In Memoriam

As I begin to write this I’m sitting in Dallas/Ft. Worth airport waiting to board a flight to Chicago, and I’ve begun to feel contemplative. I began reflecting on events of the last week, the last year, and the last time I was here a year ago. As I walk down Destiny’s path I occasionally sneak a look back over my shoulder and see the milestones that marked the most memorable moments of the last year. Seeing old friends. A break up. Applying, auditioning, and acceptance into graduate school. Beginning a lasting exercise routine. Ending the longest job I’ve held since I left Dallas. Meeting new people. Making a few new friends. Living an academic dream. Constantly discovering and challenging my limitations. These were a host of experiences that were more original and dynamic than any I’ve previously had. In these ways and others, this was the year of Despair. It was the year of Determination. The year of Fear. The year of Anxiety. Of Accomplishment. Of Hope.

This was the year of Change.

This year was also the year of visitors in Chicago. Before this, the only people to visit me had been my parents. From June to October I saw everyone but my parents as I entertained both of my sisters, nephews, and brother-in-law. I saw the majority of my closest and dearest friends and tried to expose them all to the life I’ve come to experience, enjoy, and earn. I spent too short a time with each of them.

I came home to Dallas this year as a new man, much altered from the one who was here a year ago. Those who saw me last year validated how much weight I’ve lost since my last visit. I’ve discovered that the ripples of my absence are still being felt, sometimes quite strongly, among the customers, staff and management at Magic Time Machine. While I was here I got new glasses, new shoes, new bedding, and a new tattoo (I’m really getting used to those, this one was the easiest yet). I saw most of the people I haven’t seen since the summer of 2007 just before I moved, and I regret the ones I still managed to miss this trip. Even the visits I was able to make were far too brief, each leaving a footprint in my heart akin to one on a sandy beach. My friends left a hole in the shape of each of themselves, to be filled in only by my ache and salty tears upon my departure.

And on Christmas Day, I ended a fifteen year silence during a sixty-five second phone call.

It’s been a remarkable year. Sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible, always difficult, and never dull. You, Constant Reader, have heard me bemoan and whine my circumstances all the while. If you’re reading this now it’s because you either just picked up reading, or you knew one day I’d crawl out of it and start acting like a whole person again. For my fellow Dallas friends and family, I want you to know how crucial your influence over me has been in my recovery. Whether I saw you all week, the briefest of hours, or made a promise I wasn’t able to keep through text messages (you know who you are), you each lent me a rope I used to pull myself out of the mire. I couldn’t have done it without you, and I look to the new year with eyes that seek to repay your kindness.

And though we’re very, very close to the end, there’s still one more thing to happen this year that I’ve never done before – I have a blind date sometime this week. So if it goes well, I have something new and hopeful to transition me from the old year into the next (of course if it doesn’t go well, I suppose this will be the last you’ll read of it).

Mark Twain said, “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.” I love the climate and atmosphere of Chicago; I adore the people and relationships I have in Dallas; yet n’er the twain shall meet. In this way I will always be unsatisfied. For this reason I will always be ill at ease. For all time I shall be wanting more. Yet it is precisely because of this that I will always feel an ache in my heart for the beauty of those fleeting, transitory moments of happiness and perfection that will never last. That is their tragedy, and that is their triumph.

“Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.”