January

My year started with a midnight kiss with a guy I'd been seeing for a couple weeks, some dancing and a lot of hipsters. Do you want to go to the Warpaint show on New Years Eve, he had asked. I don't know, was my response. It's a day fraught with symbolism. Maybe we shouldn't. Later I recanted: Ok, I will go to the Warpaint show with you on FRIDAY.

A few days later it was back to work after two weeks of mucking about, staying up too late, and trying to get comfortable with myself in a home that felt newly foreign to me. I did not handle the transition back well at all. Work felt like something to "get through" while my attention was elsewhere, saying yes to dates and stalking the arts calendars for things to get me out of the house. It was a cold January and that did not help things, dragging all the plants inside and clumsily wrapping the pipes. So I said yes instead to dinners and Aeros games and pie and films about Alan Ginsberg and painting with pinot and supersized Jenga and dark animations.

By the end of the month that boy I'd been seeing called me out for dating multiple people: It's ok, he said, I understand and I don't blame you; but I thought about it and I'm not really ok with it. "And then I realized that the idea of not seeing you didn't really bother me that much." I remember sitting and letting this statement sink in, and realizing that I felt the same way. Huh, I said. Yeah. And then probably: "I feel like a jerk."

January was a month of saying yes. Not always to the right things and not always for the right reasons, but I started saying it, and I said it over and over. Eventually I realized that I didn't need a date to go out and do the things I wanted to do, and by the time February hit I was dating no people.