Midday on the sixth day.

I was at church the other Sunday (what can I say, I'm an inveterate experimenter; also, it was a UU church and I don't think you can lose your Jew card for that) and the part of the sermon that grabbed me was about creation. "I was looking out at the mountains, thinking about how I would've liked to be around for the creation of this beautiful landscape... and then I realized I was. The mountains were crumbling in front of me and becoming new mountains, beautiful ones."

In other words, every end is a beginning. The world wasn't created and left to decay; it's still being created. It's probably too naïve to try and claim that it's all equally beautiful, that a burn scar is as beautiful as a forest or a cloud of dust as beautiful as a solar system. But though entropy may win out in the very long term, on a scale as small as my life there is no necessary downward trend.

I have a bad habit of holding on to the past. I want to sleep in the bed I slept in as a child and watch Sesame Street again even though I already know how to count. I want to keep friends forever and have them stay the same forever. I want to have all my old boyfriends back. Maybe take them back to the places where we had really good sex, so we could have that same sex again. I'm twenty-four years old and I'm already obsessed with reclaiming what's gone--heedless of what might be coming.

It can never be the same. The wind has blown, the dust has shuffled, my old life is never coming back. My life as of last week is never coming back. I've known this for a long time, but what I'm only just learning is that "you can't go home again" isn't just true; it's good! Because I have a new home, and the more time I spend pouting around my old stomping grounds, the less I have for living in my life now. Is this the best life I've ever had? That's an utterly academic question. It's the best life I have now and it doesn't suck.

Not that everything old must be thrown away. If an old friend is still my friend, or a friend from the past comes back, thank God for that! But thank God for the friend, not for the oldness.





So yeah, I should probably go on new dates more often.