Sunday

I started reading the Sunday New York Times again today. The day that I drove J and S down to Perry, GA so they could make their way further south to Tampa, and the day that I noticed for the first time that the cold snap and some negligence has all but taken the hanging plants in the Florida room.

It’s one week before Christmas and I am looking forward to some time off, looking forward to the New Year’s party, and looking forward to what 2006 will bring. with all that looking forward, I can say that my existence these days is still rather lonely. I feel a loneliness and distress even when others are around. I realized today that this will be the first Christmas that I do not have a “significant other” in my life since 1999, and only the second Christmas in my adult life. It is somewhat hard to look incredibly forward to the holidays when I don’t have someone to put that gift-giving, holiday-spirit energy into. I feel that it may good for me to go through this though. I feel it may be good to be alone during the holidays. Like I may learns even more about myself – that maybe I will share the spirit with myself more, learn how to take care of myself more. It still isn’t easy staring at the next couple of weeks as single.
I realize that this is the year that 3 friends lost parents, one friend’s father came into bad health, I lost the woman I had hoped to marry. There was one marriage and two announced pregnancies among my friends. It was also a year that began with tsunamis, and later contained earthquakes and devastating hurricanes that tried to wash New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast away.
I realize that 2001 was the year of 9/11 and that we were forever changed by that, but I believe in many ways that this year will be more of a year of change, at least for me an many of my friends. I believe it has forced many of our hands at the growing up thing. That we will look back and realize that things were never the same after 2005. I believe that will be a good and bad thing. Good that we grew up, dealt with some issues that had been neglected too long. Good that we got to know ourselves and our strengths and weaknesses better. I suppose many of us probably really became adults for the first time this year. Bad in the sense that we know we can never go back to that time before where there was a certain ignorant bliss that we had in the way lived our lives and conducting our friendly and romantic relationships. Kind of like the same way adolescence killed much of the innocence of childhood.
I wouldn’t want to go back and do this year over again, and if I had to I would do many things differently, but I am developing a thankfulness for what I and we have gone through. It hasn’t been easy or happy all of the time, but we have made it almost to the end and are irrevocably changed because of it. I hope for peace, stability and lots of rest in 2006. I hope that it is happier for us all, and I believe it will be.