Year-End Blowout
It’s been one full calendar year that I’ve been going to my current Daytime Employment Experience (DEE). I started as a temp, and temped for ten weeks, then was not asked to return and spent two glorious wonderful late-April weeks in Central Park (possibly the anti-highlight of ‘06 – something so perfectly unspectactular it was soul-etchingly memorable). I was asked back beginning May 1, and have been where I’ve been – in different offices, on different floors, filling various capacities at several pay scales – ever since.
My God. It’s been a whole year. Is this how quickly life goes when you’re an adult?
No, the jaded adults say. It goes even more quickly.
The funny thing is, all I said when I got to my workplace last February was that I was a writer. But while it’s true that I had been a writer, I was not then a writer. I wrote a bunch at work, still do, but not from my self as a source but more like my brain as a mirror. The words come out and they can be long and meaningful, like loving glances at sunset, but I’m not really there.
I haven’t written in an entire flippin’ year. Apologies for uncaught strides.
Today called for a celebration, even though there was work to be done and no one really cared that I’d been there for a year. Rightfully so: I was only a temp then, and I did have those two weeks off, and plus people have lives to lead and all and so forth so I wasn’t expecting to be sitting at my desk poring over a document when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appears in the doorway with a cake and balloons and those July 4th sparklers (all symmetrical about the person holding the cake, naturally).
This is not bitterness, no, and this is not self-pity, oh no. This is me, once again celebrating an anniversary, a year since something that happens not to fall on January 1st. It’s a day to reflect — not from my brain, the mirror but from my soul — the image I have stored of who I was.
And beautifully, it is not a reflection at all for I am not the same, in look or life.
Entirely unchanged, but for the grace of God, remain I.
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