Death and Love and Loss and Starting Over again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

This year, I hit the ground running. On January 1st, I felt nothing but optimism, and was bright eyed and bushy tailed: ready for work, ready for love, ready to keep pushing forward. And then, all of a sudden, my life took a major turn, and I found myself figuratively locked outside in my underpants in the snow. Which is, of course, sometimes just how it goes.

In February, Rebecca Solnit gave a reading at the 92nd Street Y that I was fortunate enough to attend. I got to hear a bit of this passage read aloud when she was introduced.

From A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

"A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn't. The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of the stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt. Though I came out of this house transformed, stronger and surer than I had been, and carrying with me more knowledge of myself, of men, of love, of deserts and wildernesses.

The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story or the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else. Only when the honey turns to dust are you free... Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it changes everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked."