There is a thick haze around the nearly pregnant moon tonight. I don't know the cause. I like to think its the smoke of a million stoners, getting blazed in celebration of tonight's festivities. I like to think the combined smoke of my cigarettes and incense are contributing.
I know that none of that is true, but it makes me smile to think it. Of course almost everything I think of makes me smile. Even the most heartbreaking things. I smile on purpose. It makes it all taste better.
As I'm writing this, it is currently 8:57 mountain time, Wednesday, October 31st. For some inexplicable reason, I keep thinking today is Thursday. Of course by the time many of you read this, it will be. Funny how written communication is the closest thing we have to actual time travel. I'm writing these words in my now. You're reading them in yours. We're connected in a spectrum that transcends actual time.
Neat.
I'm staring through the haze at that glowing silver bitch in the sky, and I can't help but get a little introspective. She has had that effect on men and women for as long as there have been men and women. I'm no different. This has been for me, a year of incredible change.
If by the end of the year I am involved in no more theatrical productions, I will have done this year, the exact same number of shows that I have done all my previous years in SLC combined. That's sad for past me, tiring for present me, and absolutely thrilling for future me.
For the first time since 2007, I have a job that schedulewise, actually caters to my real life. I'm pretty happy about that. The job itself is what it is...but I don't really care. I've always said I could do anything as long as I'm afforded the opportunity to do at night what I'm on this planet to do. I'm proving myself right.
This year saw the end of my second longest, and in many ways, most meaningful relationship I've ever had. I understand that ending was necessary, but feel the effects of that loss no less. I learned so much from that time with her and would not trade it for anything. I think every real lesson comes with pain. It's simply how this shit works.
So I've had a chance to re-learn myself. Rediscover. Realize that I'm exactly who I thought I was all along. Just...different. More mature? I don't think so. I'm still plagued with an irrepressible Peter Pan complex. I still have an insatiable love for all things ridiculous, outrageous, bawdy, and well...flat out stupid. I'm still a big fan of bad decisions. I still ache to do the things that will make great stories later. I still don't give a red rat's fuck about all the things I'm supposed to care about.
I still love.
This year I've learned I am capable of emotional depths I had previously been completely unaware of. I found that to be interesting.
I learned that I care even less what people thought of me than I had previously believed. I found that uninteresting.
I learned that honesty with other people comes much easier for me than honesty with myself. Which I found to be really quite entertaining once I gave it a shot.
Because of various circumstances, some that were decided, and some that simply didn't happen the way it had originally be planned, I have been living in the same apartment I've been in since 2008. When we broke up, it was never a question that I would be the one to leave...but because of one thing...then another...then another and another and another...I haven't. Earlier tonight I went to look at the new place I will be renting. It's a room in a house, owned by friends I've known for a few years now. Looking back over the course of the past few years, it all seems so serendipitous that I will be living there. I will be living there.
This will be, to my knowledge, my last big change of the year. I have occupied this space for over four years now, and in just a couple weeks, it will be just another memory. It's strange to me how already I miss it just a little. Everything becomes even more real, once it becomes a little bit real. That type of reality is a sneaky bastard, that ever inches closer, but never while you're looking. So tonight, hands were shook, hugs were exchanged, a bargain was struck, and a time was set when I would change the location of my bed.
And still I change.
And still I'm the same.
This is the year that my greatest tangible gift was a stick.
This is the year that my greatest intangible gift was loss.
This is the year I learned that I have x-ray vision. I can stop time. I can accept the inevitable with grace, and I can say no to a third slice of pizza.
This is the year I became tabula rasa, and discovered that I'm the one who decides how to fill it.
I'm still deciding.
Every day.
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