New Year

I think it's appropriate to write something new year-y. Like Beanie, my overriding desire is to say a resounding "fuck off" to 2007. What a pile of shite this year has been. Characterised by heartbreak, fear and bereavement, it is very hard to see the good. At work, despite vowing to be more conscientious, I have been spun away from my good intentions and have spent long hours unaware of time passing and things going undone. The people I grew up with are all earning huge amounts more than me and I feel that I have wasted so much time. With my friends, I have continued to be selfish and inconsiderate and, most of all, lazy. I don't know where I stand with half of them, the smallest thing makes me want to run and hide and I often feel that they look at me and think me ridiculous or stupid. I keep having tiny fits of fear where I panic about things, whether it's the wedding where I will see Muleboy and I have managed to gain a stone and my hair looks like shite. At the wedding, where the most I felt was an overriding sense of oddness, I found out he is now living near me and spent a couple of hours in town today afraid that I'd see him and fretting about what I would do if I did. I cook up little Bette Davis style quips that would be perfect but know I'd forget them or stammer them if I saw him.

For my New Year celebrations, I stayed at home, alone. I had phonecalls from Big Sis and my parents, both at separate parties and both of which I was invited to, wishing me a Happy New Year. I ate a great deal of chocolate, drank some fizzy wine and cried a lot. I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again. It is my favourite film. This title has been a shifting target in the past but this has stayed at the number one spot for a while, probably since I first watched it. There is nothing about it I don't like. It was painful as it is something that makes me think of MuleBoy. We always said that he is Joel and I am Clem. Watching it again, I think this is fair. He chose me because he saw in me something that could rescue him from his life; something that was exotic and different to that that he had experienced before. I chose him because he was decent and good and seemed like a safe harbour. In the end, my difference became something that pushed him away, he could never cope with the fact that I did not, actually, complete him. Which explains why he would choose someone else; so safe, so dull, so much more like an actual girlfriend should be. And so much for my safe harbour. I toyed with the idea, when in New York, to take the train to Montauk to see if it would work and he would be there but he wouldn't have been and it would have been a day in New York wasted. He was never as romantic or as aware of my wishes and feelings as I would have liked. If I am honest, and for some reason I am being, there was part of me that wanted more and was scared about getting married because being in love with him was never the way I expected it. I never expected something extraordinary but I did want more than I got. He always expected me to know that he loved me without him saying anything, he made it clear at times that he resented my presence and got angry when I cried and wanted more from him. He quite often made it difficult for me to spend time with other people and expected me to bend over backwards for him without giving in return. I sometimes wonder what I was thinking but look back and try to remember that in there, when I still was, the good times outweighed the bad. It is all that has happened since then that has made this so difficult to remember. The fact that there was so much deceit in the last couple of months. The fact that he expected me to come straight back to him without any effort to change or to try and actually win me back in any way, as though the fact of him asking should be enough to wipe out the time that I have spent in pain. The fact that him asking has been rendered insincere by his relationship with someone else and he hasn't even tried to redress that in any way. He is a coward and not anywhere near the man that I hoped he was.

The last paragraph underlines another negative point; that I am obsessed still with the situation and will try to harp on about it despite the fact that other people are bored with it and dealing with their own, far more interesting, lives. When my friends are going through happy and sad times of their own, how can I continue with these lines of thought? Shouldn't I be over it by now? Shouldn't I have dealt with it and moved on? But I don't even know how to begin.

So my New Year's Resolutions have to be for me to change my life for the better. It may be in small ways to begin with but that should eventually lead to an overall change. I will eventually come through this and be less insecure, less fat, more focussed. I may occasionally wish that my memory could be erased by Lacuna Inc, but, as the film makes clear, we make mistakes but if we don't learn from them we are doomed to repeat them. I know what I want now. I know where I went wrong. I want to do better.