Ending, continuing, and beginning again. This eve welcomes not only the last year of this millennium as we recognize it, but also another year of my partnership. It means saying goodbye to both passages and hello to new hope for both in the next. A much welcomed hope.

This last year has also marked an opening of myself, a process catastrophic, exhilarating, edifying. I say goodbye to it too, like walking through a doorway never to turn back through again. And I won’t. But the door stands without itself, removed from its hinges so that it might never close: It is imperative that the view remain unobstructed. An important reminder.

I didn’t see the reversion after awhile. I knew only it at first and recorded much about it that first year in Korea. Months gone by and I failed to revisit those wise observations, losing sight of my own deterioration. Eventually I came not to see myself as I was but in what had been; and what I had been that was lost and I feared never being again. What had been that really was not. I fantasized to relive what I had waited so long to escape; not because I thought it was better but because it was the path of least resistance within a wreckage uniquely dismal from others that preceded it.

In the reflection self was indiscernable.

When I stayed in Seattle this summer I began testing, resolutely, the veracity of memories preached by mind. Began the search for lost soul. Deliberate acts, painful journeys to uncover lost feelings; gaze upon lost faces; find, truly for the first time, loss cast aside. Past friends and acquaintances found; time spent with them feeling the true space they filled in my presence, in my past. Learning from them the truth belied by the self that was desperate in nostalgia. Driving to my mother’s side, sitting there for periods so long that even denial got bored and left me with only authentic emotion. Old boyfriends: love that withered for good reason. Places of my youth, the elements of my composition; I took you there many times. Others I keep: My humiliation is mine alone to savor.

I feel a sense of completion, a readiness to proceed. Seen all the past with more clarity and with the benefit of youth-accumulated wisdom. I know fallacious memory and learned where I was in error. I remember now vividly, through records kept and samplings of memories without -- and from the dusty corners of my own heart -- how it really was. What I conclude is that what was given away is reclaimable. What was discarded will not be sought. What is now should be demolished and a thing more sound conceived and realized. For future.

Future happens anyway, even when up to the knees in the past. Experiences build in perpetuity, imperceptibly, over old structures. Careful not to ignore them. I won’t. New friends. Ahh, those interests sparked fresh, I will follow them. There are goals within reach and serendipitous meetings to be cherished. I witnessed it all, one eye trained there even as I worked on the background.

With the folding over of this year, a purposive step over the threshold toward clean slates of each 365 days, toward the virgin canvases of years anticipated. A nod of acknowledgment to those on the other side: I'll call from the doorjamb.

I will try always to choose the things that are lifegiving.