And the year fades away

I feel like a firework; year-ends do that to me, they pump me full of feckless anticipation, theatrics and brinks, and an explosion is imminent. I feel it's necessary to terminate this segment of time, this so-called "year", with a satisfying bang, with some morsel of writing penned like a masterpiece, something to make more than just a pinprick mark on the implacable turn of the minutes. And so I've been typing and deleting and fretting, and wearing jagged grooves into my mind with endless pacing thoughts, because I've promised myself that this firework will deliver an end-of-year entry that will outshine the grainy sparkles of a year's worth of writing, and slather the upturned faces of shadowy spectators with technicolour rainbows.

It won't, but hope is a marvellous thing.

So. New Year's nearly upon us; it's just about time to hold the mirror up and look the passing year in the face. This year for me has been a year filled like no other, and it feels twenty times more "real" - and I suppose...I believe it's thanks to this very journal. When did I turn into a currency trader? I take greedy fistfuls of the nickels and dimes of ordinary daily life and convert them into gilded words, using an exchange rate that is as erratic as the stockmarket, and more so because it's dependent on my mood. When did I become a wizard? I magically stop time by etching the fleeing moments into digital space. Does it validate my existence somehow? Does it fortify my memories, or prove them?

I've been reading through old entries, to fuel my exacting retrospection. Sometimes, my words make me smile, when I've written something I couldn't have said in a better way, or had a thought that made the effort of writing it worthwhile. But sometimes...most times, I balk at the ungainliness of the younger me, at the quavering youthful teen finding her footing on the slippery cliff-faces of written eloquence. Sometimes I'll succumb to a wave of sickly disgust; hotly self-conscious, I'll claw at my head in a futile attempt to tear out the mind that ever spawned such writing, and I wish I could slump onto the backspace key and delete delete delete, erase every trace, for it never happened, honest! And then I'll apologize to the world, and tell them they missed nothing.

But that would be to shoot myself in the foot. Like a rock in rapids, or a mountain in a maelstrom, my archives are to cling to. Like I'm afraid that without them I'm just a frightened mind in suspension, disconnected from a past I can't recall, and denied from a future I can't see. Fortunately, I don't think that deeply, at least not all the time - only in rare instances of existential frenzy. But it's nice to have the reassurance. The last 17 years of my life are a grey-mist haze: large chunks of my life ravaged by the failure of neurons and the relentless passage of time. But this year...this year, words have been my armour. Somehow, this year has felt real.

If a girl existed in the woods, and there is no one around to notice it, and nothing to prove she's existed...has she existed at all?

I often wonder how it would be for my older self to read the me of this moment. I imagine it would involve criticism, large vats thereof, and more waves of self-conscious disgust at my naivete. But if I were to show this journal, this blog of mine to the kid version of me, I imagine it would be rather difficult to explain to her why I do it; why I derive pleasure from writing it, and not from, say, running around making barking noises for my imaginary dog (anymore).

Indeed. How did I, as a child, resolve silently to always remain a child, to always run ahead and hide round corners and fidget and pretend to soar off the sidewalks, only to wake up one day and realize that I had turned into a sedentary adult while I wasn't looking? How did I go from being an itinerant wannabe princess in pretty frocks one year, to a geometric construction of elbows and knees in grubby jeans the next? And then again, into chic heels and a mind like broken glass?

How did I happen?

But therein lies the answer, really. I don't know why I don't derive pleasure from childhood frivolity anymore, because I don't know how I grew up, or changed; and that is because I was never looking. Memory, it remembers the dots, but not how they join; it remembers the phases without the interim, the islands without the seas, the destinations without the journeys.

And so, even though she wouldn't understand, and I'd have to hang on to her hand to stop her from spinning away in a whirlwind of delightful abandon before I've finished, I'd tell my younger self: I don't know why I don't like having a fake dog anymore, or why I've given up wanting to be a princess. I don't know what happened to you when I turned into me. But listen, I'm shovelling my life word by word into this blog-shaped hole, so that I'm always looking, and I won't miss a thing this time. That's why I do it; it's my way of saying "I happened, and this is how". This time, I'm taking the interims, the journeys, the dot-joiners and the seas as my literary prisoners.

I'll incarcerate them in my writing, these elusive moments; and just like that, I'll make them eternal.

Happy New Year, you all.