Wow. So while many of you decided, of course, to hop on a fitness wagon and eschew all things white in your diet and to give up ice cream for the whole year and to join the gym because the entire blogosphere has shamed you and chastised you and declared that YOU ARE FAT if you're not exercising as if you're training for a fucking marathon and eating only birdseed and carrot sticks while sucking down funky green juices only to then injure yourselves on the treadmill on day three because, oh wait, you haven't exercised since last January and damn it to hell now you've to go to a chiropractor just so you can snap all those bones back where they belong because no one, NO ONE, is going to call bullshit and tell you you're fat. Not when you're eating birdseed and exercising six days a week.
Meanwhile, those who are a size 2 naturally (I know they exist!) or perhaps are just very comfortable in their own skin and know how to have sex with the lights on as well as wear a bikini happily on their jaunts to tropical destinations, flab or no flab, or gasp, even just parade around naked while reading McSweeney's 33 on a lazy Sunday afternoon, have become obsessed instead with a makeover. Not of themselves, gosh no. Remember, they're already a size 2 and will sport the bikini without the sarong.
No, they're busy making over every room in the house. Starting with the bedroom, of course, because these people have sex with the lights on and if you're having hot sex with all the lights on and the shades up and the windows thrust wide open even in Utah while the snow is falling all around, you need to have something lovely (other than you) for the neighbors to peek at while they're discerning if what they thought they just saw was really what they did see and, well, you don't want it to look like a bad porn movie now, do you?
No. Not at all.
Of course, I would like to make over my own bedroom. Here in my small rented house with all my furniture that I acquired post-divorce from the kindness of strangers. The things I could do with a beautiful bed. And luscious Egyptian cotton sheets. Curtains that call out to my neighbors with the suggestion of really hot sex.
Problem is, honestly, that I am moving. I am uncertain of the destination. I've left it rather open to the Universe to decide. I know, I know, you do not need to remind me. I am the master of my own destiny. I've already taken probably eleventy steps in the direction of this unknown and undecided and undiscovered future destination. I get up, I breathe and celebrate each new day, I share my life with anyone who happens to just nod or smile in my direction. These are all steps towards my own destiny, even if they're unplanned, unknowing, unintentional.
I just want to acknowledge that Spain is on this list. Of possible destinations. It has been sitting atop the list for months and months and my family is tired of me talking about it. Only I need to get over myself and my own fears of intimacy and the possibility of sharing my life with a kind and generous and beautiful soul who just so happens to actually be a smidgen older than me. Spain can only happen if I can truly allow love. Real love. Like Velveteen Rabbit love. Love that will rub all my fur off and leave my heart aching for more.
There's a deep and sordid past that haunts my heart. I have put the shards and broken pieces back together, fitting this memory with that memory and trying, without a whole lot of big success, to discard the hurt. It is the hurt that is somehow last to unwind its deep tendrils, to break apart, to let go and to be cast off.
I think we also know those voices, the multiples that live in my head, can sometimes make my life rather noisy and upsetting and difficult to navigate. They spin me, whirl me, they make me dance like a marionette. I feel like there are times, honestly, where I spend entire days trying to negotiate with all of them only to have the day slip into night slip into wee morning hours and I am still just attempting to get them all to agree, to shut up already, to sit in quiet solitude and to allow me to just love and be loved.
It's the loving, actually, that is truly the most difficult. I want to love freely. I want to be loved completely. If I could just wish for only one thing, it would never be to be thin. Or to have a bedroom made just for hot sex. Oh no, not at all. My wish is to know love and to understand love.
My birthday wish, my resolution, is to embrace, to embody, to truly be love. It's going to be a beautiful and amazing year.
