yearly reflection (i remember everything)

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On the last day of the year, I drove back down to my hometown to get some things I had left a few days earlier. I have gotten used to these solitary trips, I recognize fields and hills as if it were second nature, I know landmarks; the speed traps, the spot I was pulled over at and somehow avoided a ticket, the area where I blew a flat, and, after exhausting all possible outcomes, had to buy a new tire for my banged-up jeep.

I talk to myself a lot when I drive alone. I’m guessing that a lot of people do this, as there is an elemental therapeutic quality to this ritual. And maybe I’m biased, for I have driven for a paycheck, and have heard stories that seem improbable and met people who are stronger than I can imagine.

People open up in cars.

I remember the times I would drive up to Minneapolis at the end of every summer, anxious to return to a city that had embraced me, to a community that accepted me, and to bodies that loved me. 

During this specific trip, I thought about how I started 2012 in downtown Minneapolis. I was with a core group of four straight girlfriends that I had known for years. We had purchased these invitations, ones that promised unlimited, free drink, a month earlier. The newly opened club was looking for attention, for publicity, and this is one of their marketing ploys. We were excited.

The club has since been shut down due to negligence, immense police involvement, drug use, underage consumption, and the like. It doesn’t surprise me now, looking back, at how poorly mismanaged the joint was.

 One of my friends, the resident wild child, got arrested that night for being too drunk, too sloppy. She took a swipe at security. We witnessed her being placed in handcuffs, as we slowly started to sober up. On a night where hailing a cab was impossible, we walked the freezing two miles back to my uptown apartment. I found a case of beer on the way back, it was the lone positive highlight of the night, and I remember saying ' this is best way to start a year EVER', as I opened one in my kitchen.

We were up until 3am, still in shock, and we didn't sleep well. We bailed her out six hours later on $90. She was charged with 5^th degree assault against the bouncer of the club.

In order to escape the legal woes that night caused, we decided to spontaneously drive to Wichita, Kansas. One of our parent’s had just recently moved for a job promotion and we hated the idea of separating on such a somber note. There was rumor of a pool table. That was all we needed. We made the decision in the midst of a hangover, and a sudden urge to spend a few final days together.

The four of us left early on the morning of the 2^nd, and drove through Tornado Alley. We talked about different weather climates, and how wind turbines worked, and why birds flew south for the winter. We mocked Missouri’s liquor laws, and the accents of the people at the gas station. We smoked weed from California, and sang, loudly, to Simon and Garfunkel.

 We arrived, finally, to loving arms and strong drinks. A couple of days later, we said our goodbyes, and the remaining three of us drove back to the upper Midwest.

I think fondly about this trip, and I bring it up frequently when I see the people I spent it with. I like to think that it set the stage for the rest of the year. It was random, dramatic, albeit entertaining, and there were risks involved, some I saw before I knew it was coming.  

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I vowed to be honest in 2012. I had made mistakes the previous year that I was ashamed of, that I couldn't defend, that I was embarrassed about.

I had been stoically protecting my heart, fearful of it breaking again. I still thought about that first break on an almost daily basis. So, in 2011, I dated with distance, with hesitation, with aloofness. I wanted to be in control of whatever the situation was. I shouldn't have been dating at all, really, but I needed distraction, and I foolishly thought that tallied numbers would create more distance between that initial heartbreak and me. It didn’t. I had one-night stands with women who I should’ve treated better, who I should have been more communicative with. I was flailing.

I vowed to be honest, to be more open, to be more vulnerable.

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The last day of the year, on this trip back to my hometown, I thought about meeting you in Mid-January, at a part-birthday/part-drag party a mutual friend was throwing. There was an unusual amount of costume parties that season, something we all joked about, but didn’t quite understand. We were all old enough to drink legally, so why were we not at the bars?

I had heard of you for a week or two, somehow your name had just suddenly joined the conversation, your face in some photo I had seen, Now who is that?

And then we met. It always seemed to be like that, knowing or meeting someone through a friend of a friend, seeing them in the periphery (literally and figuratively (and virtually)). Then there is a handshake and eye contact.

We laughed. It felt like before. I asked to kiss you. We became a couple. It was all so quick.

I remember tracing the ink on your arms as if my fingers were paintbrushes. I traced the capital letter B with my tongue on the inside corner of your knee, the owl cage near your elbow, the ribs on your back.  

I remember how you kissed me underneath the porch light of an apartment building, as snow fell lightly onto us. Your eyes were closed so tightly, I almost thought you were imagining kissing someone else.

I remember the bike rides I took to your new apartment, (the one I had helped you move into), smelling the fresh scent of spring, hopeful of what we were becoming. I would pedal as fast as I could, anxious to see you. I would extend my arm and touch every green leaf I could reach. I would smile as wide as I could when I saw you. I was bashful again.

You told me you loved me on St. Patrick's Day. It had been a day filled with meeting friends of yours, walking from Loring Park to Uptown, drinking gallons of tea whiskey, more friends, cooking burgers on a 5<sup>th</sup> story apartment porch overlooking the city, drinking, biking even further South for a bonfire, and heading back to Loring for a final round at the 19, for more drinking. So much shouting, so much laughter. At bar close, we stumbled the half-block walk back to your apartment.

We were in your bed, and we had just finished. I told you I loved you too, of course I did, how could I not. I was tired.

You then got a phone call from your sister, reminding you of the anniversary of her miscarriage three years earlier. You cried until 4 in the morning. You told me the entire story, every gruesome detail. It’s an awful story and I hope I’ll never to have to repeat it. I tried to cry too, but I couldn't. I felt like a maniac.

I went to the mountains with that girl, who I assumed I loved, for it had felt like the first time. We were speeding when all signs pointed to doing the exact opposite. I am guilty of acting gullible when I should have known otherwise. Blame it on Tornado Alley.

There, on that Californian mountain in late April, I met a handful of folks that changed my life. It was a final hoorah for you and me, however.

I remember how you left me the day we returned, unexpectedly. I was blindsided, and shocked, and upset. I felt like a fool. Two weeks later you began dating someone else, a pain I hoped I would never have to experience again. But, of course, I did.

 You had told me that you had fallen for someone at camp, that you weren't really over your ex, that you had a switch (that you had warned me about), one turns on and off and you can't control it. You gave me about five different reasons. I never could tell someone why, or how, we broke we up. There were too many excuses. You never once blamed me. Again, I would hear this precise sentiment being echoed a few months from then. You didn’t do anything wrong.

For a few weeks, A-camp left a bitter taste in my mouth, as I mourned the first part of my year, and the relationship I so clearly invested in.

Yet, something strange happened in that summer that still befuddles me in a nonsensical, bizarre way.

 One on end, my ex-girlfriend had unceremoniously dumped me. I was depressed. My summer plans had dwindled to a repeated stint of living in my hometown, for the fourth straight summer, unable to financially survive in the non-academic months of the year.

She had begun to date a new person almost immediately after our breakup, and subsequently married this person, symbolically, in late June, during Pride. She had changed her last name, had moved in, had ‘wifed up’. I was livid with the basic disrespect. I couldn't understand, I still can't, how someone could be so vapidly unconscious of their own maliciousness. I think you did know, in your coldest hearts of hearts, that you were twisting that knife in a little deeper.

But on the other hand, a practical stranger I hurt re-entered my life. They had been one of the reasons why I chose to be honest in 2012. In late 2011, after our first conversations via the Internet, I assumed that because they lived so far away, in a region I never wanted to visit, I would never see them. I pulled a classic move; I got silent. I stopped communicating.

I didn’t deserve a second chance even though I got one.

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The first time I picked you up from the airport in May you mentioned the bumper sticker on the back of my car. Sitting squarely on the back right side of my bumper, there’s a little image of a pink elephant, with thick-rimmed glassed. I had purchased it the first weekend I owned the car, during a road-trip to Chicago. There had been a thirty-foot statue of the same image at a gas station in some rural county in Wisconsin. It was my good-luck charm. I tried to tell the story but it came out wrong, I was flustered, it didn’t make sense.

I was nervous, admittedly, and I couldn't really talk straight. I had felt guilty for how I had treated you. You were one of the reasons I wanted to change.

You had known that I was recently heartbroken, and so were you, and it was something we bonded over at the bar that night. It was also the night of your birthday, it was the first time we had met, and we both knew what was coming. At the time, it was the best sex I had ever had.

You left seven hours later. You were the perfect rebound. Blame Tornado Alley.

You were all over the country that summer, enjoying the perks of family benefits that came with a job title. I would see you periodically, as often as I could. My city, the mandatory layover stop you had to take, became your beacon of relaxation. And my apartment, one that you had gotten used to, became a second home.

I’d come to anticipate your arrival, and hear your stories, and re-live your adventures. I began to romanticize what we had, the history we had already accumulated. You were a restless cowboy, never in one place for too long. I liked that I could play that role for you, the one that listened, and valued your homecoming .

And always, that ever-present bike of yours, being the mode of transportation no matter where you went. I remember watching you assemble it in my living room and I’d stare at your muscles as you cranked the pedals back onto the frame. Your boundless energy, something I envied and admired, became a staple of your presence, something I continue to try to emulate to this day. You were a regular vagabond.

I had known about the others, had always known, but had kept that at a safe distance from my conscious. There were from all over, on every coast, those from my city, my friends. I remember trying to be blasé about it, that it didn’t bother me, but of course it did. I wasn’t seeing or sleeping with anyone. I remember thinking I was special.

It shouldn’t have been a shock when you told me in November that you fell in love with someone else, but it did. From the start, you were never anything but honest with me and I couldn't hate you, I still can't. I was never as angry with you as I was with that girl who got married. I silently forgave within weeks, and I stopped talking to you in my head by Christmas.

The last quarter of the year I limped on, feeling like I got punched twice hard in the jaw. My heart had felt like it had run a marathon only to pass out in the last minutes. I was tired, and I slept a lot.

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So, on this trip back to my hometown, as I thought about my year, and the women who have since defined it for me, I am continuously surprised by whom enters and exits my little life.

I am increasingly impressed with the people I encounter and meet, the relationships I decide to foster and invest in, the lives that become forever entwined with mine. It’s a thought that makes me feel better, that they are forever apart of me, even if I never see them. I think about that first love, the one that defines it all, and how much that hurt, and the mistakes I made during my time with them. I allow myself to feel all of these things and not feel weak, or scared, or depressed. Rather, I embrace the entire spectrum of feelings that love (or something like it) creates.

And so, on the final day of the year as I drove back home, I thought about the treat I was given the night earlier. And I hope that it blooms into something in the next year that is substantial and meaningful and as exciting as anyone else. 

You have to keep your heart open, and in order for it open it has to be broken, and that’s what I tell myself. There will always be lessons. And I am quick to learn them.