My year draws to a close, the year I start and end marking the day of my own birth, something over which I had no, absolutely no control. It is an arbitrary day, as arbitrary as any other and therefore just as valid or invalid as any other for evaluation. This day, this day though, I choose. I take my stock and make my judgments. This day I assess what I have done. Mirrors are such cruel things.

I have held other women’s children, feeding, cleaning, comforting, loving, singing them lullabies and breathing in their milksweet powderclean essences, feeling the flutter of their tiny hearts inches outside my own as they lay sleeping in my arms, nestled against my own useless breasts. I have loved them and I have walked away.

I have broken the fragile heart entrusted to my care, betrayed a trust bigger than myself, broken a vow made to last forever. It is a debt I cannot pay, a wrong I cannot right.

I have traveled, taken planes, driven cars, slept on trains and buses, shifted gears on moving trucks and package vans, filled and emptied endless boxes, sewn and thrown up curtains to block out views I don’t even remember anymore, and failed to make connections anyplace at all. In the end, I have returned to my beginning. I have gone nowhere.

I have studied, read, memorized, and written, and lost it all through an inability to retain, to synthesize and build on what I have learned.

I have eaten, breathed, slept, moving from moment to moment, existing by burning food, air, time, making waste of it all.

What exactly have I done?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.