Squares

In the office behind the bar - which really isn't an office as much as it is a closet with shelves and a computer - there is a large calendar attached at eye-level to the wall on your left. It is the kind of calendar you buy at Office Depot when you want to get organized but don't want to spend a lot of money so you just buy the plain and simple looking one. Each page of the calendar blocks out a month in large, open squares that look vacant and desolate, practically begging you to fill them with something --which in our case are sales figures from the previous year, booked parties and schedule requests.

Last friday's square had the sales numbers and a brief line about some party of 30-45 people that was going to be coming in. Above all that in black ink someone had squeezed in "Ed's 1 Year Anniversary!!" just below the line from the friday before that.

I looked at the scrunched text one night after I'd closed the bar, wondering if it had really been that long.

When does a year ever feel like a year? 

As I have a habit of doing, I rolled the friday square and everything that came with it around in my mind. I thought about the first square as well, how cold my toes had been as I stood outside for the first night checking id's. And then all the squares in between. What about them? They had seen me climb out of debt, fall out of a relationship, walk away from an Ironman. I'd moved three times, had a root canal, taught spin classes on zero hours of sleep.

I'd even walked in the cold rain one night because that seemed as good a place as any to find answers. What square had that been again; did the answer matter half as much as the memory of falling water surrounding every part of you, even your ankles?

Is it normal to look at the year gone by and find yourself drifting away to an idea of the year ahead and how that could look, how you want it to look?

It's been a year. Actually, it's been more than a year now. A year and a few days. I'm still not sure if that's cause for celebration or for panic, for champagne or a tumbler of scotch. I think you could argue both.

Instead of arguing, I've tried to look at it all -- the year, the individual squares -- with indifference. Not that I don't care about what I've done. Of course I do. But I will have done those things no matter how much I care about them. The year is behind, those squares already full of ink. The ones ahead can't be written in.

Maybe I look at the squares with so little emotion not only because they can't be changed, but also because nothing you can put in them could ever describe a year, let alone a life. Like remembering the first time she levelled you with a stare, or waking up hungover one morning and deciding right then and there that you've had enough. How could those ever fit? And where exactly?  

I'll close the bar tonight, fill up yet another square -- another two inch by two inch cube that if you cut out each and every one of them and somehow stitched them all together still wouldn't be big enough to describe the feeling of watching your parents hold hands as they wade into the surf together on a beach in Bali.