A New Year

Amazingly enough, December was a good month.  Did my entire office get laid off in which we all simultaneously panicked?  Yes.  But after a few days of trying to figure out just what in the FUCK we were going to do now it all seemed to calm down.  We all took a breath and looked for other employment.  We all found it...eventually.  I was the first, of course.  Like there was any doubt in anyones mind about that.  I can't handle NOT working.  It's not me.  It's not how I operate.  I did take the entire month to finally make my decision and chose to start the beginning of the new year.  A new year, a new job.  Funny enough it's the exact same job I had before.  Same company even.  Just a different environment.  It's taken some getting used to but it seems to have smoothed itself out nicely.  

I miss my friends though.  My boys.  The ones I've spent the last nine years with.  I've been there for marriages, new homes, births of their children.  They made me laugh.  I don't laugh as much now.

We spent Christmas in Missouri.  Moving my grandmother was challenging, but it kept us from remembering.  At least for the majority of the time.  I teetered between ambivalence and anger.  There wasn't sadness.  The goal was to get my grandmother moved, get her comfortable, and then get the hell out of town.  We accomplished it nicely.  I spent Christmas Eve with my father's side of the family.  That sentence still blows my mind.  Many years I did not even think about those people, and now they're in our lives.  Life is strange.

New Year's was spent at home.  Just Thomas and I.  It was better than any fancy dinner or drunken party.  It was just us.  I wanted the year to finally end and it did.  The year that I couldn't imagine getting any worse.  The year that kicked me square in the ass and then had the nerve to laugh at me.  But it's all over now and now we move on.

I turned another year older this week.  I didn't want to think about it but for a brief moment I was sad when I remembered that she wouldn't be calling me.  There would be no birthday card from her.  The moment passed when I remembered that one year that she forgot my birthday.  She was too busy being a drunk.

Her loose ends are, for the most part, tied up.  The burdens that were hanging over my head for so long are practically gone now.  I know it changed me though.  Permanently changed me.  It's not bitterness, it's reality.  I'm okay with my reality.  I look forward to putting last year behind me and moving forward.  Take all the bad I was given and turn it in to good this year.  Learn from my mistakes and grow from it.  Prove to anything and anyone that I am better for it all in the end.  We all are.