Retrospective

Current mood: grateful
Here it is...over half-way through November and the year is coming to a quick close! I cannot believe how quickly it has flashed by!
Every year, about this time, I get into this retrospective mood. I can't explain why...I don't really know, but I become this incredibly deep person that I love and miss for the whole following year, until this time rolls back around.
This year has been one that will certainly go down in my memory book as a time of revolutionary growth for me. The year began with me still in Iraq...and I remember New Year's Eve very well. It was a bitter-cold evening. Everyone around got out their secret bottles of booze (the ones that they had managed to not drink in the previous weekends of craziness). I heard Jeni's bottles clanging, and Jade ruffling under her bed to try to find her bottle of Vodka. Haha. Those were some good times...what a bunch of alcoholics we all were!
But alcohol was not on my agenda that evening. I wanted to go outside and feel the breeze. I wanted to go to the phone center and call my friends and family back home. I bundled up, picked up my M-16 and headed out the door of our barracks building towards the designated bus stop, which was about a quarter of a mile away. After exhausting an hour waiting for a bus to show up...I decided to go by foot. (This was about a 4 or 5 mile journey.)
That night, I truly felt the fact that I was in a foreign land, alone and vulnerable to many dangers as the wind blew chills right through me. I didn't look around much as I walked... I mostly tried holding my booney cap on my head, in an attempt to also block the wind from my ears. I saw some headlights, but no tail-lights...to my luck. So I just kept walking. A part of me hoped that someone would be kind enough to be willing to drive back towards town with me. But no one stopped, no one bothered to offer me a ride. Before long, I was crying. I was so cold, and I was too far to turn back around.
I remembered how I had spent so many of my nights drinking in the previous weeks. Drinking was the only comfort that any of us had to numb us to the fact of how much it sucked being so far from our lives...our loved ones, and our dear friends. Drinking was the only drug to keep us away from the harsh realities.
But New Year's Eve, I was not in the mood to drown the emotions I was feeling. I wanted to feel again... I just wanted to let myself feel a little fear, a little cold, a little pain... And that I did. With this one gush of wind that chilled me to the core, I felt my heart skipping beats in my chest.---I had never cried like that, and have yet to cry like that again. I suppose that at that moment, I was too strongly conscious of the presence of that all-powerful God of Youth—of that capacity to be entirely transformed into an aspiration or idea—the capacity to wish and to do—to throw oneself headlong into a bottomless abyss without knowing why or wherefore. I was conscious of the fact that I was going home in a few months and that my life would be frightenly different. I was conscious of the presence of God...and the hand that He played in having sent me to a desert land to experience first-hand the woes of religious extremism, of ignorance, and of intolerance... to experience first-hand why politics should and do matter to my daily life... to experience first-hand how ONE person can at least change the world for one other person.
That night, as I continued walking towards the phone center, I grieved the loss of my closeted life, the loss of my barrier from the world, the loss of my ability to deny who I am, and the loss of my capacity to live selfishly and so unaware of the woes of people both around me and far away. I was, a new person. I was scared, not for my life...though perhaps that was one night, if any, that I should have been. I was frightened of the unknown...the uncertainties of my future.
And it's funny how tonight...as I sit here on my bed, in the comforts of the home I grew up in...with blankets to keep me warm, with no need for an M-16, and with the world at my finger-tips...I feel the same fear, the same cold, and the same pain of the uncertainties of tomorrow.