To Closure

It seems that the very air around me is charged with electricity. Can you feel it too? Oh but it's magnificent, isn't it? There are exiting things coming soon, I promise. Twenty-ten is going to be a huge year for our little family of two. Twenty-ten means graduating, finding a job, selling our first home, moving our tiny family, recreating our old lives in a new city. Twenty-ten means it has started, the beginning of the end. The momentum is tactile. I can see it in every snowflake that falls. When I close my eyes I can almost taste it. Oh but it tastes good!

As soon as the presents had been opened and the turkey aroma began to fill my parents house I started to realize it, you know? I started to realize that this it it, our last Christmas as students. Can you believe that? Can you wrap your head around that? Try it, it's freaky! Four years, four Christmases, and we did it. Better words have never been typed on an iBook threatening to die on you, but wouldn't you agree?

A quick glance around my living room and I know I am in the right place to start a new decade. Our Christmas decorations are looking slightly askance, the tree leaning sideways just-so. The Holbs is in his sparkly New Year cone hat watching Kenny Chesney sing barfy cowboy songs on the TV (don't even get me started on Kenny Chesney, Internetters), with Peter Pan passed out on the floor cuddling a dirty sock and Barnaby MacDuff perched on his little pillow. My cute little house that has meant the world to me these four years. When I look at it all I am stunned at my blessings. Goodness! I tell you, I'm starting to think this might all be a trick. How could anything this wonderful really exist for someone like me? Could these four years have gone any better? Good gravy! I ask you, could this have been any more wonderful? Could it have been any more fantastic? More nurturing? More difficult?

Naturally I am terrible at looking back. I try to ever so hard but I can't seem to get back too many chapters before getting horribly distracted. My sisters can recall their childhoods to startling degrees, can mentally navigate through the towns we lived in, while I can barely remember the names of people I went to high school with. What is that about? I figure I am just a creature of anticipation is all there is to it. After I have felt every last bit of what I'm experiencing right now I have to find something to look forward to or else I will simply wither away in a most dreadful and tragic way. Wouldn't that be sad? My delicate soul is saved by whatever is soon, whatever is next, whatever is exciting. Every night I drift to sleep to the sparkly melody of anticipation; what I will eat for lunch, what I will wear, where I will go when the morning dawns. Without a plan before sleep I can become quite depressed and surly upon awakening, and I am very frightening when I am surly, you'll just have to take my word for it. Clearly this leaves very little room in my brain for memories, you see. I am why that guy invented souvenirs, obviously.

(Also but my iTunes just started playing a very lovely song for me and when I went to see what it was I saw that it was the New Moon soundtrack. How should I feel about that exactly?)

Closure has always been a saving grace to my life. I like for things to have a definitive ending. I like me a clean slate. Close the book. This is why I like Mondays so much. You can make anything right on a Monday. So rather than a review of twenty-oh-nine like so many have done so well, let's just take a minute in here to say goodbye instead, how's that?

Dear 2009,

Thank you for being so wondrous. Thank you for being so dratted difficult.

I hereby declare the year two thousand-nine closed.

xoxo,

Nat The Fat Rat

(your turn)