My best New Year's memory

[updated to add photo of Peg and Ginny on the night described]

Well, 2006 is here and the sky out my window is filled with fireworks, some officially sanctioned, most not legal but honestly there is a large-scale fusillade in progress and it's beautiful in the winter night sky. I see the lights of a few small planes to the north - wonder how it is to watch from that vantage point.

I've been thinking today about my best New Year's memory, which actually is my best-ever memory in this life. It's a pretty simple one. Just a few years ago, I awoke on New Year's morning in Ginny's little farmhouse. The little spare bedroom was cool and the windows looked out on a grayish snowy morning. I was tucked comfortably under a quilt and entwined securely with the man I believed was finally the love I'd waited my life for. Okay, so setting aside all the A's (alcohol, anger, and abuse), I'm still not sure he couldn't have been, because I saw the so many something-more's inside him.

But this is not a waah-waah story.

The previous evening we'd had a lovely dinner out with Ginny and Bas and Mike and Katrene. Happiness is written all over my face in the photos from that night. Back at home, when the ball dropped, we toasted and kissed and he whispered "This is our year." (I used to live with a guy who made pointedly sure he didn't kiss me on New Year's after New Year's, I guess just to remind me I wasn't all that important in case I ever managed to escape that knowledge for a single second...) I remember that kiss and those words - I remember not having to hope that the one I loved would give me that moment's consideration, and being delighted when he did.

It was a year, all right. It was a year of death, job loss, bankruptcy, illness, torturous breakup, and relocation to the other side of the continent.

I feel... not cocky or proud, but grateful that I was the one who released that future, whether or not anyone thinks I didn't do it soon enough. I did it, and years sooner than I might have because I've certainly had a track record of sticking with someone long past the point where I've become the insignificant other. That's the thing about me - I'm loyal and I stick.

It was a year, all right. But I woke that morning feeling tremendously satisfied and happy, surrounded by love, eager to move into the future (wow, how wrong I was!), and that everything was right. Not that everything was perfect - there were already enough danger signs. But that everything was right.

The house isn't Ginny's anymore, nor her next house either. My relationship ended, her marriage ended, I moved back across the country again. And those are just a few things on the list of changes in this roller coaster car of a life that jumped the tracks a long time ago. But with all that's happened since, I find that I now hold that memory without any baggage, with love and not with the later pain. I hope that it continues in me to be capable of separating the strands of loss and protracted struggle and find those memories completely untarnished by their epilogues. I've never felt happier and more serene and more loved than I did that morning, down to my toes and with my whole soul. I don't want to forget that.