As All Things Go

It’s funny how in such a short span, your life can change. Forever, just like that. The days and the nights appear and disappear as they always do, but you’re not the same person that you were the day before. In my absence from this space, several suns and moons rose and vanished in the hazy Shanghai sky. The trees outside my window, so familiar and static every time I stare out from my room into the rest of the world, continue to bristle in the breeze as they always do. But I will never be the same again.

The rest of the planet moves forward, and though I’m backward right now, soon I will have to catch up. I looked in the mirror this morning, another sleepless night closed out with the grey, heavy heat of morning. I’ve lost a lot of weight. The beer belly has shrunk down to a mere red-wine belly. Depression makes your body do that. It makes your soul not want to do the things it should be doing. Like staring out at the moving world when your heart is anchored down by pain and ghosts and questions.

Keep moving forward, keep groping for the future. This is what I tell myself.

Another year has gone by, and tonight I celebrate my birthday once again. Loyal readers will remember the celebration last year, a bonanza of booze and friendship and hopefulness. Hope that another year would bring completion, bring love and joy that defines the process of growing up. And indeed it has. Along with the requisite pain.

But tonight, as all the dearest people in my life who live in this city (sans a crucial one) gather at the swankiest new night club to fulfill their obligation of making me happy, I stand on the cusp of another new panda age. What will the next year bring? What kind of life will I live at age 28? I expect it to be filled with equal amounts of joy, pain, suffering, ecstasy, and love that my 27th year ended on. And you know what? That’s not half bad.

Wil used to say that all things are circular. All that I’ve given to situations and to people, whether bad or good, will come back to me. Love will come back to me. Sorrow will, as well. But I hope love more than sorrow, because that’s what I’m good at giving. My heart is big, and it will be filled again.

On the day after my birthday, a couple of days ago, I stumbled into the office fresh from a goodbye that never should have happened. I was greeted with the news that Jean, who as much as anyone has come to define who I am as a human being, gave birth to her beautiful baby boy on the same day 28 years after I was born. I had been joking with her for months before that she had to have her baby on the same day as my birthday. And what the fuck, it actually happened. I smiled when I heard that…and kept right on smiling.

All things are circular. May her son be blessed with the love and the warmth that I’ve experienced so much of, and will eagerly wait for someday. As all things go, as all people find who they are and with whom they belong, as all things are circular…this world is still a fucking magical place. It’s just TIME that’s a royal pain in the ass.

Happy Birthday to myself. Happy Birthday to Jacksan Poe Gorman. May you live two hundred beautiful years. Tonight, I drink to all that is good in my life, including all that has left and will return.