I will write no resolution.
I say this every year~
Because if I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that the New Year does not always unfold the same way you ring it in. If that was the case, then I wouldn’t have spent 2020 looking out my window. And 2021 would have been a year of sameness, stagnancy.
I read my diary entry from last New Year’s. It’s uncanny how today, I’m tempted to write exactly what I wrote then. As much as my situation changed in 2021 – unrecognizably so – my thoughts remain remarkably the same. I bet if I found my diary from New Year’s 2011, the entries would say the same thing then, too. The Mad Libs might just read a little different.
– (Insert Girl You’re Currently Pining After) doesn’t think I’m (Insert Current Insecurity) enough to love me back.
– Your friend (Insert Person Who You Currently Compare Yourself To) is so much more (Insert Current Definition of Success) than you are.
– You’ll be a lot happier once you achieve (Insert Current Obsession) and will most definitely certainly be happy forever once you do.
I am not the same person I was in 2011, but I act the same 10 years later because thoughts beget actions. Actions beget habits and habits beget destiny. Well, I saw my destiny this year, frozen in my headlights at the end of the road. I was sure, so sure, that my mental framework would last me forever. It served me well in high school. Got me through college. But now it suffocates me. It’ll hurt like hell to shed, but it hurts even more to test the seams on snakeskin 2 years too small. I resign myself to my failure, and dutifully pack my suitcase and head out of town once more. Top hat and all.
A good friend of mine was convinced that, eventually, he could stop the constant cycle of breaking down and building up. He was determined to find the right formula, the right framework. So he read books and honed his body. A true renaissance main, he’d make Da Vinci proud and circle his own square. Shake hands with his past selves. Conquer his inner world so he could conquer his outer one. A few days ago I met up with his cousin and she gave me an earring with his ashes in them. I think he just wanted to figure it out.
In 2021, you all heard my music just in time for me to forget what music is. I fell in love so hard I almost forgot that I don’t know what love is, either. My best friend died and I realized I never really learned how to live. A year of questions and reflections. Here’s to 2022 being a year of answers and actions. I’ll get up and try again, because I’ve done it enough times now to realize that’s all we really have to do.
2021 has one more punishment left for me, but in 2022 we’re ungrounded baby. I’m getting my phone back. Allowed to sleep over at Log’s house. But enough with the metaphors. My flight takes off at 6:38 AM on New Year’s Day and I’m doing my best to find the levity in that, at least while my suitcase is still light enough to carry on. Okay, last metaphor, I promise.
I will write no resolution. Thanks for being here.
-MBK
That’s actually a pretty beautiful entry. Good job, past me. It felt powerful, too. Things changed after that one. I reached the zenith of my framework that year. ’Twas an embarrassing showing at the end of 2021, but what can I say? I was crashing out. I went back home battered and bruised. Jevandre died, I was hopelessly smitten with Codename: Emily and I tried to flush it out by hooking up with [Redacted] and attempting to reignite things with Codename: Jenny Jones. We were just supposed to go sledding but I was left feeling like a fool. And cold. As some sort of divine punishment my flight got snowed in and I was forced to stay in Kent for New Year’s Eve. It’s probably a good thing, too, because despite how seemingly self-aware the 12/31/21 entry was, I secretly hoped that I could make it back to LA in time to plant a big ol simpy smooch on Codename: Emily. God must have stopped that from happening. And it’s good, too, because that night I did some of the classic psychotic shit I’m wont to do. As the clock struck midnight, I locked myself in the background and stared at myself in the mirror until I truly saw myself. It was a bit scary. After ~4 minutes you get a sense of how you appear to others in the world. Good Lord, I looked tired. The year was weighing on me. I swore the next year would be different, and this time it felt like it would. I wrote no resolution, but as soon as I got back to LA I decided to move out of the garage. Okay, well really I had a tiny backslide with Codename: Emily, got locked out of her bedroom and slept on her couch, and THEN decided I was done.
***I never learn my lesson***
So much for “Always Never Again” mirite?
Okay, so after the briefest of detours I got my first apartment in Hollywood and was determined – no more women! No more distractions! I’m doing my own thing. What’s that thing they say about God and the plans of man? I hadn’t even started moving out of the garage by the time I met Codename: Didi. In fact, there’s a brief crossover event in which she appeared in the Melrose house, and I saw it for the first time in the light of day: a dingy railroad house with a detached garage. It wasn’t this magical place anymore. We corporeal beings try our hardest to line things up energetically, but our bodies betray our sense of timing.
***Allow me to explain***
We are the last to know when the time is up.
The Melrose house was perfect, until it wasn’t. So by the time I left, I had not only outgrown it, but recognized that I had outgrown it, so to be there was stifling and sickening. But leases and all that. So when Codename: Didi came into the house it was like someone from the next chapter appearing the page before they’re supposed to appear. The first time I noticed this phenomenon was in 2019 with Codename: Apples. We knew our time was up, but by God we kept fighting. There was even a specific end date: the beginning of grad school (hers, not mine). We were in a sort of post-relationship limbo. Undergrad had ended, but we both happened to move to Washington. Her because school was starting in Pullman in the fall, me because I wanted to save money before I went to LA. We were in the same state, so even though we knew the relationship couldn’t last beyond syllabus week, we at least had to try.
***For the people in the back***
Pullman and Kent are 8 hours apart.
When I went to go see Codename: Apples the weekend before school started, I drove my dad’s shitty Dodge Neon over the Cascades and got stuck somewhere near Spokane when it broke down. It felt like I was going out of bounds in a video game and the physics engine was crashing. The devs were saying, “don’t you know the story is over? Why do you keep playing? The map ends here.” But Christ, I loved her and I wanted to say goodbye. So I had my dad drive all the way to Spokane, swap cars with me, and I drove the remaining 3 hours. I didn’t even WANT to do this. That was the shittiest part. I had to move mountains just to do some shit I didn’t even want to do. And as soon as I got to her new apartment, and we walked around her new campus, and I got a sense of her new life, I knew I had came too far. I felt out of place, and I felt out of time. I was displaced like fuckin Billy Pilgrim. When the time came for us to say our tearful goodbye, and the universe popped our little pimple, it was already leaking. That’s gross I’m sorry. But I’m serious. My soul didn’t fit in Codename: Apples’ little apartment.
Similarly, Codename: Didi didn’t fit in the garage. And a few years later, when I went to go visit Codename: Didi in Wales, and I didn’t want to admit it was over, I felt the same thing. We were looking out beyond the edge of the world, past St. David’s, and I thought, hey this isn’t real. I shouldn’t be here. I have to go. But everything I have here, in this moment, exists only here, and the second I walk away from this little bench it’ll begin to undo itself. And it did. I didn’t think you could outgrow an entire country the same way you can outgrow a garage or a tiny one-bedroom, but our souls don’t follow the same rules our bodies do.
So she’s seeing somebody now. So? I am too. SomebodieS. Hah! Sucker. But for real, I felt relieved to hear it. Honestly. But I can’t shake the feeling that I woke up on the other end of something today. More moved on, more removed, more free. But maybe I didn’t want that? How can it ever have been real if it can dissolve so quickly? I suppose it’s been awhile. And the strangest part is understanding that you can have a few weeks, months, years with someone and they give you a lifetime of thoughts and feelings to make sense of. It’s like when you truly collide with someone’s soul there’s such an explosion of energy that… well, it’s like a big bang, where the hydrogen atoms are still twisting and rearranging billions of years later, until it all falls to entropy. I mean shit, it’s been five years and since then I’ve had 124 journal entries mentioning Codename: Apples. You meet someone, you fall in love, it ends, and then you’re left with the hydrogen atoms. Ya’ll know I always lose the metaphor.
I’m a simple guy. I want simple things in life. Money, power, fame, world domination. But in love I want the complex things like laughter and touch and kindness and smiles. I’ve been searching for one thing my whole life and I’m getting pretty good at finding something close. This year I will write no resolution, but I know that this was an extremely important 366 days. Despite the tragedies, I daresay it was my happiest. I overturned countless stones and found lots of worms and tons of slimy things. I climbed a hundred hills and felt a dozen suns. I took a thousand flights and saw two million countries. I lived in seven trillion houses and felt ten gazillion feelings. Yeah yeah, we packed it up and I lost my pillows but hey – at least I got the couch. And the towels. A jumbled definition of love that is now my intellectual responsibility to untangle. Oh, and ten thousand spoons.
***The tragic irony***
All I needed was a knife.
’Til next time -mbk
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