There’s only one question no matter what area of my life I look at: “What have I done?”
Though the bend of the words changes, their order doesn’t. I’m divest of everything I’ve worked towards for half my life. I get physically sick at least once a day from nothing other than thinking of this year. At points, the only thing keeping me alive was fictional people who rely on me to finish their story.
Thank God for family. If there’s one boon to slugging through Hell it’s finding out who your real friends are. It’s 11:59 on the last day of the roughest year of my life, and I’m tired. I finally feel old, and I’m so far from where I was at the best week I’d ever had that I’m tired and I just want to quit. I don’t believe good things are coming. I’m tired of being punk rock poor, and tired of all the nowhere I haven’t gone this decade. I’m tired of giving much, asking little, and getting nothing. This decade was ugly, stupid, and brutal, and the bastards are winning every day. I miss my dog.
And I didn’t even have the year most of you probably had, with real losses and diseases and injuries and war.
I don’t expect 2011 to be better. My only goal is to not let everything that’s happened inch me toward joining the greedy, hateful cowards running and ruling and handing over the world.
Goodnight, worst year of my life. I won’t miss you, and I’m going to strip you for the good parts: my niece’s birth, my new friends, my true friends, good food, good family, and summer/autumn in Connecticut. A few more memories are all I’ll take.
I have no idea what’s coming in my new job, new apartment, old life, old habits, old limits, and I don’t care. I’m going to gnash my teeth in its flesh and take everything I can get. There’s nothing to invest in anymore. There’s only what you hold before someone else takes it. Guard what you’ve got, and get paid up-front.
The determination’s there, but the question refrains, isolated, more desperate to understand. What have I done?