Thanksgiving

I’ll be honest: Thanksgiving really isn’t my kind of holiday. It’s been a long time since the warm familial scenes at the dinner table and greeting card memories. As things stand right now, I’m holding my breath on phone calls and emails and correspondences. I’m waiting around, gathering up my options and looking hard at each of them, in hopes of divining something between the bundles of sticks and unhatched eggs. Even for everything that’s happened, I know I do have a lot to be thankful for.

In the last year I’ve been on a roller-coaster. Get-togethers and break-aparts, friends made and unmade, feelings caught in butterfly nets and then lost again, swept up in the wind and out to sea. I’ve been knocked off my horse and into the dirt more times than I’d like to count. Each time I managed to get back up, even when I didn’t think I could. I bandaged my bloodied knees and kept going, even when I thought for sure I’d fold up and fall apart.

This time, this time it will be the end of me. I just know it.

I wrote a lot of stories I was really proud of, and exceeded my publication goals for the year. I met some people that helped me do some things I didn’t think were possible. I started my novel. I found myself in the middle of something really good with somebody really lovely. I have no idea what we’re doing, or where we’re going, or what’s around the next corner. But I think I’m okay with that, because it’s going to somewhere good. I just feel it. And I just have to learn to trust that and not be afraid.

This Thanksgiving I’m getting along by the skin of my teeth, caught between held breaths and crossed fingers. Phone calls and text messages keep me company while I sit on my hands and wait the worst of this out. But I’m still thankful for everything I have, and everything I don’t, and everything else in between.

Are you?