tried to rape me.

Breathe.

That picture was taken right before we started dating (the last time). I was genuinely beyond happy. It has been rare that I have been that happy since.

October 29, 2005, I went over to his house with candles in my backpack, a half-formed prayer tacked onto a fleeting thought (to Whom? I think even then I knew He was real), and a nagging feeling that this would be the day my life changed. Five hours later I had called just the right people to get a party together, and I sat on a couch in a perma-pot-stenched basement wearing a jacket from one boy and the arm of another, and I did not smile once. If I had to guess the next time I wore a real smile? Eight months later when I dedicated my life to God and was baptized.

I do not know how to let go. I do not know how to convince my heart to open so that I can heal it. This is the closest I have gotten...ever. I want it whole so someone else can finally come in and treat it the way I've always needed. I am so not there yet.

Getting Over the Hump

I'm getting over the hump. Yesterday was critical, today was easier.
And then I was in ANOTHER car accident.
Count 'em, folks. 5! Five. Cinq. AH!
The dude cut across the twenty-foot-wide bright yellow STAY-THE-EFF-OFF-ME dividing space between where he was driving and the exit ramp I was on, barely missing the garbage-cans-full-of-water things that keep you from crashing into concrete, and straight into me.
Good times.

I just got my second wind for today and unfortunately it's now 12:04am, which means I've wasted my entire second wind for the whole day and I'm only four minutes in.
As my gamer brother would say, "EPIC FAIL!"

So second wind. Could have used that about three hours ago when I was hyperventilating and screaming through my windshield at the guy who thought that killing me for pleasure would be the perfect cherry on top of his weekend.
Or four hours ago when I lost the most epic pingpong game of my life (but have no fear, I beat someone better two minutes later).
Or ten hours ago when I stopped studying because I was "exhausted."

I miss the way things used to be.