The sunsets here are beautiful.  Orange, pink.  Fading with an inexorable, unbearable slowness to blue and black.

Another day.

Gone.

*  *  *

A while ago, I screwed something up.

We’re not talking some little thing that’s easily fixed.  We’re talking something big, something involving other people and a couple core parts of myself, too.  Something easily fixed, sure (most things are, really), but the fading of it, the moving from the orange-pink glow of day to the enveloping blackness — it’s hard.

Really, really hard.

The kind of hard where you wonder if you’re the same person.  The kind of hard where you know that not only are things going to be the same, but they’re going to be irritatingly the same.  You know better; you know different.  You are different.

Different, but wrapped in the dusk of Really Bad Choices.

Lessons learned.

*  *  *

Is it wrong to wish we’d never met?

Don’t answer that; I know.

*  *  *

There’s a scene in Lilo and Stitch, as ridiculous as it is to be thinking about Disney movies at a time like this, where Stitch is in a small wooded clearing, trying to read a book about a lost duckling, and he looks up at the sky and says, in the saddest little monster-voice, “I’m lost.”

I cry every time I watch that movie, at that scene.  Even though I know it all turns out for the best — that this little blue imaginary monster finds his family and all is well — I still cry.  Every. single. time.

I get it.

And I’m starting to wonder if there’s a me to be found.

Just over six months ago, I sat here, in frigid temperatures, coffee in hand, talking to a friend until my phone nearly died on me from all the time spent caffeinating in the dark.  There were piles of dirty snow and wet December streets, and my hair smelled like mangoes and pink grapefruit.

I remember thinking this was a strange olfactory dichotomy.

Nothing about me was healthy then.

I remember also thinking that if I could just give it a year, it would all sort itself out, as it all tends to do.

Faith, I thought.  Have faith.  In what you feel, in what you know to be true.

Three days later, I strapped on the high heels and loaded the office into a bag and took off for parts unknown, for reasons unknown.

I took the drugs that poisoned the cells that made me all yellow and tired, printed a boarding pass, took a deep breath.

I jumped.

I always do.

To be honest, it was about time.

I don’t even know where “home” is anymore.  Does it exist? Is it where your heart is?  Is it where you grew up, have roots, have connections to things larger and more deep than your Self?

Or is it where you’re planted, where you grow out instead of up?  Where you put your heart, where it’s cared for, where it’s needed?

All I know is that I sat here, just over six months later, wondering how it had ever been half of the time I allotted.  Amazed that the lack of snow and streets was replaced by puddles and steam from the day’s heat, drinking the same coffee, and looking at the phone, thinking that maybe a little reaching out was needed.

Six months, a day.

It seems like forever, and no time at all.

So much has gone on, so much is going on, so much is coming down the pike.

Another year.

Can I be happy now?