New Year Reflections

Past selves, potential selves, and lost selves as yearly retrospective

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This post discusses addiction, grief, loss, and suicide.

When I think of New Year’s Eve 2009, I picture the years as a staircase, each stair a different year, and I am a slinky slinking down the stairs, as slinkies do. I tumble from the stair of 2009, having been pitched on the stair journey twenty-nine years before, but instead of landing on the stair of 2010 the stairs start melting like that scene in A Nightmare On Elm Street, when Nancy is trying to run upstairs and her feet keep sinking.

I cannot stop myself from falling (because slinkies cannot stop themselves from falling) and headfirst I topple onto the stair of 2010, which has melted into a gooey void. It swallows me.

I think it was during this past year that I found the mangled slinky part of myself from 2009. It was spat out through some wormhole, back into this dimension. The slinky is no longer a slinky but a melted, gooey mass of hot pink and neon …