the time before
Happy New Year!
It started like this: twenty minutes before midnight, I resolved to be nicer to Bear when he interrupted something I was doing. At midnight, Bear and I were lying around in his mother’s guest bedroom. We had just finished packing, and we’d forgotten to calculate for gifts, so it was much harder than on the way over. It was much more like the kind of practical logic puzzle I’ve always been disappointing at. Our flight was horribly early the next morning.
“Happy New Year!” said Bear.
I reached for him and somehow managed to claw his face. He turned and his knee slammed into my leg. OW.
A minute later, I was checking my phone, doing something extremely important that I can’t remember, and Bear said, “What are you doing?” and I said, “Can you just let me do this, please?!” And broke my resolution. Awesome.
But then, horribly early the next morning, we were on a plane, flying over the whole country, and it was surprisingly big, and I felt a little like God or a hawk might feel, tracing the sweet curl of overlapping highways with my eyes– enjoying that faint, graceful human symmetry against the massiveness of nature. I thought about the people who live by the base of all those mountains, and the people who live near the start of great forests, and all of the people who live in the wild open spaces that look to me like montages out of movies that will have werewolves later, and I was pretty awed. And cowed. Which is a great word. I had been planning on getting things done on my computer, but instead I stared out the window at the world and felt fulfilled.
I have been trying to think of good New Year’s resolutions. But what I really want to write about is the time before. Because I know I’m in it. I’m in this lucky, easy grace period that happens sometimes when you’re young. And it’s easy not to think about where you are. You’re more likely to think about how you were once there, later, when you’re not anymore. And then you say things like, “I didn’t even know how good I had it.”
For the record, I am trying to know how good I have it.
Kate on January 2nd 2012 in Uncategorized