Ize on the prize

I bought my plane ticket to Anchorage yesterday while I was on the phone with my mom. Something inside me turned lighter as we spoke: the thought of going home for Christmas suddenly seemed bright, warm, welcoming, instead of this lonely, heavy darkness -- some mental fortress that I'd built up in my head. So, click click. I bought it. (You see, my mom is the type of person who would never say outright, "Amanda, please come home for Christmas" ; her mere allusion to taking some pleasure or comfort in my being around was enough to get me to buy my ticket home.)

Alex had asked me to think about coming back around then, and I had responded negatively -- immediately -- this based wholly on an incapacitating fear of looking pain and change squarely in the face. I had begun imagining a grand and sunny escape to the Caribbean as some sort of midwinter, midyear, mid-crisis (?) cure-all. My change of heart has me thinking that might not have been quite right. I'm sure Jamaica is absolutely amazing, but I know now that there is a more important place that I need to be for the holidays. I'm going to go back to the place that still holds many of the biggest pieces of my heart, and rejoice in those whom I love.

I'm still pretty damn scared by the idea of going home to a place that will be barely recognizable to me. My father's impending absence is a spreading shadow with no source, a Big Nothing. What will Home be with half the bedrock pulled out from underneath the foundation? "Insane. I don't know. I don't want to look," said my brain. What WILL Home be? I don't know, but I think it's only responsible and right for me to pull my shit together and take that look alongside my mom and my brother. They are already putting things back together, filling in the cracks and the missing parts in new ways; I suppose I am, too. Going home will help me to understand how and where our putting-together makes a new Whole.

And, the time that I'll get to spend with Alex will be lovely and renewing. Where I had once only been able to obsess over the dreariness of Anchorage in December, I now see sweet and quiet hours with the person I'm so excited to be adventuring with. (Hot chocolate, winter walks, golden-gray afternoons and making dinner: a small taste of what's to come.) How selfish of me to have fixated so acutely and so stubbornly on my own sadness. ///Break the cycle! Wake up! Look outside! The sun's still shining. You can still love and be loved./// It's high time to see the big picture and start living and actualizing love instead of dwelling on the deficits and the hurt. Current financial crisis ≈ my own inner turmoil (the difference being, of course, that the turning-around of my own psycho-emotional situation is my direct responsibility).

And from January 2nd, when I leave Alaska, it won't be long at all until Alex is here in New York. Our journey together has already begun -- is ongoing -- but a bold new chapter is imminent. This potential of ours is swelling like a sonata.

...I just had a dream this morning where I was driving in a car on a wide, main street at night in the wintertime. It might've been Anchorage. I couldn't brake; I spun off onto a side street, kept spinning spinning spinning, pulled the e-brake, miraculously managed to dodge different cars and snow berms and swerve finally, breathlessly, to complete stop somewhere in the middle of a residential street packed hard with the whitest snow. I wonder if it's at all telling of my current situation -- that I feel as though these times are mostly dark and not in my control, but that in the end, I am still driving and surviving, and I'll make it through and find some stability in the end.

Ultimately, the love that dwells within me -- my love for my mother, my brother, and Alex -- has trumped the fear. That's pretty major.


"I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me..."

but I'm pretty sure it won't.