My New Year

My New Year is starting quietly.

It's a nice way to start the year.

I slept soundly after midnight fireworks where outside I sat with neighbors and my daughter sleeping heavily on my chest. As I stared into the night sky with the brilliant lights creating illusions of small fires impossibly burning into a vast, dark ocean, I thought of you. 

It was beautiful, and the warmth of Sayler's matted hair resting under my chin, close, almost uncomfortably, forced my head upward toward those flickers in the dark open and it all made me feel secure, safe, loved.

As the clock struck midnight the neighbors leaned in for those awkward, half-hugs that you give a person holding a sleeping toddler and wished a Happy New Year. 

I wished, then, that it would be a happy new year. 

I promptly retreated home where Sayler fell into my pillow and blankets and I passed out shortly thereafter. 

I awoke hours later. 

Many hours later.

I had a myriad of dreams.

In one of them I lost my dad's poncho at the airport and was inconsolably sad.

In another I was kissing a balding, middle-Eastern man whose volleyball team I was on after we suffered defeat to a team we had beaten earlier in the season. 

P.S.

What. The. Funk?

But despite the oddity of those dreams I slept so soundly for the first time in as many days.

I sit now, drinking my morning/afternoon coffee from a favorite mug on this first day of 2014.   It's one of the "Saturday Evening Post" mugs my mom gifted me with that she just knew I would love.

And despite how much I have loved those mugs for years only today did I notice this photo has Sayler's birthday on it:

Not the year, of course.

But this photo of this scrappy, smug girl with a black eye and unkempt hair and clothes in shambles made me smile.

It reminded me of Sayler,

And maybe myself a bit.

And I found myself thinking it was certainly meant to be that the date was May 23rd just as Sayler's birthday is May 23rd and then I reminded myself that though I have never been a New Year's resolutions kind of gal,

I am hoping in 2014 I stop trying to see connections in things that aren't really there. 

Because I do that, don't I?

I believe in all the things I cannot see, but only have feelings about. 

It is blind intuition... or perhaps it is naïveté.  

For 2014 I will require more facts, more logic, more grand gestures. 

And somewhere I will find the balance between Faith and reality.