The Old Year

Listen while you read: "There Goes The Fear" - Doves

Every night is a reset button.

But tonight is something different.

Tonight, I'll close my eyes when I sleep and wish with every muscle and tendon and cell, that I'll wake up to the first day of 2011.

I want a reset, to do the last year over. Not because I made mistakes, although I did, but so I could relive the best moments, and appreciate them, and so I could make choices for the right reasons, not out of desperation or expectation.

If I were to wake up to January 1, 2011, all over again, I'd be in the same room, here in my parents' house. My ears wouldn't be pierced yet, and my grandfather would still be alive.

What I'd do first: I'd wake up in the morning, and call the Foxes of Hickory Hills to ask if they wouldn't mind having me for lunch. I would cherish it. I'd take a picture of the three of us together: a replacement for the one I won't have on my wedding day, and didn't get at my graduation.

If I woke up to the old year, I'd make mostly the same choices, because the point isn't to make some manufactured future where things are "better," but I'd care better for the hearts of the people I love, because I've done a poor job of that for the last six months. I've been selfish, to the point where I lied myself through a relationship that was completely fabricated in my mind--I made it something it would never be.

But I'd still approach that relationship with the same hope, because we came to understand each other better and more easily than anyone ever had before.

My heart was out of sorts for a while because of it, but I learned about myself, and about relationships and people in general. I now I know what it's like to have a man ask me what's wrong, because he knows that I'm thinking about something that has upset me, but that I won't talk about it. All this he can tell by the way I bite my lip when I'm simultaneously frustrated and resigned. Yet he doesn't love me.

I'd do our friendship the same way in a repeat.

There are times when I'd hold my words and wait for better ones to come, because there have been, especially in a Chicago apartment since October, plenty of words that never should have left my mouth. And for all of those, I am still sorry. I was destructive in the wake of the waves that a broken heart made in me. I was some one entirely different.

But I'm better now. If I was to do it again, I'd skip the disasters, and come straight to the healing.

If I woke up to the start of 2011, I'd be so very excited to go back for my last semester of college, and that, I would do better. More studying, more reading, more writing. The new friends I made in the last year: I'd start those friendships all over again. Everyone from Westwoods, in particular. And I would pour into that community ten times over. Those people helped me hold my world together this summer, and I never gave them proper thanks. They were all beautiful and I hold them in my heart. I would be a better youth leader, and I'd be closer to those kids. They'd know I'm still here for them.

I would be a better roommate to my best friends, and I would value living with them so much more, because A207 was a perfect home for us, and I never loved it while I was there, but now I miss that place and the three girls I had lived there with so very much.

I would spend more time with Laura and Jessie. I'd get closer to Jess.

My college friends started sort of slipping away from the scenery of my life before we were even close to leaving CCU, and I wish that even back in our sophomore and junior years, we had kept the bigger group together--all those Shelter boys. I know that people drift apart, and that's obviously a part of life, but I know that a good number of us are still close enough and have the sort of relationships where the distance and time apart will never matter. Boys, I miss you, too.

The summer was a dream. I wouldn't change a thing. Except I would have saved more money, and saved Barry. Poor little guy all crushed up from an RV on I-25. (Barry was my old car, for those of you who don't know. And no one was harmed in the accident.)

If I'd been smarter and worked harder, who knows, maybe there would have been a job waiting for me when I graduated, and maybe I wouldn't have ended up coming home. But it's no matter, because despite this great wish to relive the last year, I've found my way:

"I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength." -- Philippians 4:11-13

I've made it through another Old Year, in the air of loss and change and heartbreak and a hundred other ugly things.

I've made it through another Old Year, because I was swirled with snowflakes and love and laughter and butterflies in the rain. There were fireworks and we held hands and breathed the mountains like we owned them, and we did: they were our private gift from heaven, and we threw worship to the Creator from their roads. We worshiped with our hands and our mouths and our pounding feet and fists. There was love. And wedding cakes in bright and shiny shoes, on my best friend's best day. There was Denver and DC and Lakewood and CCU and Target and Lemont and wonderful everything. I wrote letters. I danced. I laughed, God did I laugh. I walked and I smiled and I cried and I hurt. And there was so much love.

With another shot at that old year that tore up my picture of the world, I'd love more yet.

Cheers to the Old Year, here's to the New Year.

For more love, we'll take 2012 as it comes.

It's Contagious

I wrote "Love Well" last week, and now I'm thinking about doing, aging, living.

I think this might be what realizing you're middle-aged feels like on the worst days.

They made a statue of us. (Click and listen.)

The kids I grew up with, my parochial school friends, my high school classmates, and my first college roommates and neighbors: we're mostly waiting to graduate in May.

Some of us, I think, have been looking back at the last four years, the last twenty-some years (yes, our whole lives), and wondering how different we could've been.

If we had made relationships work.

If we picked different schools.

If I kept playing basketball.

If I hadn't gone on the stage.

If someone else had picked me up from the airport.

If I hadn't gone to Sonic on a Saturday afternoon last Spring, and if I hadn't missed that last class with Elaine. If Tom had started the car. If grandmothers were always caught when they were falling.

They'll name a city after us and later say it's all our fault.

And if we weren't so jealous. If we cried in our laughter.

If we made different homes, were given different homes.

If I never wrote a poem.

If we couldn't dream about the things we didn't ever do.

How different things would be.

All those ifs...

They've got years of experience.

I fell in love with some music a couple times, and made men's faces the mask of those sounds. It was never really love.

And I made close friends--the best friends-- even the ones that weren't very good at it. And I wonder what it would be like if somebody in an office had thought that I'd fit better in a different room when I was 18 and in a new place.

What wouldn't have happened. The laughter, pictures, car rides, kisses, drinks, tears, poems: the adventure.

The life I wouldn't have had. I think there's a plan. I believe there's a plan, always.

I was meant to unlace my shoes and give Coach my uniform back.

I had to wear that flannel dress with rustled hair on the old LHS stage before the remodel and be kissed by John Proctor--his Elizabeth.

I made enough bad choices to get out of town--a spring break preview of life away from my life, then first to camp on a chance. (The girl had a fear of small boats. These things happen.)

And I learned what summer romance was. It was beautiful for a little while.

Then came Fall and there I went--to university Septembers and Colorado mornings. And it all came together.

And it's contagious.

A year isn't so really so long. You don't realize that when you're young, until somebody tells you. I had no idea until my mom said so at Christmas, but now I think I get it a little bit.

When you're twenty, a year is five percent of your life. When you're eighty, five percent is four years. That's almost as long as I've been out here. In sixty years, college will seem so small, like the years are starting to now.

So a year's not so long. And four of them like this--it sure was something.

We fit life into them.

We're living in a den of thieves, rummaging for answers in the pages.

We're looking for something bigger than the things we've done and the things we didn't do.

Where we are right now isn't just about what lives we've lived or what choices we didn't make, which are really choices we chose not to make.

We're looking for answers of who we've proven ourselves to be and what comes next.

If there will be statues of us.

If the relationships we missed come back around.

If we'll be in these places together later on, or ever.

If we'll remember the road trips and sleepovers and one-liners and movies and mistakes and summers and papers and answers.

If they'll know our names, our legacies. Because we all leave one.

If we'll know what love is outside a song.

If someday all the minutes we spent in each other's lives will begin to make sense. If we'll see why we were brought together in some peculiar combination of Star Wars and basketball and Midwesterners and locals and snowboards and Kahlua and brothers and Boulder and transfers and camouflage. We're a wily bunch. And we wonder if we'll ever understand how lucky we were together inside the plan.

All those ifs...

We're curious, and it's contagious.