2008: Last Year? Weather...

I'm back from the family trip. Here's what I'll say: complicated. I knew what was coming. I wrote this other long, mountain metaphor on the plane ride there too:

Is my goal, my therapy goal, my pinnacle on a mountain of happy life, to simply endure the pain? To find lists and numbers and poems and friends with whom to laugh through the tears, because maybe Dolly's been right all along; or is it to not feel hurt anymore? To reach the top of this painful mountain, the height of which squeezes air out of my lungs and sense out of my brain, chapping my body in the wind, to make it down the other side to a first aid tent full of familiar faces?

As always, I know it's both. Not always that I've known, no, that's come recently and will change again, but always that both and more answers are correct. I've climbed some mountains, summitted, set up camp to live on the hardest or easiest or between part, and climbed or fallen back down the other side. I've jumped from mountain to mountain, bouncing off Solitude simply to get lost in the cold expanse of Heartache. I've traversed up and down Healing: conquering, slipping, simply surviving.

I walk on. I skin my knees, or crack the surface of a bone, even break one--but only kinda. I feel the sun warm my face and only enjoy the run because it's raining.

I don't know if I'll laugh or cry this trip: I expect both.


Blah blah. It gets a little melodramatic, but whatev. I love me some extended metaphors.