1 January

An email that I sent to Omar last night:

It's the last hour of the old year (for me, for you it's been 2004 for two hours. What's it like in the future?) and I'm sitting on my front steps with my laptop, having a cigarette and writing to you.

It's cold, not like in the east, of course--I am not typing in my mittens, but I am shivering. It makes me feel closer to home. This is my home too, of course, I will always be an Angelino, but I have realized more than ever this year that my home is there, my life is there.

Mom is at a party that I, fortunately, was not required to attend. I don't care for parties and I spent too many years catering and working parties on New Years Eve to find them attractive in any way. I enjoy being alone on this night, I choose it over anything other than spending it with you. I have never spent a New Years Eve with someone I am in love with, I have never kissed anyone but my parents at the moment when the ball dropped. That is the one New Years tradition that I would like to celebrate sometime.

Of course, time is an invented concept, the difference between now and one hour from now isn't really any bigger of a deal than the difference between any other pair of hours, except for that when you go on to the next one, the last one will never happen again. So in a way, every second passing is worthy of celebration, every moment is a time when you can change your life forever. Resolutions don't have to be made tonight, they can be made on June 2nd at 4.40p and 17 seconds just as easily, but this is a time to see where you are in your life, how things are different and how they are the same, what has changed in the time past, what you want to change in the time ahead.

This has been, in many ways, the worst year of my life, but interspersed were some of the best times in my life, and if I had to have the bad in order to have the good, I'll take the bad. The good was very good indeed. The worst of the year and the best of the year all had to do with you, of course. I'm glad it's over, but of course, nothing between you and I is actually over, the tick of one second to the next making a new year isn't going to change anything.

I'm glad you called me today, I missed you, I missed talking to you. You are so far away from me now, and I don't mean in miles. Ever since you moved, you have been so far away. I know that you are healing, but I miss how close we were before then. Will we be that close again? That all depends on you, of course, what you want, how you want to live your life. If what you really want in relationships is anonymity, as you told me today, you and I will never have that. And I don't think that's really what you want, not forever. I hope not, at any rate--with me or with anyone, nobody with a heart as big as yours should leave it locked up behind a barbed wire fence forever.

I saw Peter Pan the other day, which I loved very much. It was fun and funny, but it had a very strong message, one that I am a real sucker for. That feelings can bring you down so low that you might think that you'd be better off without them, but they can also raise you up higher than you thought possible, and you are missing so much if you don't have adult feelings and grow up.

Sometimes I hate feeling as much as I do, I wish I didn't have these wild swinging emotions as wide as the sky, but I know that without the lows you don't get the highs, and if you are unable to ache in agony you don't get to soar with joy. And you brought me a great deal of joy this year, I hope I brought you some as well. I know that there were times when we were together that you were happy, that I made you happy, I don't think that I am fooling myself on that account. But I know that the real lows that you felt were because of other people. I don't want to make you unhappy, but I would like you to feel strongly enough about me that it is possible for you to be unhappy over me. Feeling pity for me is not the same thing.

What will change in this next year? What will change between us? I say that I will never feel differently towards you, but of course, I can't know that. And things change all the time. Sometimes you spend so much energy pushing me away that I feel as though I am so exhausted with fighting you, with refusing to leave your life that I just want to give up and say fine, you win. Goodbye. But the idea of living my life without you in it is like choosing death, so I don't. I can't. I don't know what will happen with us, and neither do you, but I know that you are my heart, and if I leave your life I will leave my heart behind.

I've stopped shivering. I've been out here long enough that I have become used to the cold. You can become used to anything if you endure it long enough. But all I have to do to be warm is to get up and go inside the house--it's right there and I can choose to be warm whenever I want.

Sometimes I wish that I had known you before your ex killed your heart. But that might be worse, remembering what you were like before that. I remember you being full of life and love just a few months ago, so maybe your heart isn't dead, just frozen, like I'm cold out here on this step. Maybe I'm wrong. He didn't kill your heart, he just wounded it so badly that it's lying bandaged and broken, slowly healing. But when your heart breaks, it's never the same afterwards and one has to guard against it being covered with so many scars that it can never hold as much love and feeling as it did before.

My metaphors are getting out of hand. I cannot not hope for better things for us in this new year, thirteen minutes away now, because hope is the anchor. Without hope for better things ahead, we are dead already. And I know I am not dead, because I still feel so much. I see my life two ways, with you and without you, and either way I will go on living, because my heart beats and my blood runs through my veins and I breathe one breath after the other. One breath, one second, one more chance for change. One more chance for happiness or despair. Both are part of life, and they go hand in hand like the sun and the moon.

Nine minutes. To this arbitrary moment that means nothing and everything all at once.

When the new year comes, the year that I turn 40, I will be thinking of you at that moment, that death of one second and life of the next. I do not choose to love you any more than I choose to breathe, loving you is breathing, loving you is life. My greatest fear is there being a time in the future when I think, "O yeah, I remember Omar. I wonder what ever happened to him? Boy, was I crazy about him." I don't want you to be part of my past, I don't want loving you to be part of my past.

The ball just dropped. The moment was, and now the moment is. "Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind", I don't want that to be you and me, something that happened a long time ago.

I don't know what will happen this year, I don't know where you and I will be at this moment 366 days from now. All I know is right now, this moment, I love you. And this moment is always.

Love,

Kymm