2009: Uncensored

New Year’s Resolution 2009

1. Live like you’re dying.

I feel like there should be more fanfare.
Now that I look back, I’ve felt that way about a shitload of things this year. Everything seems to have come and gone so quickly and quietly that their passing makes no sense. There’s no time for me to absorb it, nothing that’s hitting me and saying, HEY. IT’S OVER. YOU’RE DONE. MOVE ON.
Hello?!
It has been a strange year, anticlimactic at some points and completely miraculous at others. My life is STILL a gigantic bloody contradiction, and I’ve realized that’s not going to change. That sucks. That means I’m going to be just as confused at 44 as I am at 14. Fuck.
Maybe I’m just overanalyzing this the way I used to, but I honestly believe the number 14 means more than all those other digits or combinations of digits. Whatever. I hate numbers- they make no sense to me, they’re constructs, they place tags on things that can’t be understood through statistics but nevertheless there is this one number I wish to hang on to.
I was fourteen for the majority of 2008. And though I hate to admit how superstitious I really am underneath all the cynicism I actually think that has something to do with why this year has been such a year. I turn around and the things I’ve gone through in the past 365 days could make up a lifetime, and yet in my eyes it’s still not enough, not enough, not enough. Never enough. It’s not enough until I hit my limits and I still have no idea what and where those are.
In 2008, my father and I became a team. I met the love of my short yet still rapidly waning life, ended a two-year stop in cyberspace, and started a chain of events in the real, tangible world that will go on to shape the next decade of my existence if not my life in its entirety. I lost my lip virginity and started sleeping at 11-12. I broke up with someone for the first time, rejected someone for the first time, even smacked a guy across the face for the first time. I went from the invisible girl to the one who could have anything she wanted if she could be fucked to try, the ugly duckling to the girl three guys ask out at camp. Camp Mason. Religion, Christianity, God. My aunt. A family. My sister. Nira Martinez. Irreversibly breaking a bond. Love too much. Too hard. Too little. Not at all. Taking chances and passing up about three times as many.
Which leads me to the only thing I want to bring into 2009.
At any given moment all of this could be over. I could be standing at a funeral thinking, why did I waste all that time? It could be MY funeral, my life, my wasted life, my nothing. We are never powerless to take charge of our lives. They belong to us, and what we do with them depends on motivation, will, and as always the healthy dose of luck. But what happens when my luck runs out? Is that really the only thing my life is built on?
So I guess looking back on this year, having thrown me headfirst and more prepared than I expected into the kind of whirlwind life I’ve been waiting 13 years to live, I walk away from it knowing that all this was given to me through a little willpower and a lot of luck. And if I don’t tip the scales, even them out- it will be over. If I keep waiting to be ready I will never be ready. I am ready now. Go. Move. Run. Jump. Live. Don’t look back. There’s the world full of experiences and your clock is ticking. This is your life. You control it. Make your decisions. Make your choices. You’ve spent long enough daydreaming every night before you go to bed. Bring it to life. Here’s the path, the runway. We’ve given you the four-inch heels. Walk in them. Don’t stop. Take control.
Then lose it.