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I don't have an image for you today, and I'm sorry I missed the last two weeks of entries. I am not stopping again, I can assure you. We went away for Christmas and writing just got away from me for a little while. We're going to San Francisco on the 5th and I have a paper to finish before that, so there may not be entries until we get back. It is 10:28 PM as I write this. There's only an hour and thirty-two minutes left in this year. It is so close to being over. I thought I'd come here and say "Fuck you, 2004!" It has been, without a doubt, the worst year of my life. But I'm not going to do that. Instead I'm going to ask quietly for 2004 to just let me go. Please. Let me move into a new year and let me leave you behind. I have survived this year of hell, and please, please, please, I need a break. I need 2004 to let me go. So many horrible moments this year. Crying half-naked on a cold table in a dark room on my birthday while a brusque doctor tells me my babies are dead. Sure, fetuses that stop developing at six weeks are microscopic - but when they are wanted, so much, and they die inside you, they are babies. They were my first and they are gone. My beloved grandfather. Rest in peace, Pop-Pop. Godspeed. I'm glad I was at the hospital on your last day. I'm sorry I stepped out to call my boss when you took your last breath. I loved you so much. I always will. Greg's sweet cousin Carol, taken from her husband and her three beautiful daughters long before any of them should have had to know that pain. Greg's mentor, a man who was so nice and funny and was so good to my husband in his early years of teaching and after. Gone. All of these people are gone. Horrible things in the world. So many dead in Iraq and so much horror there every day. Terrorism in so many places. bin Laden still at large. Bush re-elected. Gay marriage banned. Roe threatened. Roads through our wilderness. Rumsfeld screwing up time and again and keeping his job. The dollar tanking. Energy costs skyrocketing. My parents' 401K in the toilet. My brother out of work and completely broke. Not losing any weight since the pregnancy. The hurricanes. And finally, this horrible, horrible earthquake and the horror of its aftermath. So many dead. So much destruction. Why is it always the people who can least afford to lose anything are the ones who lose everything? Not all bad, of course. There was London and New York and DC and Toronto (twice) and Niagara on the lake and the Shaw Festival and Avenue Q and the Prince concert and directing Footloose. There were over a hundred books read and two classes and lots of movies and TV on DVD. There was gardening and there were parties. And most of all, there was Greg, and there was Elizabeth, and Patti, and Kate, and Gabriel, and Phil, and my mom, and many other dear, dear people who held me up and propped me up and cheered me up and made me laugh and understood and didn't walk away when things got ugly. These were the people who saved my life with their love and their laughter and their unconditional support. With the way they simply were. They were there. Somehow I made it through 2004. Without antidepressants. Sane. There's nineteen minutes left, and I'm going to try to post this before the stroke of midnight. Please, 2004 - let us go. Let me go. Let me go in peace. let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears
'tis a song, a sigh of the weary
while we seek mirth and beauty
'tis a song, a sigh of the weary
'tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave
'tis a song, a sigh of the weary
"Hard Times," eastmountainsouth back | next
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