Tattoo removal shop
The last day in 2006 found me sleeping off the Cajun breakfast from the Uptown Diner. I’ve had a bad head cold all week, and the prevailing notion states that spices unclog sinuses, but the spices in this case made my throat all scratchy and then put me in a coma for six hours during the first snowstorm of the year. It wasn’t just the Cajun breakfast, really, but it’s never just the Cajun breakfast.
New Year’s is usually my favorite holiday because I like do-overs, but I’m choosing not to begin this year with a blinding torch of hope or whatever it is I usually feel on this night. I don’t think this is necessarily negative. I’m just choosing to slide in neutral, not pushing for one thing or the other, instead of being all glittery and full of promise. It might speak to my mental health, or just the final acceptance that January 1 doesn’t mean anything, not really. It’s superstition. I can start over any day I want, and I’m not picking tonight.
Tonight, I’m sitting in my wedding slip with my husband, the last dregs of that fucking crazy and unnaturally colored Cajun breakfast out of my system, feeling sleepy, feeling queasy, feeling resigned, watching the wind blow the new snow into the trees. You see, what gets me each time, after the New Year, is that my same old fears return: I am stuck, inside this body, and my entire world hinges on the soft mushy soup of my brain, and if that stops working, I’m dead, and how do you deal with that? How do you deal with knowing that you can die of anything, at any moment, that you’re going to die anyway, that it’s all for nothing, really?
How does one become zen about that fact, is the question. Because people do become zen. They make millions out of wrestling with the existence question, comforting others with their books and retreats and one-liners, but it doesn’t comfort me. I move through the universe like a jumpy zoo bird, too watched and dull and aware and sick of being dull and aware. My hope for 2007 would be to weave that awareness into something utilitarian, something with a certain gravity and function. And once I can be functional, I can be wild, reckless.
But tonight I’m not placing bets. Tonight is for rest and stillness and maybe a little champagne leftover from the wedding. I’ve never tried it this way before, but I’m holding no hope for this either. It’s just being, and doing, using the weight of my body to hold me straight to the earth, expecting nothing out of January than for it to be here, like it has every time. January, January, January. The month I turn 26.
(OK, I can’t completely devoid myself of the New Year hope. It comes, anyway, and that’s what’s so frustrating. That stupid will to live and not only live, but live well and keep trying. What if I just want to sulk? What if I just want to disappear, become furniture? No such luck, each time. An enemy.)
Posted by: Zosia | 12-31-2006 | 09:12 PM
Posted in: General | Comments (0)

