December 1
Change is in the air. The sharp, crisp air verges on winter when it cuts through my lungs now, and the days fall from the calendar like the final leaves that parachute to the hardening ground from the ashy branches above. And each day I wake up the same, slightly different person in the same unfinished room I left vacant a year ago. Laying in bed in the early morning, blinking last night's dreams from my eyes, my memory hears conversations from last fall, in the very same room, where I packed suitcases and wondered aloud with friends how my life would be on a small island.
November seems to have slipped through my fingers, a blur of welcome homes and Thanksgiving clamour. December arrived quietly in the night, slipping in through the back door while we were all soundly sleeping. As a child, December was a melodious word, brimming with happiness and sparkle, pine scented childish greed and whipped air snowflakes melting lightly on hot cheeks. Now December is different. Though still busting at the seams with holiday cheer, mainly the kind contrived by marketing departments, December has a more ominous ring, warning of an end, the final rinse cycle on a year spinning to a close, to be stored in the cabinets of my memory with the rest before it. December holds a large amount of weight for me this year, for it is a goal month for me, to find a job, to "land," to begin to find roots in my life.
And as of late, my roots have yet to take hold. I own nothing remarkable to speak of, like a house or a nice car, and my plans for the immediate future remain, well, shapeless. My efforts to hit the ground running have been largely fruitless, leading to frenzied spells of internet job searching and a slow build of anxiety. When friends ask innocently, "so what's next?" my stomach churns. I want to answer with something more than "I don't know". Anything more than I don't know. Or do I?
This morning I cleaned my room. And by clean, I mean overhaul, tossing sentimental notes and shapeless childhood clay creations, even my old equitation saddle. There's something wonderfully cathartic about ridding yourself of excess belongings. I mean, you really can't get more symbolic than literally tossing old baggage into a dumpster, can you? At the near culmination point of my cathartic unearthings, I lifted a rectangular storage box onto my bed, unaware of the contents. Wrapping myself into a cross legged position, I lifted the top of the box to discover a verital time capsule, a chronology of my "greatest hits", condensed into a rubbermaid bin.
A genuine, childlike smile spread across my face as I flipped through progress reports and secret notes from high school friends, letters from my grandmother while I was away in college, photos of my life in Costa Rica, my travels through Europe, all neatly stacked for me to peruse.
In my own private Ulysses moment, I reveled in my own life. Curvatures of Roman architecture, psuedo artsy over the shoulder shots of gargoyles presiding over the ledges of Notre Dame, soft rolling waves sighing against black sandy beaches of Central America, charming cottages punctuates the angular Swiss countryside, all sprang from photos that I took. Large red A's bled into title pages for papers I wrote, on feminist philosophy and Marxian political thought. Ball point confessions spilled across the textured pages of journals, referencing loves and friends and worries from a different time. Behind the lens of each camera, or over the pen scrawling across each page, was me, the same me, maybe a little different. And over the short span of twenty seven years, what this documentary evidence made incredibly clear to me was that I have truly lived. Maybe not exactly in the way I would have predicted or hoped, or in the shape I would have molded, but in a beautiful series of moments, both serendipitous and scrupulously planned.
I sat for a moment, amidst the piles of paper and photos that represented so much of my life, and absorbed my history, basking in a gratifying happiness that had evaded me for the past month. Journals read of jobs or men I thought I wanted but didn't get (or in some unlucky circumstances, didn't realize I didn't want and did get), and photos captured places I would never have gone had I always taken the safe or easy route, or if everything had worked out as planned. Suddenly, encircled by tangible proof that indeed, what's meant to be will inevitably be, I felt ready to embrace the three little words my first year torts professor deemed the hardest phrase to utter in the English language: I don't know.
