It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’ve been trying to complete my normal ritual of cleaning the house and getting to bed at my usual time. I’ve never seen the point of toasting the new year at midnight, when it’s dark and cold. I enjoy instead getting up at sunrise on New Year’s Day.
However, I’m having a hard time this year because I’m not looking forward to tomorrow. I’ve achieved none of the goals I set for myself this year. I didn’t finish any books or screenplays. I didn’t find a job. I didn’t lose any weight. I didn’t finish mourning Hal. Essentially, I’m no better off this year than I was last year or the year before that.
I don’t have anything to look forward in the New Year. Instead, I have a list of things I have to endure, a list of things to give up. I feel like a person who had one year to live and now realizes she wasted most of it. Only it’s not me that’s dying, it’s my stories and my characters. I will go back to work next year, assuming I can find a job, and the characters I’ve spent the last year falling in love with will die of neglect. I don’t have the energy to both work and write.
In any case, this blog is done. I will take it, along with my first blog, and combine it into a memoir of what my life has been like since my husband died. Maybe someone will find it instructive. I’m not sure I did.
