Dude. I feel like you've been hanging in the shadows a bit. One moment you're on the way, and the next moment -- or so it seems -- you're leaving. It's my fault, really. I should have paid more attention to you. I should have slowed down, stopped to look at you from a different angle, analysed you, explored you. Instead, I got caught up in living and you drifted by while I was hardly noticing.
I have to say, 2012, you're not my favourite year. We don't part as best friends, that's for sure. But we're definitely not enemies, either. There are things you failed to provide, but there are many many things you brought with you, too: opportunities for writing, learning, working, and being challenged. I'm especially thankful for doors that opened onto new chances to learn from clever people, and the privilege/burden/adventure of getting to do some brain-moulding of my own -- not wisely or well, but with gusto at least.
While spending your year, 2012, I let slip old habits which I'd once thought very important, and formed others that I hope might stick around a little better. Some friendships got shuffled around in the busyness of the everyday humdrum, and suffered for it. Other friendships -- some of them surprising -- blossomed and deepened into very cool things (it's always the unexpected ones). Still other relationships -- the long-term ones, the friends-forever ones -- grew solidly and well with only the much-loved, occasional watering and sunshine of face-to-face meetings.
2012, you answered some questions I hadn't even realised I'd been asking, some that had been floating around in the back of my mind and heart since I was a little kid. That was a gift I'm very thankful for. But the gift of the year -- your crowning glory, 2012 -- is the one you brought in September: a new nephew to love on and squish. Thanks for that.
I feel like you passed by unreported and unexamined in some aspects and I wish I'd had -- made -- taken more time to really look at you while you were here. But you're leaving now and I think it's for the best. You were good, 2012, but (and no hard feelings here) I'm ready to replace you with another.
Leave the door open for 2013, will you? It's soon to be shuffled in straight from the Timemaster.
Farewell,
Danielle
