New Year's Day 2010

Pensive.

~ adjective
1. dreamily or wistfully thoughtful: a pensive mood.
2. expressing or revealing thoughtfulness, usually marked by some sadness.

Another year ended. Not just a year, but a decade. Seems like we were just freaking out about Y2K and planes falling from the sky because we feared all the computers would go wonky when they rolled over from ‘99 to ‘00.

Little did we know that the very next year they would fall out of the sky because the world went wonky instead.

Actually, that’s not true. The world has been wonky from the first time one caveman bonked another caveman on the head with a stick over a scrap of meat. We’ve been doing nasty things to each other since the dawn of time. We Americans were just surprised because somehow we all thought there was some kind of a Dome of Invincibility over the Great U. S. of A. and no ‘bad things’ would ever get in. We also were under the delusion that everybody liked us, since we do things like spend boatloads of money on things like foreign oil.

Where the hell did the last ten years go? I remember sitting in my little rental house in Burbank, weepily watching the Y2K New Year’s celebrations on TV roll over each time zone, the fireworks and music and the optimism. Then I blinked — and this morning I woke up and realized that a whole decade just vanished. Just like that. And I didn’t do anything. At least anything noteworthy.

I went to work and came home and went to work and came home… and moved into a nicer house that doesn’t leak and has a furnace that gets warm on chilly mornings. Moved into it on September 10th, 2001, actually, and the next morning was working on getting a decent TV signal because the cable wasn’t hooked up yet and finally got a viewable picture just as the second plane hit. And for the last eight years in my house, every time I’ve looked at the morning news on that TV my mind flashes on that lingering mental image, just for a second. No… I won’t ever forget.

I got married to the wrong guy for all the wrong reasons. Shortly after we met I was diagnosed for the third time with cancer and I think we both panicked. He proposed because he was a really nice guy that hated the idea of me dying alone and I accepted because I was scared to death of dying alone. But we both expected me to die, I think. Thought it would be a short-term commitment. But I didn’t die and I got healthier than I’d ever been… but we were both too honorable — or stupid — to admit it may not have been that great of an idea to get married based on fear so we ended up in a rather dismal marriage that was doomed to end in tears and resentment. In the end it was patently obvious that we really didn’t even like each other all that much. I did learn one very valuable lesson: Dying alone isn’t nearly as scary as spending a lifetime with the wrong person.

In 2008 I was diagnosed again. Same cancer, different part of my body. I almost decided that I didn’t want to go through the torture of chemo and radiation and nausea and white cell counts and needles and blah, blah, blah a fourth time. Almost. Then I remembered that I’d once told my oncologist that I didn’t care how much it hurt, or how sick it made me… I couldn’t die before my mother because it would break her heart. I went back into treatment and for eleven months endured everything that comes with it. I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t tell a lot of people, actually — I remembered what happened the last time I did that — I ended up standing at an altar with nagging doubts in my head and butterflies in my stomach looking at a man I hardly knew and didn’t really love enough to be standing with him at an altar making promises I wasn’t sure I believed in.

I told the ‘need to know’ people at work and my best friends. I got through it, again. Kind of anti-climactic. And I know I’m not out of the woods yet and may never be completely healthy again. But I’m still here and breathing. And going to work every day. Still.

So I sit here in my car parked at Zuma Beach, watching the first day of the new decade draw to a close, and I realise that I’ve simply been waiting. Going through the motions of living every day without really feeling anything and going to bed every night after a long day at work wondering…

if this is all there is.