When the new year came and went I was deep in the woods.
Last year my love and I left our hotel in the middle of downtown Washington D.C. and walked into a random restaurant with minutes to spare before the ball dropped. When the entire room erupted we were barely through our first course but already buzzed. It was the kind of night where strangers grinned across tables, toasting the new decade together.
The next morning I was so hungover I almost threw up my breakfast in a crowded restaurant.
A day later we were on our way to Dominica, a tiny island in the Caribbean that I didn’t know existed until six weeks before we left. There we would attend a 10-day transformational retreat a friend was facilitating as a way of clearing our vision.
It was a thrilling, intense beginning to a year of violently shedding the superfluous and non-essential. The vom-that-never-happened feels prophetic now that I think about it; a ghostly foreshadowing of what was to come.
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This year my love and I ate a simple meal of fish and rice at his home. We spent most of the evening soaking in the hot tub under the stars, surrounded by redwoods, and I fell asleep in his lap. We left the forest the next day only to drive to the ocean, take pictures, turn back.
