Reminders

I had been doing pretty good. Life stinks, so you move on, try new things, look on the positive side of things, right? Accept the things you cannot change, and change the things you can like Ty on crack.

And then small reminders come. And a sense of being stuck in the same old scenario returns. Hoplessness. Will things ever change? Wallowing in self-pity is not fun, but oh so easy.

It takes an act of will, of discipline to stop, and I've never been too good at that. To choose not to wallow in that which blunts the edge of reality but does nothing to change it. To accept that things have changed, and get to work rediscovering your place in the world.

I knew on New Year's Eve as I thought about the year behind and the year ahead that things would be different. They had to be. They are different, in ways I had feared more than in ways I had hoped. But time is experienced in an inexorable march, and to spend my time wishing I could go back and change things is a waste.

The new year is now closer than the old. Perhaps that is a fitting metaphor for moving ahead. Travelling paths I fear to tread, with a strength that is not my own, to and end I cannot see is tremendously scary. But simply sitting down and demanding that the world grind to a stop so I can adjust to things is not an option. I can sit, but the world continues to go.

So I accept it: she's dating a presumably wonderful guy who makes her ridiculously happy. I'm left alone with regrets for time and emotions invested in someone who proved to be just like everyone else, wondering what might have been if I had taken other opportunities I instead passed on for her sake. But I didn't, and those too have passed. She was my yesterday: today and tomorrow are all I have to work with.

Where to from here, then? For now: lunch.