Year’s End

It doesn’t help that the flood of events has mirrored this pattern: every now and again something will happen, but it doesn’t have any relationship to anything else that’s happening, and then I go to sleep, only to wake up to something even more unrelated, like a dream about wizards who turn into animals and the realization that I’m sleeping beneath some very odd peach-and-burgundy floral-print comforter and matching sheets. Why are they on my bed? Who knows; it’s how it was when I got home and I’m too lazy to change them.

Or my good friend will come over and we’ll hang out and he’ll tell me how he’s engaged to a girl I’ve never met. And I’m happy for him and that’s worth writing about–engagements are worth writing about as a unified whole because now 5 close friends are getting married before the summer of 2004 comes to a close (before I’ll have even found a job, probably), and i’m so incredibly happy for all these people. But then I start feeling a little depressed that I don’t even have any prospects, and how I probably won’t have any for a long time because I’m so self-centered, and I don’t really like girls anyway, at least not the right kind, I just like being infatuated with them, and I have no idea what love is. And if I don’t have any idea what love is, how can my friends, and they’re all headed for disaster (I’m actually jealous), and I told you so…

…and I’m glad you never listened to me, even if I had actually been so stupid as to say something instead of just think it and then watch it fall out of my head and fall to pieces and wash down the drain and isn’t it cool how the drain makes a little water tornado? I hate tornados. Fuck tornados and all that destruction…and that earthquake in Iran…fuck that too.

Or I could have tried to get some unity of thought about Christmas, and write some pompously literate-sounding thing about the Incarnation. If I ever make it sound like I understand how God could be born in a manger in some actual place in our world, or why he would do so just to die for us, please do something hurtful to me. I don’t understand it, but it is real, more real than most things I do understand and I need it more than I need closure this afternoon, some semblance of reason, defragmentation…

This year has drawn to a close with a whimper and a sigh, without definition or plan for what will be different next year. No resolutions forthcoming, no energy to take regret and turn it into progress. Just a kernel of praise and thankfulness to God that I am still alive, and a lot of pain. Pain from loneliness and a desire to be with someone, and a desire to be alone, to sit and let rain fall on my head and turn to snow and then melt and then the sun comes out and maybe some branches start growing and ten years later I’m a tree. I need to see myself grow somehow–it might as well be into a tree, since I don’t have enough motivation to actually put my sins to death or become a more loving person or stop being addicted to expanding myself instead of Christ in me.

It’s funny; I never realized I came back from the quarter wounded. Tired, maybe…lazy, certainly. But wounded…that would explain the fragmentation, the lackluster way I’ve taken in images and events and why I’ve been sick with the flu and why I resisted pulling together any thoughts to make a more hopeful weblog entry. But where is the hurt, how deep is it, who did it, and can it be healed? Maybe 2004 holds the answers. Maybe it does. 2003 certainly did not. Odd years are like that, I guess.