New Year's Eve Renderings

As always, I am writing to you on New Year’s Eve again, where I  am mulling over evil, humanity, and healing. It feels even further from the loft space of last year where I spent many candle-lit hours writing and sunrise filled mornings processing life’s journeys. It feels far from the expensive cherry wood  floor in Connecticut I collapsed on after hours of painful and unshared empathy. This is my new floor — it doesn’t yet contain those moments, those memories.

 I moved. Again. Began life anew, again. Got remarried, in 2013.

Thankfully, I don’t have to put all of my belongings in my car. I have unpacked them for the last time in one town/village and need not to ever again unpack them somewhere else. The process is nostalgia-inducing, as it seems impossible to think without gazing at old photographs and meandering through old memories, past hauntings and renderings. The memories that fall out of boxes as I still unpack are those of times before digital cameras and shutterfly, making them feel even further away. They are other lives, past lives. The photos are spread across this new floor, waiting for a decision on which ones I will put on the wall. Which memories belong on the wall of my new life and which ones will go back into the shoe boxes they emerged from?

As you know so well yourself, part of me deeply desires the transient life. I long to move without the shoe boxes containing memories; to move with only necessities. Yet, upteen moves, thirty years, seven towns, and three children, and a second marriage later, I find myself back in the same memories I abandoned in what seems like a life time ago. I relish in the uncertainty of the newness of all of this, yet, this New Year’s Eve is different.

This is an effort — for the first time — to find (or create?) a little more certainty in my life. I joke to friends that I want to put some roots down. I dislike the terms “settling down” or “putting roots down,” even though I borrow the latter for my own metaphor of growth. I am not sure how many “roots” we have in total to put down, but I’d like to put a few down here. I’d like to feel safe, to build a life, to build a home, to watch as the next chapter of my life unfolds. It all begins with adjusting to this new floor, and view from the desk I now write from.

Do you ever enter a new space (life) and feel overwhelmed with everything that could unfold there? With the life you haven’t yet lived? I wonder, in my new writing room, what I will experience in the confines of these new four walls. Will I whisper words of love? Will I grieve a loss I haven’t yet fathomed? Will I conquer self-doubt? Will I struggle? Will I embrace self-love? Will I accomplish goals I haven’t yet set my mind to? Will I mourn my transient self? Will I long for lakeside beaches or sandy surf, or, perhaps, a log cabin retreat? Will I feel at home?

What challenges and joys will I celebrate and process in this room? On this floor where I sit, clicking away on my laptop?

I’ll start with placing the images of freedom on my computer and a past history – back into the shoebox. These photos will mix with cards filled with caring words from friends, expressions of love and anger from past relationships, and sympathy cards and apologies already contained in these boxes. If the images and the boxes containing them are tucked away, the floor space is clear for new moments, memories, and a new chapter for me to explore. It will be clear for my laptop and myself to begin to type out the beginnings of a newest life, a brand new chapter of the book of me. A new partnership, new passion, new truth, new atonement, new hope, new sorrow, a new near perfect bliss of second marriage, and how the world can sit in new light, if we simply allow ourselves to give in to the opportunity of all of it.