The end of this year seems to have crept up on me quietly with the semester speeding by. This is coupled with the surreality of the year turning into 2010 and being able to remember it becoming 2000 and all of that associated chaos. Because I'm a 1990 child, this was an important decade, one in which the things I remember from the beginning are from my childhood, but the later parts are animated with the experience of actually living them.
I looked at a few top 100 songs of the 2000s lists and the songs from early in the decade seem so far back to the point of parody. All of them are part of some ridiculous youth that is barely comprehensible now. Things begin to get shady in the middle. The line between childhood and young adulthood is vague and hard to comprehend and things like the years attached to songs are not necessarily reflective of their engagement with my consciousness. Still, around 2005 it becomes hard to tell. My sister was born in 2006 and I still remember the songs I sang to her when she came home from the hospital, Death Cab For Cutie and other songs that caught in my chest as I rocked her on the porch. Those songs are part of my living and feeling.
So now it's almost the end of the year. I'm still at school, still sorting out the last few days before I hop a train back for a few weeks, spend a few days in the bed which does not feel like mine anymore, see my arts group friends, catch up with a world that is overfull and busy and I no longer have a real space in. And then I'll come back here. To snow so cold my face turns pale and pink at once, and love and warmth that illuminates me from my core.
I try to remember. Try to be aware of how and when things change, when, as my adviser says, I found the last piece of the puzzle, understood the answer that was there all along. I try to notice and remember so that I can keep changing and growing, keep singing and looking out at the sun.
It's not always easy, but usually I can sing even when the sky goes gray for months.
