My 2022 - Looking Back In Retrospect

Let's just say when I think back on 2022, the only thing I'll remember is how much I want to forget it. Don't get me wrong, it had some beautiful moments from amazing trips abroad, strengthening my friendships and becoming more vocal when I needed to be however, another word to use to describe this year is 'draining.' I feel like I have physically and mentally felt every emotion possible this year and at this rate I am definitely ready for a new year and a new start. 

Coincidently, this year my favorite singer released an album called 'Midnights' where the tag line of her prologue starts with 'What keeps you up at night?' and let's just say this year saw me have a lot of sleepless nights and in some ways its a momentary glimmer of distraction. The tiniest notion of reminiscent thought that wanders off into wondering, the spark that lights a tinderbox of fixation. And now is irreversible. The flame has caught. You're wide awake.

 

Maybe it's that one urgent question you mean to ask someone years ago but didn't. Someone that slipped through the cracks in your history, and they're are too far gone now away. All the ghost ships that have sailed and sailed away, but at this hour, they've anchored in your harbor. They sit with flags waving, bright and beautiful. And it's almost like it's real.

 

Sometimes sleep is as evasive as happiness, isn't it mystifying how quickly we vacillate between self love and loathing at this hour? One moment, your life looks like a night sky of gleaming stars. The next, the fog has descended. Suddenly you're in the rope indentations of your old tire swing still on the branch. All the phone numbers you still know by heart but never call anymore. The boy's devastated face as he peeled out of your driveway. The family man he is now.

What must they all think of you

 

Why can't you sleep? Maybe you lie awake in the aftershock of falling headlong into a connection that feels like some surreal cataclysmic event. Like spontaneous combustion, or seeing snow falling on a tropical beach. A lavender haze crush that feels like the crash of wave. Or was tonight the night you realized how solitary, how alone you really are, no matter how high you climb. The elevation just makes it colder.

 

Some midnights, you're out and you're buzzing with electric current — an adventurer in pursuit of rapturous thrill. Music blaring from speakers and the reckless intimacy of dancing with strangers. Something in this shadowy room to make you feel shiny again. On these nights, you know that there are facets of you that only glow in the dark.

 

Why are you still up at this hour? Because you're cosplaying vengeance fantasies, where the bad bad man is hauled away in handcuffs and you get to watch it happen. You laugh into the mirror with a red wine snarl. You look positively deranged.

 

Maybe you were trying to mastermind matters of the heart again. You've gotten lost in the labyrinth of your head, where the fear wraps its claws around the fragile throat of true love. Will you be able to save it in time? Save it from who? Well, it obvious. From you.

 

We lie awake in love and in fear and in turmoil and in tears. We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren't — right this minute — about to make some fateful life-altering mistake. The floors we pace and the demons we . For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go for searching. Hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve... we'll meet ourselves.

Next year I know will all be about change. My one biggest fear. But like falling asleep (most of the time) it happens slowly then all at once. I will ride these waves and do my best with what comes at me knowing things will be ok in end and finding the strength to move on and most importantly let go.

N