2012: "Bye! See ya! Bye! See ya!"*

My favorite part of 2012 was the New York City Marathon. It never happened, of course—I’ll do it next year instead—but building up the distance, establishing the routines, internalizing the long-distance running habit in such a way that I seldom made bad/unhealthy decisions, this is how heavily it weighed on me, is something I can think back on right now and say that I really enjoyed.

The best moment of 2012 was a specific run. One Saturday afternoon in late September I took off from my apartment and went south all the way down Bedford until I hit the water. Then I swung left, crossed a bridge, and ultimately arrived at Fort Tilden. At that point in my training, sore legs and sore feet were a simple fact that I didn’t bother complaining about anymore. But I could not have anticipated how good it would feel to walk down the wet shore and soak my feet in the ocean. It was also a pristine fall day, with the sky a blinding shade of cerulean, the sun glitterbombing the ocean, and the wind a steady, sand-stinging tug. The beach was mostly empty, it may not have even been officially open, but I stayed there for a long time, walking around in circles at the shore as the light incrementally changed and the saltwater soaked into my skin. And I wish I could articulate the overwhelming sensations I felt in a way that doesn’t sound corny. Let’s just say that I’m not immune to the ocean as backdrop for catharsis, especially since this happened around the time that I hit my ten-year mark for living in New York and was nearing the peak of my marathon training. I ended up walking the length of the shore from Fort Tilden all the way to Rockaway Park to catch the subway home, which is not an insignificant distance (about 2 miles) after a 14-mile run. In trying to reconstruct the dates, I now realize that this was just a few weeks before Hurricane Sandy. It feels like I was there much earlier than that.

I got home that evening and had a scheduled phone call with a family friend, Charlotte. She and my mom became quick friends right after my parents moved to North Carolina. Then a year later my mom got sick, and it was then that I grew close to Charlotte, as well as in the immediate aftermath of Mom's death. She was the kind of friend to whom I could say pretty much anything, contemptible or irreverent as it might have been, and she made herself so readily available to me that in retrospect I wonder where she found the energy. For a few years it was very easy to stay in touch, but then she moved away from North Carolina, and my dad remarried, and I numbed myself to a lot of family-oriented obligations, and suddenly it had been three or four years since we spoke. I scheduled this phone call with her because I’d learned a few days prior that her ex-husband and lifelong best friend, who I also knew, had died over the previous summer. How could she have been so willingly at the ready during my crisis, and meanwhile here I was plunking through something or another in my studio apartment for several months without ever being aware of hers? I guess you do what you can. Or maybe some people give and other people take.

*

In 2012 I hit ten years in New York and this might have been the first year where I looked back on the previous nine and wondered if one of them might have been better. Nothing horrible happened to me, it was just blah. There seemed to be a lot of intangible lacks—a clear future, a clear cause—as well as one or two tangible ones, like health insurance and the outlines of select people. But I paid my rent (somehow) and had a bed and heat and ate a lot of food and I didn’t suffer.

A year ago I spent New Year’s Eve at a dumpy Irish bar in South Lake Tahoe with my brother, sister-in-law, step-sister, and her friend. We got drunk and danced and capped off the night with something called a “blowjob shot.” This was just after I’d spent a quick vacation in San Francisco. It seemed at that point that I was ready to live closer to my brother, to have more space between myself and my neighbors, and that if my romantic life were to pick up again it would need a change of setting. So for most of 2012 I was reluctant to commit to anything more than two months away. I was certain that I’d move, and would do it on a dime. I wasn’t sure I’d move to San Francisco—a few months later, after I ran Robie Creek in Boise, it seemed like a fantastic idea to move back to Boise—I was convinced only I’d leave New York. “Honestly I don’t know what I’ll be doing then,” I said to my Dad when he first floated Christmas plans last spring. “I’ll probably be living somewhere else, I’ll probably have a new job. I just don’t know how much flexibility I’ll have so I can’t say right now.”

I find this to be a pretty comfortable way to satisfy the urge for change, to dance around it unproductively. I do it all the time with various projects I begin working on and later abandon. It turns out that what I ultimately needed were actual commitments—a job that got me out of the house, which I took last summer, and a challenge, the marathon, that would require some self-motivation to achieve, and I signed up for that at about the same time. This did a lot to dispel my urge to leave. (At some point early this year I wrote a story about a self-inspired character named John who is suicidal, and a few weeks ago I shared it with my writing group. No one bought the suicide part. “John isn’t suicidal,” one person said, “he’s bored.” For most of 2012, I was bored.)

But as I was telling someone at work the other day—a woman who’s a few years younger than me and seems to be going through “a typical Saturn Return”—idle, aimless hours, days, weeks, and even years, aren’t necessarily unproductive ones. “I’m starting to think that there’s no such thing as wasted time,” I said, scratching my chin and affecting a good, pontificating cock of the head. Surely you’ll have to weather the hurdles and ultimately sign a check or make some kind of sacrifice if you’re going to get the thing done, whatever it is. But the time spent taking notes, doing research, writing drafts, lying on the sofa staring at the ceiling, wading through dumb jobs that don’t seem to relate to the goal . . . it’s all material. If it’s going to happen, all that detritus will be there for you to cull from when the time comes, when you actually are ready.

* A high point of 2012 was learning this excellent exit from my 2-year-old niece. She climbs the stairs to get up to bed with her mom or dad leading her by one hand, and with the other hand she waves, gleefully wishing everyone a good night: “Bye! See ya! Bye! See ya! Bye! See ya! . . .”