The Best and Worst Year of Some Kind of Thinking

When you're sad, take a picture of something that makes you sadder and say, that's beautiful.

Cigarettes floating in rain water in a rusty wheelbarrow left for dead in the backyard. There is a fisher price play-kitchen sinking in mud. Everyone who visits me says, kids must live here. Then they see the slugs that have taken over the fake faucet and friends are dead. It's what Nietzsche would have said if he would have lived long enough to stop caring about the bigger things that never touch us. I used to believe in resurrection and, I guess spring is the perfect time to think about it. I used to sit and watch myself write in the reflections on the windows and that way, I'd make myself who I wanted. But when was the last time a rainy day like this moved me to words and tears? The new baby next door is crying, crying. When was the last time I brought a boy home, but couldn't call out his name because I couldn't remember it, smile lines. Natural laughter. No fight, no blame.

When you're sad, take a picture of something beautiful and say, that is mine. That loves me. She sits with me all night and I say I don't want to speak so she undresses and I watch her move through the apartment. My eyes are thirsty for this. I'm stoned on pills I swallowed to stop the crashing. The red sea of sadness parted for a minute so I could breathe, miracle. Friends who feel you and love you when you're crazy, miracle. I tell her I feel like shit. I'm calling different people and crying, hysterical. She draws me in purple ink from across the table, a sweet smile on her face every time our eyes meet. She knows I've had a hard year. She's had hard years herself so she knows what to say, when to shut up. Blessed are those who others call crazy when they feel and act on feeling because they shall be comforted and in that act is the real stuff, truth. Being there for each other in these endless end-times- radical. Knowing real love is the rain outside and her smile and the plants on the windowsill become the garden. You always wanted to know where it was.

The pink of the hen and chick plant makes me think of young skin, succulents, and from somewhere comes a memory of reading tarot cards in a bar in South Dakota this summer. Annie the bartender saw me sitting with a friend and came over. She asked, "What's my destiny?"

Out came the two of cups, mixed happiness. She says, "What does that mean?" I say, "It means you'll love him, but he won't love you back." She says, "Ah, hell," and smashes the fire of her her cigarette into the floor. The girl she is with looks nervous. "Well, ok," Annie agrees, "It's worth it."

It's worth it, it's worth it, it's worth it,the rain hits the windchime outside, makes it go for a moment. I say, oh no, that's not what you were made for. But it's worth it- the dream of knowing someone else completely in one kiss- impossible- but worth it, the wanting, the needing, the "crazy bitch" that always comes sooner or later from the one who can't understand his own feelings, let alone yours. Worth it?

"It was just a mistake," D says to me over the phone. "We all make mistakes. Just let it go. Be easy on yourself."

I had a really hard year. It started last winter. Joan Didion wrote a book about being obliterated with trauma, loss, and pain all in a short period of time and she called it, "The Year of Magical Thinking," When I heard the title I thought she called it that because that is what it took to get through it. Magical thinking. But she really called it that because that is what happens in the depersonalization and hopelessness of trauma, the human mind tries desperately to believe in magic- a superhuman ability to control the world around us and to find meaning in things that, if they are understood to be meaningless, would be just too terrible to imagine and the mind would break, shatter.

I guess this year contained both for me. I had to fight hard to see beauty in small things just to stay alive and I also made big mistakes by imagining goodness and beauty and magic in people that were actually quite empty and selfish. I had amazing friends who held me up when I couldn't stand and I had very shitty "friends" who leaned on me when I didn't have the strength and then called me crazy when I asked for reciprocation. In my sickness, I went toward sickness and tried to believe it could just magically disappear.

In time I will tell you what I mean and what happened. I haven't been writing because I haven't had the strength or the "why." I still don't, but I have real friends who keep telling me it's worth it.