I've always been a sort of late-bloomer. Trust me to find my turning point right at the end of 2001, too.

I've been spending the whole of the month with nine people, six of whom I've never met in my life (people of an entirely different culture, people who don't even speak the same language I do) - and I had a blast.

I hate to have to say this, but I think it was probably the best fun I had in the last four years - and I've changed since, I really have.

I've learned to reach out more to people. I've learned to do things myself, but I've also learned to trust others to help me when I'm in trouble. I've opened up more to other people. I talk more now, express my feelings better than I ever have. I even sing more, in front of other people, I mean (when before, I was rather shy)... but being around these people who love to sing at all times, I've learned to do it, too.

I have a feeling that 2002's going to be a greater year - a year to find myself even more, and to grow into myself even better.

Emily {deck107@yahoo.com}  1 Jan 2002

This has not been a good year for me - although there has been good within it. But strife and worry have consumed me for the most part - and the things we feel bring value to the struggling have been noticeably absent.

So it was that I returned to my family for the Christmas period - in a place that used to hold nothing but bad memories and a desperate need to escape - and I found astonishing perspective and space and relief in one image.

In the middle of the night - I drove my brother back from a movie and we parked the car outside my parent's house and looked up at the sky. In the city you can see nothing, but in the country every star is bright. The moon looked like a hole in a curtain - impossibly bright. There was a small veil of mist in the sky - like a gaussian filter - and it had the most amazing effect on the light...

For taking up half the sky surround the moon was a hula-hoop of light - a vast circle of diffused light, refracted. Like a vast eye in the sky. It was beautiful - and it gave me some perspective.

Tom Coates {tom@plasticbag.org}  1 Jan 2002

December was when I finally broke free and allowed myself to fall for somebody again. For five years I had hoped and struggled and wept, wishing I could be with a girl I had adored since I met and if not wishing that I could be away from her.

But I couldn't have either and I was stuck in a loop.

But December saw me breaking free and falling for a girl who is funny, smart and absolutely perfect for me.

I'm scared of how quickly I've taken to her and how vunerable I can be in her presence but she adores me too so I have been happier this December than I have been for a long, long time.

Wed December 5th. - the best night of my year.

Brendan  1 Jan 2002

december was a mess... it was a good mess, but a total mess all the same.

i was behind in my rent by four months until December - see, i've been working in a flea market, selling jewelry. marginal employment for, at least how i feel about myself now, a marginal girl... i lost my last dot com job last april.

before that, i was smoking cigarettes in the stairwell with Kurt Anderson.

so there i was this December in a busy downtown christmas fair - standing on my feet 12-14 hours a day in cold december new york weather... drinking soup quickly from cardboard bowls, trying to convince people to part with money so i could pay all my back rent. we got paid on commission. it was brutal.

but i did it, and i paid it.

and now, what now?

in 2000, i bailed out of New York at the last possible second - December 27th - hopped a greyhound to New Orleans to stay with people i'd only met on the net... they wound up being close friends, and that year i ended up travelling all over the world.

in 2001, over a single glass of expensive champagne my boyfriend told me he loved me... someone stole the bottle while we were kissing and we found it only minutes later, hidden behind a chair, completely empty. and i moved in with him that following May.

we haven't been employed much this year - the economy for html grunts and commercial photographers was not polite.

but we have an incredible place together. we were given a 75-gallon fish tank by a friend who's office also closed... we have amazing furniture my boyfriend dug out of the garbage. you'd never know it. we have plants, and a lazy fat cat that blows snot on you when he's feeling affectionate. we have each other to rub the knots out.

last night, he and i, and about 14 of my other favorite people, put on a huge performance for a large-scale New Year's Eve party. we rehearsed crazily all december - i showed up at practice at night, after being at work all day. i was tired, insecure, physically and emotionally exhausted, and unsure of my abilities.

but we pulled it off last night. and we looked fantastic even though it wasn't perfect. and we worked hard, we were there until 6am, and suffice it to say that i'm in a bit of pain this morning. but there were hugs all around, an affirmation of shared strength and accomplishment and durability that i think, truly, New Yorkers feel more than anyone else right now. We have been to hell and back, and we're still going.

take THAT, energizer bunny.

this year is, apparently, going to be full of backbreaking, nearly unendurable work for me... i'm ready. bring it on.

only beauty can result from it.

what i took away from 2001, and from December, which ended last night, is that i've got a really great support base here. you can wipe out a piece of the city, but you'll have to take out the whole damn thing to get rid of me. i'm pretty sure i can speak for the rest of my little family here, too...

i feel fearless.

dori {dori@saranwarp.com}  1 Jan 2002

2001 was a year for change. I've changed dramaticallly, I've spent nights wishing I could be the same little girl I was in 2000. I wished I could have the innocence that I had before I met my boyfriend. I wished constantly that I could have spent yesterday again instead of moving onto the next day. I wished and begged and hoped and dreamed that I could be the person I was before.

It wasn't until today, January 1, 2002 that I realized life isn't about reverting to the way you acted before, the way you looked before, or talked, or walked, or smiled. Life is all about moving onto the next, anticipating what the rest of your life is going to bring, and enjoying every second of it. No matter how tumultuous or shallow or pretentious life may seem, or how low you can possibly go on the scales of how good your life is, or how horrible it is, life always brings something new and fresh. And you have to live with the idea that, good or bad, you're going to move out of the phase into a new one. Whether you lost your job, or started one you hate.. Whether you started a new school, a new semester, or moved into a new house.. Things will change. You can always remember the way it was before now, but don't dwell on it. If you whine and cry because you want to be back 'in the day' then you will be always unhappy, sodden, down. If you look back 'in the day' and say, good, that's over, let's move onto the next.. You'll always have hope for the future.

Your future is what you make of it. My future will be made of events I cannot possibly predict. However I know that because a year ago when I started hanging out with a new group of people, I am now in love with the most incredible man in the world.

Such is proof that everything happens for a reason. A butterfly flaps its wings in China, and a man dies in France.

Everything has repurcussions, good and bad.

Life is what you make of it, the repurcussions formed the way you are able to deal with given situations. If you dwell on the past your future is bound to be dull. If you keep your past on your shoulder, remember the good times and the bad, and be sure not to make the same mistakes, you should have a good time of it.

2001 was a year like any other year. Except it taught me that change is not a bad thing. Change is only what you make out of it. For better or worse.

steph {sk8rpup@yahoo.com}  1 Jan 2002

I'm still standing.

I think that's the most remarkable thing about the year. There are worst case scenarios you imagine in life: unemployment, painful breakups, a parent with a terminal illness, being robbed. There are even worse worst case scenarios, hideous national tragedies that you couldn't have imagined before they appear on an urgent news bulletin. This year all of those things and more happened, things that when I imagined them before, I could only see myself crumbling, hiding, if they ever happened to me.

And I'm still standing.

I tend to spend December musing, and this year was no different, I spent hours driving around in the fog, sorting through equally foggy thoughts. Two thousand and one contained higher highs and lower lows for me than any of the twenty one years that preceeded it. More than anything, it was a year of intensity, and of finding strength I hadn't given myself credit for having before.

I hope 2002 holds more of the same.

Alexis {lexilark@hotmail.com}  1 Jan 2002

december 5th... thats the high point of my life in 2001. i became unsure of my relationship with a guy ive been with for 3 years. i risked being kicked out of home to spend a night (talking) with a boy ive only known for 2 days. and i enjoyed myself. if only for that one day. things have gone downhill since. and i wonder about all the choices ive made, all the things i did... and im still mad at myself for causing all this turbulence in my once calm and settled life.

rhei {ishii019@hotmail.com}  1 Jan 2002

"Stop, stop it, Dave. My mind is blowing. I can feel it" ---HAL in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Oddessy

I myself did not have the luxury of human emotion when my mind was blowing. I had suffered from severe depression and anxiety. My shrink assured me that depression just happens and no one is to blame. I disagree, there is someone to blame. God. God hates me, and I hate him back.

2001 was the year I came back from the dead. But when I returned, there was nobody there. No one to cry to, no place to call home.

My girlfriend, my goddess in the doorway, my first love, my baby, she left me, and everyone seems glad to see me again except her and it hurts so much.

Now that my deppression is in it's recessive stage, I am much more vulnerable. On New Year's Eve, I was supposed to see her and some friends but I didn't.

I must've called her a thousand times but her cellphone died just like she did. They waited for two hours and then they left me.

So I spent New Year's Eve walking alone down the crowded streets of Bangsar. In a place where the streets have no name, I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

When the clock struck midnight, I was alone in an empty cofee shop, sitting, smoking. I searched for the meaning of all this in the steam that rose from my cup, swirling and blown away by the midnight wind, cold on my sweaty skin. I sneezed, I coughed. I hate myself and I want to die.

Maybe I'm an idiot to think about what we had, my father is alone at home, he wanted to spend it with me but I wanted to see her. Now I know what God felt when Christ asked me "Father, why have you forsaken me?"

I really miss my Father. I miss the way his hands seem so strong. And the way he holds his coffee and the way he makes sure that nobody leaves with an empty stomach.

My tummy rumbles. I am hungry but I don't want to eat. I only eat when I am happy, I simply lose the will to live (and eat) otherwise.

I sit on the sidewalk and feel the pain as my gastronomic juices corrode and eat the inside of my stomach.

It's a pain that won't go away, like a memory, it always comes back to hurt you when you're hungry.

I miss her. I miss the little things. I miss everything. I miss the way her toes curl when I hold her. I miss the way she pushes me away and plops herself in front of the fan in my apartment because she has walked up a hill in the hot sun just to be with me.

I miss the way she said it felt like we were in a Nescafe commercial the first time I made her coffee in the morning rain and we sat on my balcony and the smell of her hair and skin and the rain and coffee made it such a marvellous place to be.

I miss the way she laughs. She must have about 300 kinds of laughs. I miss the way she says my name when we're doing things that only Prince would sing about.

Who framed thy fearfull symmetry? Subashini, who made you? God must be a fucking genius. I miss her hair. Hair is everything, you know? Have you ever buried your nose in a mountain of curls that made you wish you could fall asleep forever?

Her lips, when they touched mine, it felt like that first swallow of wine after I crossed the dessert. Tits! She had big ones, her nipples would stare right at me like secret searchligts.

Her legw were like Greek collumns and what's between them is a passport to heaven. I need a drink.

I look up from my cup and I see a father and son crossing the street. The kid looks at me, there is a strange light in his eyes that seem so familiar.

I wink and the kid smiles. At that moment, in the midniaght sky, God sends me a shooting star. I close my eyes and made a wish.

I sent a prayer up for that kid, I wished that he'd never spend New Year's Day alone, drinking cold coffee in an empty cofee shop. I wished him love, luck, may he make mistakes, I hope he falls so he learns how to rise.

I hope he grows up to love Pearl Jam, U2 and R.E.M. May he find a love he doesn't deserve. May his journey on this thing called life be frought with danger and peril, and when it's over, may he have a silly grin on his face and may he meet fierce friends along the way. And as the clouds rise above his father's house, may his dreams be full tonight.

I miss her, I miss my father. If he were here, at least I wouldn't feel so hungry.

Guruchathram Ledchumanan {chathram@rocketmail.com}  2 Jan 2002

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