Hello, blog.

. . .

I'm feeling a little shy. Shy? Maybe estranged. It's been a long time.

It's Christmas time. Not Christmas anymore, but still that time of year. Christmas, New Years, holidays, all the humdrum of daily living suspended in time for a period of weeks. January looming. Historically, societally, this is a time of "new beginnings". Joy to the world; a savior is born, time to make amends and examine past mistakes and make resolutions for better living. For me, though, this is more a time of endings.

All the major relationships I have been involved in have drawn to a close around this time. Maybe they ended a little before, maybe they dragged on for a while after, but this is when it really hit home, when I actually understood that it was over.

So it is Christmas time again, and once again a significant chapter of my life is drawing to a close. This has been a pretty momentuous chapter. Many ups, many downs. Two years of love and hate and angst and joy and elation and despair . . . a rainbow of intense emotion ranging all about the spectrum. I haven't really written a lot about this relationship, at least not in public forums. I haven't even spoken about it much except to close friends. It has been the most private relationship I've been involved in. And now it is changing.

Maybe it's all the same, really. Endings, beginnings. You can't have one without the other. One thing passes on that there may be something new. The snow melts so that fresh seedlings might push through the ravaged earth.

I've been crying a lot. I'm sad, but I'm somehow happy in my sadness. Sad in my happiness.

A Bulgarian friend shared a New Years tradition wherein she baked a Bulgarian dish with several tin-foil wrapped fortunes embedded in each slice. Six of us ate together, digging through the layers of noodly dough to find our predictions. I got "Money", "Win from the lottery", and "Finding the lost happiness". She said that if we kept the fortunes, they would come true for us in this new year.

The person I am now wants to childishly believe in fortunes and fate and magic. I whimsically taped these three strips of paper into my wallet so that they would be close to me, so that they could come true.

Money and the lottery have yet to come. Perhaps I will make money when I become a professional gambler, or as I move into a career in massage, or when I complete some things I have been writing. Or maybe I'll become a porn star, famous the world over, rolling in dough. Or maybe it will simply result from winning the lottery. I certainly won't win the lottery, however, until I begin playing the lottery.

But maybe I am on my way right now to finding The Lost Happiness?

When I first read this particular fortune, I thought that maybe it meant that I would find happiness this year [. . . with him].

Now, though, I wonder if I might mean that I will find again some sort of happiness that has been lost in all the drama of these last two years. Perhaps, this year, I may become happy again in a different way.

I mean, I will always be moody and self-involved and angsty, balancing on a rickety teeter-totter moving up and down from one mood to another. I thrive on that up and down and all over the place roller-coaster ride. It feeds a well of inspiration and creativity deep within my core and makes me ultimately feel more alive and engaged.

But in the past, despite this penchance for ups and downs and ins and outs, I have also been happy on some more stable, continuous level, in a way that I haven't been in recent times.

I've had great happiness in recent years. But it has been a slightly different shade, you know? It's like there were a few crayons that fell out of the box and got lost under the bed, and the pictures I've made with the remaining crayons have still been amazing, but I could make other pictures that are differently amazing were I to find those lost crayons again. Not better. Not worse. But different, in a way that has been in the past, but has not been in recent times, for me.

What a mess of words! And I still don't think I've really done justice to what I feel, what I am trying to communicate. Stupid, stupid words. I never have the right ones. They're all lost under the bed or something. This is why I draw pictures, generally, instead of writing.

Anyhow -

I feel right now that my fortune may come true, but in a different way than I had thought.

I've written before that I'm not the sort to deal well with closure. I don't read the last few chapters of books. I fall asleep during movies. I pretend in my head that everything always has been and always will be just as it is right now in this moment. I am terrified of change.

In spite of this fear, I am trying to gracefully let go.

So things are coming to a close.

It is time. It is right - I feel this deep within.

I have felt it for a while, but I didn't know what it was. Now I do. I know. I understand. I will accept.

I will face my fear and embrace change.

Goodbye, 2005.

Goodbye, love of these last two years. I wish you great happiness, and I will always cherish what we have shared. You have been a pivotal force in my life. I look forward to knowing you going forward on different terms - having you as a friend, being a friend, learning to draw lines together in order that we might grow something fresh and beautiful within them.

. . .

Endings leave space for new beginnings. What new things will come?