New Year's Eve day was spent helping friends load things into a u-haul, studying with the co-compspirators, and unloading said things from the friends' u-haul into our old apartment building across town. One of the lovely features of my life here is the way people from diverse spaces naturally clump into a community. Not worth getting into here, but I have to remember that I love those smallish cities where this is possible. It was incredibly warm and as we strolled along the bayou with puppies, my body unclenched and forgave me for subjecting it the Montreal winter. Casual conversations about pregnancies and futures (organic farms! in costa rica! my friends fell into the Instantaneous Love six-months ago and now have their futures all mapped and i wondered, "what is my dream?"). Also, fart jokes and much mocking. old friends. yes. We stopped for lunch and our waiter was a man I met at a party last summer where we decided after much debate that his spirit animal is a giraffe. i have been here a while.

just before midnight e, j and i wandered down to our old place. All our old neighbours were standing outside with their dogs and it felt poignant and familiar - how many times have I passed them on my bike? There is an old bachelor-type whose house is falling apart but he has an incongruous, meticulously groomed scottie dog and a Volvo. And a woman who presses a minimum of eight rapid-fire kisses onto my cheek whenever she sees me and talks so much that I make sure I don't stop unless I have at least 10 minutes to spare.

I had a moment of fierce, deep sorrow thinking about the people who have lived near us on that corner. Last year Sean died of an overdose and the year before Jessica was murdered just before the evacuation, and maybe the same year or possibly the year before Hadley died of AIDS. But there we were. 2010, baby. I expected Bob to roll by on one of his souped-up bikes but his studio was dark.

I doubled back to the new place for champagne and then we clambered over tracks and trains to watch midnight fireworks over the mississippi. A sketchy mob dancing on trains and sending rockets over cop cars turned out to be friends, including giraffe-man. New Orleans is small and full of overlapping circles.

Ended up at a dance party full of 22-year-old gutter-punks and then I suddenly lost steam. Part of me is preoccupied with missing and i hate it. Maybe it is being around F and D, who are so much in The Love, but I was suddenly impatient with myself for being so cautious and intentional. gah. I came home early to smoke and eat salty snacks and scrawl earnest and incomprehensible intentions for 2010 in my journal. yikes.

10:37 a.m. - 2010-01-01