RelinqWish

(Thanks to Libay for this)

1. What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before?

Buy property in the city, move into a condo building, endure 6 weeks of dusty construction while living in the same room, break into the Manhattan corporate world, take a writing class!

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Not into the habit of making promises I can't keep

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Not so close

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Can't recall - maybe that means no

5. What countries did you visit?

France - Just Paris and the nearby Versailles

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?

Mo money, and maybe significant strides in my writing career

7. What date from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and

why?

No particular date stands out

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Buying our first home in the city after flipping the upstate weekend house

9. What was your biggest failure?

Occasionally being affected by ghosts from the past

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

No, thank god.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Thing as in item? The biggest expense that was most rewarding was the home renovation

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Ours :)

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

The behavior of "ghosts of the past" namely psychopath former bosses who couldn't handle my leaving their company and had to resort to stalking me long after the fact. Get a friggin' life.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Home improvement.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Home improvement.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?

The whole Hard Candy album of Madonna - we saw the concert in Madison Square Garden and it rocked!

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

i. happier or sadder?  

happier

ii. thinner or fatter?

I want to say thinner, but maybe I'll say healthier as this year I started working out 2-3x a week!

iii. richer or poorer?

How about more money for less work? Does that count?

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Travel.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Hesitated.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

I spent it with the one I love.

22. Did you fall in love in 2008?

Funny and cheesy but I fall in love with the same person every other day.

23. How many one-night stands?

I wish.

24. What was your favorite TV program?

It's 2009 and I still don't like TV? WTF.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

Living well is the best revenge. I don't have enough time or energy to hate.

26. What was the best book you read?

This year I was totally into Khaled Hosseini. I am starting to reread authors I like, to study their styles.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Kinda late in the game, pero the modern Madonna

28. What did you want and get?

A kickass modern condo with awesome furniture and a hot babe on the couch!

30. What was your favorite film of this year?

Should I say...Juno?

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I was 32 on my birthday to answer this 31st question. We had a barbecue on our roofdeck but it rained so my sweetheart grilled in the downpour and got zapped by semi-lightning through her umbrella.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

The absence of this global economic meltdown.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?

Believe it or not, skirts and dresses made my 2008.

34. What kept you sane?

My writing projects

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Barack is totally hot

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

The US Presidential Elections - I was truly on the ball with that one.

37. Who did you miss?

As always, my family and friends in the home country. Particularly the source of this questionnaire.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

I want to say someone stands out but no, I don’t think I met anyone significant this year.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008:

When it’s rain, it’s four (sic)

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

Hard Candy – Madonna 2008. Get the album.

Read it here:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2008/personoftheyear/article/0,31682,1861543_1865068,00.html?cnn=yes?iid=perma_share

That one night it was seventy degrees in January, I was stupid enough not to bring a jacket, thinking the weather wouldn't change. I came home after midnight and found her in the dark, sitting up in bed, telling me it was over. I had too much to drink, the smell of oak and malt and cigarettes were not enough to mask my sin, but they were more than adequate in turning my gut inside out. The acid burned my throat and found its way to my head, where it sat like a porcupine in my eye socket for weeks until I had packed my bags and left her there. It was the only time she cried.

Whenever my father got called out on an indiscretion, he would blame his father and his brothers and his blood. He would mention how my grandfather slept with women in their own home, sometimes with my grandmother in the next room. My father excused himself and was forgiven, like his father and his brothers before him. I pictured helpless penises being dragged out of trousers, pulling limp bodies towards this unstoppable force. How innocent. How convenient. I wanted to ask my father how sad it must have been for him, to be cursed with this desire, but I never did. He bragged about the next woman's body like it was a new outfit and that was enough to answer all my questions about his remorse.

When it came my turn to be pardoned, it was almost scripture. We were a passionate lot, weren't we? Can't keep our hands to ourselves is right. The Genetics of Infidelity would be a good paper. On the first page would be a picture of a double helix of nucleic acids. In my mind I slid down that spiral like a fool.

The day Sandra stopped looking at me was the moment I remembered that I lacked one detail that would complete this equation. I didn't have a penis. This whole premise of compulsive betrayal would never apply to me. She would never be the wife and mother who could, after her tears and How could you do this again? / Think about your children! speeches, distract herself enough with housework and community expectations to say whenever asked how I was as a partner, "Oh he's a good provider." Instead she asked me to move out.

For a while it was all just cars zinging past.

Pick yourself up like dried roadkill, maybe a steamrollered deer frozen into the pavement. Before this it was chamomile tea after dinner and a back rub. And then it became just the blaring horn of the truck carrying corn husks before the golden strands started flying away in the wind, leaving me sprawled on the ground. Whatever it was that hit me, it's gone. Can we go back to tea?

I forgive you, Mom. You just wanted things to stay the same.  You did it for us, it's always for the children. That's really what I thought when I found you sitting up in the dark crying while you held your prayer booklet in front of the Virgin Mary. When you said "a family that prays together stays together" before asking that the rosary be recited every night in the living room, I knew you were on to something. So did Dad as he fell asleep by the second sorrowful mystery. Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy.

There is no tea at my new place. This is where we start over and I'll pretend Sandra didn't teach me how to work the laundromat or how to zip up my jacket in the winter. I'll believe that this is home, this city that is fifty degrees colder and a hundred races richer. Of course I'll be all right, I told her.

I'll come up new words for sorry, Sandra, just you wait.

Meanwhile, to the next one who comes up to me at a bar on my third drink, asking me to come home with her:  Let's save each other some time.

When we begin it will be like a roll of fabric at the tailor's, intact with endless possibilities. As it starts I'll rub on you enough to leave a mark. Maybe you'll be like clay and I can mold you into a shell for my body. I'll leave enough to recognize where I had been on you, enough for you to remember it in you. Keep your eyes closed before you see that this never belonged to you. As it ends we all return to our original shapes, rejecting the other. But we fit, you'll say. I'll say my body is also clay. How can you ask to shape something that's moldable, being moldable yourself? When it's over we become a messy ball of resentment. Don't bother taking it apart. Just walk away.

The moment you finally believe me, Sandra, you'll be coming from the city side of Brooklyn Bridge with your red hair yellowed in the sun. It's summer and you're Cynthia Nixon. If I am Steve and the father of your child, we could put this behind us. We'll hug and bawl on each other's shoulders like two best friends.  We could go out for pizza like in Season Two or for burgers like at the end of The Movie. I can be the bartender with no ambition or anyone you want me to be. I'll pretend you're not my mother and I'll refuse to be my father. We don't have children to ruin. We don't have penises either.

You'll never forgive me.

It's been a month. I keep peeling myself off the asphalt to get off the road but every morning I am back where I started. In my dreams my teeth get knocked out of my mouth and I spit out  blood when the truck hits me. I'm screaming into the dirt, the voice vibrates into my scraped cheek as I look up. There you are, in the truck with the golden hair, looking past me, flying away.

This time I wake up grabbing my crotch. The phone is ringing and there is no receiver in my pants. I'll be right there, I tell Sandra.

I am waiting outside the locked door of our old apartment. The knob needs half a pull then a quarter of a push before the key can turn. I have no keys and it is chain-locked from the inside. I know this because I am hearing it scrape on the door with Sandra's footfalls. It smells like chamomile when she leaves the door open and walks back upstairs.

I am sitting across from her on our dining table as she eats stewed innards. I know you don't eat this, she said, I've been cooking this a lot. I've been screwing a lot of girls, I want to say. I don't.

"Sandra, I'm sorry. How many times to do I have to say it?"

"I didn't ask you over to talk about this," she said. Was that a tear or just an itch that she wiped from her eye?

"This is too painful and I want you to stop," I say, but she hands me a paper bag and sends me home.

My steps down the stairs are so hard that the door falls open on my way out. I stop by the street lamp and put my hand in the bag. There is a strange solid object that brushes my knuckles when I grab the note that is in there with it.

It says:

You're only sorry that you're alone.

The bright light from a passing U-Haul truck was the last thing I saw before my knees gave. There are no wild deer in New York City but here I am with my hocks on the ground. The only pain is in my belly and it's coming from the brown bag between my body and the concrete.

I reach down and find a silicone penis in my hand. I look back up.

Right then I see our bedroom window and I want to run back in, but you just turned off the lights.