good-bye 2012.....

dear 2012...

many people will be thanking you for all that you gave of yourself this past year, but not me. instead i spent too many days finding it impossible to get close to you. every time i tried, sometimes desperately, you shrugged your way past me with a grinch like smile on your face that made me want to slap you.

granted, you gave me a few {only a few that i can count} highs that were high enough to make me happy and which fit me beautifully, like my favorite pair of jeans {i guess this is where i say i "thank you"} but the lows...oh, the lows you threw me like an incompetent pitcher, couldn't have gotten any lower and will never be forgotten. unfortunately, i caught every one of them.

by now you're probably thinking i'm not being fair, but those are your feelings. you see, there were too many days this past year that you took my feelings and stomped the living pulp out of them. then you stooped over, picked them up with disgust in your eyes and discarded them like they were used kleenexes. it was you that wasn't fair.

after the first half of the year, i assumed that things could only get better and at a minimum, we'd be luke warm with each other, but i was wrong. instead, on a sunny day in july, you tied weights to my ankles and threw me overboard. i gasped for air, slapped at the water and begged for a life preserver, but it didn't work. you won. i drowned.

not long after that day, a thin layer of something i can only refer to as yuck, covered me like a sheet of saran wrap. it was laced with hate and mistrust and misunderstandings and questions and tears and pain and no matter how hard i tried to shake it off, it stuck to me like glue. i begged you for help, but all you did was add another month, and then another month to something i couldn't get out from under. i didn't wish you for to be gone, i just wished for you to be softer and easier on me.

september came and you did it again. this time not to me personally, but to our entire family. you created a level of sadness that no family should ever have to experience. unfortunately, we all now have a day in september with 2012 behind it, etched in our hearts. a day that never should have happened.

when the late fall and early winter days arrived, not one of them welcomed me. well, maybe they did, but in a snarly "can you see my fake smile" kind of way and i just wasn't in the mood to try to make nice. i knew just by looking at them, that they were way too similar to the earlier months of you, 2012. they had disguises on, made up mostly of cheap masks and paper thin capes, but they weren't pretty, kind or fast enough to get by my critical eye. then something caught me off guard again and like i had practiced it a million times, i caved. i looked to you and prayed that maybe, just maybe, you'd take me under your wing and let me fly through the rest of the year with everything around me feeling perfectly in tact, including my heart and all the thoughts in my head, but you didn't.

finally, the last few weeks of december showed up and suddenly you looked at me differently. actually you looked tired, exhausted really, and i could see that somewhere deep down inside of you, you didn't want to {or have the strength} to cause me anymore grief. you left me alone. you didn't taunt me, well not as much as you had, and you finally walked around me without sucking up every ounce of my self-esteem. {something you had perfected over the past eleven months} unfortunately though, my heart continued to do what it had done all year...it guarded itself from you.

so 2012, you came, you were here and now {thank God} you're leaving. tonight, at midnight. i have high {like unattended balloons filled with helium soaring upwards into the sky} hopes for your replacement, 2013. mostly because i didn't like you, but also because thirteen is a lucky number for me...well, for our entire family. so go 2012. go away. i won't shed any tears for you, but don't take it personally, {well sure you can...it's just that people always say "don't take it personally} take it instead knowing that you caused me so many tears while you were here, that i just don't have any left. buh-bye.

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