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1/5/04--That stupid, horrible, evil Huck Finn project was due the next day. Ali stayed at my house until like eleven working on hers with me, and then we were both up really late writing the explanation essays, and I was up until past three, up again at five something, and I had to stay home b/c of the complete lack of sleep and I was in hysterics.
12:44 am 11/27/04--Finished the Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni book [haha, Mrs. Ajavon, "Doors"] and am philosophizing about the Story. And seeing as now it's actually 1:14, I'm not even making sense at the end. At least, not as much sense as I'd like to.
Right now, I am cold, I am exhausted--again, and I am beginning to feel the stirrings of hunger. I am lonely, but I am content.
Everything has happened yet nothing has happened, and taking everything into consideration, This Time This Year is an improvement from This Time Last Year. Not because of the excitement, or happiness, or anything I'm feeling right now, but because I have so much to show for it. No matter the sadness, what has happened in the past year has overall been for the best.
12:44 am 11/27/04--I was presumably asleep. When I awoke, preparations for Thanksgiving dinner with the Geyer family would begin. My life was dominated by a growing friendship, but more consciously by an all-consuming, four year old crush only fully accepted less than a year before. I wrote poetry, but that was all. I had no idea what we would write, what I would write. No idea where the world would take me, us, everyone. No idea the confusion and tears and pride and doubt and satisfaction that were to come. No idea what the year held for me, or for Ali, or for anyone. For this afternoon, or maybe evening, we were to begin writing what would grow into a two hundred sixty-three page novel (at its first entry into the computer); we were to set ourselves on a path that would lead to bouts of insanity--memories of dreams, of nothing, whose desires would conflict with what others knew to be reality.
It seems that this was a pivotal day in my life. The birth of the story, The Story that drew us together inseparably. Except really, it only strengthened the threads that already bound us, reinforced what was already so there. For even without the Story, we were best friends, we were kindred spirits. I could say that the Story led to our closeness, our periodic oneness of mind, our lives intertwined--as sisters. But then again, I sat down next to her on the first day of high school, choosing Ali over all the people I already knew. I wanted her to be the first to know my secrets, long, long, long before the Story was even forming. It was she who I could trust, who I could be more comfortable around.
I could declare the birth of the Story to be the beginning of a new year of my life, could name November 27th my New Year. But then again, we would have become sisters no matter what. We'd become so close before the Story. And we met each other over a year before. Without that there would be nothing. Does that make August 27th the beginning of a new year, in my life, and Ali's life? But there's the day we shared every dream we had in our recollections, there's the day we finished the Story and were sick for three days, there's the night we snuck down to the beach and became sisters in blood--there's so much, I can't even list it right now.
A more significant New Year's Day for me, or for us? What meaning has one day when every day is the beginning of a new year? Every day is important and every day something changes. Maybe we should just try to make every day worthy of starting a new year.