The faces around our antique dining room table are an endless shuffle playlist, but today it's just me, Liz, and the Geege.
Liz tells us about the gradual emancipation of slaves in the 19th century, because these are the kinds of conversations that happen here, and we split the last piece of bacon.
Then mid-philosophical musing, GG grabs her--
"Look what's beautiful!"
Her eyes laser beam across the room onto a patch of light floating along the wall, making a shadow cutout of the tree outside our window.
"Every once in awhile, when the sun hits just right, you can see these shadows making shapes..."
***
I came to New York one year and 25 days ago. (The plan was to poetically drop this blog on my anniversary, but you can read the getting-one's-shit-together-late thing as a thematic choice.)
In digitally scrapbooking a year of my life, I thought it was important to give you a list-- The 10 Reasons Being a Barely Employed Twenty-Something Is Less Sucky Than It Sounds. Or, 5 Things About Graduating With a Humanities Degree That Don't Provoke Suicide...
But in the end it hasn't been a year of lists, it's been a year of moments.
It was the year I met a few oddballs that made me feel right at home.
Like happy songs made sense all of the sudden.
The year I got to drink beer with my dad, which is the most telling symptom of adulthood, and I learned to make guacamole (13 avocados for maximum effectiveness).
This was the year I fell in love with Tom Robbins, Junot Díaz, and John Green (and flirted with Mary Karr and Patti Smith).
The year we got caught in the rain and rainbows of the Pride Parade, and I saw my first drag show.
This was the year I shared pizza and angst and The National with one of my favorite people in the world.
(So much angst.)
It was the year I babysat a guinea pig, and "Gangnam Style" somehow happened to all of us.
It was the year I finally met some of my biggest heroes.
This was the year I got to intern with the kind of boss who wore matching socks and bowties, packed the same lunch in the same tupperware all 100 days I knew him, and showed his interns that they mattered. The year I saw my name in a byline in a very tasteful font.
It was the year I worked with someone who left me very instructive post-its.
And someone who helped me make menacing ones, a la Phoebe Buffay.
And a lot of other people who somehow made me feel welcome in the Scary Office World.
It was the year Tegan and Sara recorded a dance album (and if you've ever been to my apartment, I'm sorry I played it the way prison guards loop songs as an instrument of torture).
The year I found out church can be home, if you let it. And it can be where you find people who share your affinity for glitter and disposable cameras, and your awe of a being capable of perfect love.
Who will talk meaning-of-life with you over IPAs and hard cider anytime you need to (which turns out to be a lot).
This was the year I took the train to Brooklyn in the middle of the night so I could climb into bed with my best friend and have her tell me it's all right.
The year I watched some of the people I love face the big grown up kind of loss, the kind I can only shiver at and hurt for, secondhand.
And I felt the feeling you feel when you are not, cannot ever be, enough.
The year a lot of messed up people did a lot of un-wrap-my-mind-around-able things that I am ill-equipped to write about, that made all our worlds stand still.
...This was the year I learned that some people leave. It's just in their bones and you have to let them.
But (and listen here) some people stay, and you have to let them too.
Some people will belong to you long after the details of your lives overlap, when friendship is a plane ride or a handmade card or an email covertly sent at work. When it's a practice you sometimes fail at to remind each other of your devotion.
But these failures are forgiven even before they happen, because true friendship is grace.
This was the year I experienced so much grace.
***
I came to New York one year and 25 days ago.
I thought I'd find a job, a plan, an identity, but instead I found music and wine and hurt and beauty and questions.
And eventually I learned that my last blog was wrong: there is no space between diploma and real life. This uncertainty is my life, and thank God.
