2024/2025 (part 2)

She had spent the better part of 2024 looking for trouble and then running away when she found it, which had her feeling a mixture of bravery and cowardice. Maybe bravery wasn’t the right word, but she certainly didn’t want to be left with only cowardice.

It was a dance she’d been doing most of her life. Raised in a strict religious household, she eventually turned her back on faith in a ‘higher power’ and made socialism and virtue-signaling her religion. Maybe socialism wasn’t the right word, but she certainly didn’t want to be left with only her moral superiority.

It was New Year’s Eve and she didn’t have a lack of options to bring in the New Year. Being pretty, there were plenty of suitors eager to spend the last moments of 2024 with her in hopes of starting 2025 with a bang.

Or a kiss at the very least. Although in her case, one usually led to the other at a dizzying rate.

But this year there was no glamorous party to attend. Instead she wore sweatpants and an old t-shirt announcing her devotion to all things feline and sat in her living room with a glass of wine. She had purchased some paint earlier in the week and thought this was the perfect time to replace a mantra that had stood above her bedroom door for the past few years; “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”

Similar to the vagueities of bravery and cowardice (to say nothing of socialism and ‘good intentions’), she had been recently finding it increasingly more difficult to tell the difference between how she felt when she was in the company of people and when she was alone. An emptiness seemed to hover over/beneath both.

So she stepped up on the ladder and with one pass of the paint roller removed the old quote and began the task of substituting it with something more appropriate to where she was in her life and what she was currently feeling.

Weltinnenraum… in big bold lettering. The German phrase that translates to “world-inner-space.”

After that word was applied with all the artistic flair that her passion for calligraphy could muster, she finished it off, albeit in smaller lettering with; “It is most often used to speak that essential space within the heart of a human being.”  Another gem from Rainer Maria Rilke.

She knew that weltinnenraum was an intimidating word to have perched above her boudoir, but this time she wasn’t perching it for anyone else but herself. Plus, she enjoyed the fact that she wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

Her life in a nutshell.

When she was done she washed her hands and thought about her New Year’s routine. A yearly daydream where she would imagine bumping into her ex at the airport. An airport halfway between Reno and where she currently lived. A meeting that wasn’t entirely by chance, but was a result of both of them ‘knowing’ the other would be there.

It wasn’t the sort of daydream that had any sensible person making travel plans, but it helped pass the time until the ball dropped.

Their last communication had been through emails exchanged in the first minutes of New Year’s Day many years back. At least three, maybe four. She had ended hers with “Let’s agree to never stop thinking about each other.”

She hoped he was keeping up his end of the bargain. “He needed to let me go… and he did” she said to herself. “I should feel gratitude.”

But she didn’t.

She could feel the year draining away, which had her feeling a familiar mix of hope and regret. Maybe hope wasn’t the right word, but she certainly didn’t want to be left with only regret.

Just give up and admit you’re an asshole
You would be in some good company
And I think you’d find that your friends would forgive you
Or maybe I am just speaking for me

–As Is by Ani DiFranco