I’ve grown weary of writing about my life. What once felt like a ground strike of purpose, the filling of a great pool one cupful at a time, has become a meretricious dance of expectancy. I no longer observe my life in poems and find narratives in my woe. I gaze up at a moment of irony or a spring of hurt and eye it with the jadedness of someone who has too long felt obligation to such a thing.

But weariness has been the cool current that has moved me through the entirety of 31. A creature of misplaced trust, waiting for its dues. But never did the laurels come to be rested upon, never did the rain cease. 31 was trial after trial, often times overlapping, and I’ve long since stopped looking for the lessons in that. 31 has left me cash poor and soul penniless. So conditioned for the strife, I no longer know how to live in peace. Sitting upon my free hours with bloated belly like a single minded dragon. I’ve lost the taste for normalcy, and all the harmless little annoyances that brings. I don’t have a tolerance for small problems, drained hours, lost time. I’ve come to hoard what is mine with the fierceness of a beast, once wounded and never healed.

Such am I to lament what is lost, what had the possibility to be enjoyed and wasn’t, this brings me deep sadness. An awful companion to weariness, the grief of it. I will never be 31 again and I am sooner to find vicious satisfaction in that fact than soft fondness.

But I did learn lessons, against my better laid plans. I learned, with more dismay, that I have ushered away eras that could have been eons. Eons that I would have known contentment, if I hadn’t have known restlessness when they were actually unfolding. I learned that I have sowed the seeds of my own displeasure and I never knew until they flowered. Now they litter the space beneath my feet – and I have also learned that I don’t much like trampling. I unlearned a bit of that lesson and have since learned it again.

But I am too soft for the worst of the lessons I learned. A council of lessons that ladder up to a larger central truth, that people only care about you shallowly, in the moments when they feel some generosity. But mostly, people need you, and that is not the warm thing that it sounds. I am the only of the broken animals in my company that I have not saved.

I comfort in the idea that life is long. That there is time for me to have better years, and for me to save myself. I reject the idea that I stress too much in favor of the truth that I can’t escape your unpleasantness. 31 was dazzling proximity to unpleasantness. And what a dear I’ve been, all these years, to be an apologist of it. My how you’ve profited from three solid decades of my spectacular tolerance. It has ruined me. Down to nubs, I am, a grey scale version of who I was.

And gosh did I love her, that girl you desaturated. Boy was she bold, and stylish, and dreamy, and strong. The passion she indulged, the hope she kept, the beauty she cultivated. That’s what she was: a garden, thoughtfully planted, carefully trimmed, opulent in all that she was. I miss her, and I keep thinking I might find her at the bottom of a therapy session or in a Sunday when the conditions are right. I hope she’s not gone, I hope she comes back.

In 32, I might even be foolish enough to hope. Already I’ve turned inward and rediscovered something I left here in a springtime of cottonwoods, sometime around 2010. Already I’ve proven that some of my gumption remains. Already I understand that 31 was the year the veil blew off my head and I saw something of what the world really is. And I think things will be better without it, once I unwrap it from around my neck and stop treating it like a noose.

In 32, I will celebrate the publication of a book I started at 19. The opening lines divining themselves to me in a bathtub while I watched my fingers steam. I proved to that girl, 13 years ago, that she was capable of summiting her pain. I will prove to the girl who was 31 that she can do the same. I am still weary, I might wish to lay down and sleep right where I am before stepping one foot into that intention, but I believe that life is long. And that this might be a better year, and that I can save myself.