I’ve decided that I’m going to celebrate the Chinese New Year this year. While this may seem a horrible, culturally-insensitive thing for one of the whitest, most Anglo-Saxon, former-British-colony dwelling, child of Western privilege to go around declaring, bear with me. I have never loved, or been all that successful, trying to embrace rebirth and a new year in the dead of winter. At least here on the wet coast, by the end of January life does actually seem to have begun again; with snow drops and the occasional crocus forcing their way through the mud, the prospect of spring actually becomes plausible. But this year, I’ve got a whole slew of new reasons for needing a second chance at beginning the year, so for now at least, I’m applying for cultural conversion.
About a week and a half ago, one of my closest friends fell from the sky. Except the sky was a window, and the window was in his new bedroom, and his new bedroom was in my home. And he fell hard. Three stories. Onto a parking lot. I was the only other person home. He had been fixing his curtains. It was only on Tuesday that he was finally moved into a room in the hospital that actually has windows enough to warrant curtains, and I couldn’t even bring myself to joke with him about it. I haven’t been up to joking about all that much lately.
I have been to the hospital every day. He was even sitting up when I saw him this afternoon, and we had a good chat. I want to go to the hospital to keep him company, but I also go because day-by-day I’m trying to replace the image of him that seems stuck on the backside of my eyelids, lying on the concrete, looking like a broken bird. I can still see the hole in the heel of one of his socks, on the ankle that he shattered but I ignored, trying to see if he was still breathing. When I lay on my side in bed at night, sometimes I still dream that my pillow is wet with blood. I don’t mean to be gory, and I sure as hell try to leave all of these images aside every time I go see him, but both what happened and my own reaction are a big part of why I want a new start to this year.
I’m getting ready to start my high school teaching practicum on the 30th – 13 weeks in an East-side classroom not far from where I live – and I want to start that next year, fresh, and not carry over all of the heaviness I feel right now into what I’ll be doing tomorrow. I want to have fun with the students, encourage them, and help them enjoy school. I want to be able joke with them, and not sit behind my desk and see how transparent and fragile they are. Not see frightened little birds who didn’t learn to fly, and fell instead. I want a new new year so that by the time it starts, my friend no longer has to lay surrounded in heart rate monitors and institutional grey walls, and I can sleep through the night, and joke again.