The year in review

2005 was a wierd year. it saw a great many personal changes in my life, some of them wonderful, some of them anything but.

I made 3 resolutions this day last year: to return to england, to regain my finanical independence, and to get some action of the horizontal tango variety. (To be fair, a meaningful relationship is much more important to me than sex, but you can't exactly put love on an agenda, as it's not really up to you.) Number one i got, number three i missed, and number two was mostly achieved. I'm supporting myself through loans, but they're my debts, not my parents, so we'll call that half a victory. One and a half of three objectives met, then. Could be worse.

I was home for christmas and just got back to bristol this morning. I was annoyed at being somewhere over the tip of greenland, by myself, 35000 feet in the air and not a kiss in sight, when the new year rang in, but there was also something surprisingly poignant about leaving america in 2005 and landing in england in 2006. i know that what we name any particular point in time is arbitrary and ultimately meaningless, but it's how we map and mark time in our lives' rhythms. i felt like i made a really clean break, a fresh start. last year at this time i was stressing over my application to york (which ultimately failed), my life and emotions were in upheaval, i had no direction, no plan, only vague desires with no visible means of achieving them. today i know what i'm doing, where i'm going, and how i'm going to get there. god it's refreshing. like many humans, i loathe uncertainty.

on the plane this morning i was treated to an exceptionally beautiful sunrise (i'll put up a few pics later). I aslo had the distinct sensation of rushing madly towards something or someone that was waiting for me. I wanted to cry out, "Hold on! I'm almost there! I'm coming!" But of course there's no one. I shouted, but no one heard. Perhaps it's just a reflection of the growing sense of belonging I have in this place, this country, this pieced and plotted land, furrow and fallow.

Or perhaps it's a ghost of desire past.

Acceptance:

Among the less than pleasant developments of 05 was the final emotional acceptance that whatever there once was between me and my dapper gentleman of the storybook saga of yore (i will finish it for you one of these days, i swear), is no longer. I don't know why. There was no row, no falling out. He just gave up. When I left Manchester he told me I value you, I value our friendship, I'm not good at corresponding, but I do want to keep in touch. I hung on those words for the better part of 2005. I clove the them, sustained myself with the hope that when i returned to england he would be here, waiting for me. Instead of welcoming arms and the glow of friendship, I found a cold shoulder behind a locked door. I wept for weeks. Somewhere in the back of my brain i knew it was inevitable, but it took my brain a long time to convince my heart that it was over. It's still hard to let go. I've never been so close to love as when he held me, and it's hard to walk away from that. But you can only carry on a one-sided conversation for so many months, and my dignity will only let me beg for his attention for so long. I will always rue the loss of our relationship, and I will forever wonder what happened to his affection, but i'm finally reaching a point where I can think about him and remember the best moments of our time together witout crying (usually), and I've stopped instinctively comparing every male i meet to him. So i guess i'm moving on, wheter i wanted to or not. (i didn't; it's much easier to obsess over the ghost of a love that isn't there than to try and find someone new.)

so even though the year started out horrendously, it ended much better than it began, and that is encouraging. My health is good, my path is clear before me, there's fresh scar tissue growing over the most recent tear in my heart, and my prospects for all things in my life save love have never been better. Fingers crossed for ticking off that last resolution in 06. *wink*