"More western union dilemmas, phone calls to my bank. I think of Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight. 'Always the wires from Paris, send more money, send more money.'

My hair is undyed, Rome becomes a backdrop to my failure to get to Nice. The train is full now. I cannot go until tomorrow. It is a twelve hour train ride, over night. I will new year on the train. I like trains but my mythology dictates that your new year is the opening flavour of your year. Spend it at home? You will stay in, it will be a quiet year, you will be soothed and safe. Spend it at a great party with people you love equals a year of joy and adventures and surprises. Spend it alone on a train? My mythology does not provide an answer."

I love any kind of personal mythology, especially one that finds patterns in life [all mythology is about patterns, actually]. I have been cataloguing the past few years in my mind.

This is the first year for four years that was better than the previous year.

Somehow I finally managed to complete my perennial new years resolution to STAY CLEAN. I don't know if it has anything to do with new year's eve last year -- probably not, since I spent it secretly high, at a lovely part in St. Paul.

But, thinking of Delighted's mythology, I kind of purposely decided to stay in tonight -- well, my car is in the shop and it snowed all day. But I also wanted to be by myself, and think, and write, so that maybe the new year will be quiet, peaceful, and introspective. There's something about being alone, too. I don't want to be alone all year but I do want to be independent and free to do and say and think whatever I want. Now that I am free of the hardest part, heroin.

Really, though, freedom itself is the hardest part. Being trapped is predictable. Now the whole world just opens up. Freedom was what made me nervous all along, because freedom implies personal responsibility. That is only the classic existentialist view, which I have been pondering since I was 15. Simply: without god or religion, we are only our actions, we create ourselves. And that puts enormous weight on our actions, much more weight than when we are blissfully chained to love or religion or drugs.

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself and your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urge that motivates you. Keep the channel open." -Martha Graham

I have been talking to friends a lot, on the phone, and they say, take your time, no one is going anywhere, you can do *anything*. Donna and I concocted a lot of silly fantasies about the future. But the beautiful thing is that, until now, there was no thought of the future other than survival. Our visions may be fanciful but they are just as possible as the fact that I am eight months clean.

I don't want to have any resolutions, except to be open, free, and ready for anything.

"One night I lay awake beside a loved one and wondered how to go on, how to thrust myself positively into the world when I knew I was going to be snubbed sometimes, when I knew that my needs could go unfulfilled regardless of how dire they may be, that I would be broken over and over again, past every possible point. I didn't know how to live.

The pain and fight exploded in my head until I let it down, let myself feel the room as quiet, let a feeling wash over me: Source. Inside. Infinite."

[by Donna]

The sun will come back tomorrow on a new day here, cold, and covered in snow like a blank canvas.