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How to have a truly happy new year.

For the first time in years, I don’t remember my New Year’s resolution from January. Usually, I write it down in my journal or on a note I stick to my mirror. There’s been many of those dog-eared sticky notes from years past. The year of contentment. Speaking life. We passed pancakes across the breakfast table on January 1st this year. “What do you want from 2018?” I can’t remember my answer. I know what I didn’t want though. I didn’t want to walk into her office and share the parts of my life I’m inclined to hide. I didn’t want to Facetime her the day after she delivered her baby that never breathed. I didn’t want to spend four months wondering how I’d walk into her house on Christmas day and see her empty chair. I didn’t want to go on another first date that led nowhere. We sit across from each other in a little coffee shop in Colorado, picking at a charcuterie board. “When I think about all of the things I have left to go through,” her voice cracks....

Cracks and Question Marks

I walk across the university campus for one of the last times, keeping my head down to block the rain. The cracks in the concrete zigzag and connect to each other at random points. 

From under my hood, I can’t see the basement of the music building where I used to wait outside my music teacher’s door in first year, praying for strength to hold my tears until after the lesson.

Or University College. Third floor. Monday class. We discussed the stories we’d written, but mine were always “too innocent”. Not enough sex or despair.

Or the Kresge Building, where we talked about God as a hypothetical.

The rain continues to fall and I can see the feet of students rushing past me on the sidewalk. I want to connect the cracks in the concrete, but some of them are solitary lines and some of them shoot away in unexpected directions.

I may never know why I met the brown-eyed girl when her mom was dying, or why I had coffee with the professor who agreed that we didn’t get along, or why I kept meeting and re-meeting the boy searching for philosophical answers.

That’s okay because it never was my job to form the lines.

Only to walk in them.

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12


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