Photography: ldcross

For Outpost Mâvarin’s Weekend assignment #204: My Favorite Year.

To tell the truth, I’ve had a hard time answering the the assignments for the past few weeks. For better or worse, I end up thinking back to times in my life that other people would call dark. Very, very dark. There’s a reason I’m a here-and-now kind of person: after 20 years of hell, every year of my life has simply been getting better.

Or another way of putting it: my favorite year is the one now, even far before it’s finished, because it is furthest away, in every sense of the word, from those two decades of pain.

Of my years, the ones that I would actually think about letting another human being live, there are about … five “good” years, relatively speaking, not counting 2008, in which case there’d be six. And they are mostly not good years in the way that people typically think of it; they are simply… years.

I’ve had one year in my life that might be considered all-around good. It was 2007, when I managed to put enough together to buy a house, and the PTSD was on hold for most of the year and thus “good” and “bad” did not wash each other out.

2007 built itself upon passable years, which is why I expect 2008 to be better. And 2009 to be even better than that. And so on.

Sometimes, the center holds.