Dear 2007,

Thank you for breaking me and rebuilding me this year. Thank you for taking your time and doing it very fully and precisely. There was nothing wasted in this year. More growth than the first 27 years of my life. I sit here today, with pink and red hair, colors bright and welcoming to the new year ahead, a completely transformed and stronger person than I have ever been.

Thank you for the silence. Thank you for allowing me to listen, and hear the quotes I needed to hear when I was open for them. Thank you for the holes created in my life that allowed space for better things to enter. Thank you for the people who left their coffee cups on the table to my left when they were done, so the table appears occupied and no one else sits there, allowing a brief pause in the rumblings around me for me to be able to sit here and embrace gratitude.

Thank you for those aha moments. Thank you for the pink in my apartment. Thank you for bringing me a guardian angel in the form of a poodle who models to me every day how I should love and live – freely, enthusiastically, unconditionally and insanely. Thank you for listening when I asked for peace and clarity. Thank you for the intermittent internet signal I can poach from my neighbors on special occasions, but not too often or I would waste my day rearranging my Myspace profile.

Thank you for hot tea and cookies and the smell of lilacs and for allowing so many to bloom for my birthday. Thank you for those times I laughed so hard I cried and cried so hard I laughed, and for the spectrum of emotions I sailed through so wildly that I sometimes created new emotions. Thank you for the beautiful shape of the eyes of Haitian children, and for how they spent hours braiding my hair, and for keeping me still when I was in the truck going to Mardi Gras and wondered if that was how I was going to end.

Thank you for recovery. Thank you for keeping my father alive and for his legs that walk, and for the drum set he pounds and for the rhythm of life. Thank you for awakening the fiery, powerful spirit in my mother, and for that night in Uganda when we laughed about the soap as I huddled under a mosquito net and she tried to bathe in a bucket of cold water. Thank you for the pink beads in Baby Aimee’s hair.

Thank you for the people in my life who lifted me up, anchored me down, cleansed me, reached inside me and forced me to examine my guts, for the people who fought for me and with me, my army of friends and loved ones who never stopped feeding me, pushing me, kicking me in the butt, as needed, and seeing me. For the people who accepted me and forgave me 10,000 times, and again, as I figured things out, slowly but deeply. Thank you for the arms that held me tight, the noodles that brought us comfort, the Diet Cokes that gave us an excuse to pause and think, the friends I lost when their lessons were done and my ability to accept people’s different and evolving roles in my life. Thank you for those church services that were perfectly written for me (that was really neat how that happened), and for the songs that were written for me, and for the birds that flew for me and the sunsets that dripped across the sky just to make me sigh.

Thank you for the ability to continue loving, and the dissatisfaction that keeps me hungry, and for the sentences I met along the way, and the words I gave birth to, and the smiles that people burned into my heart. Thank you for the funny guy holding a red balloon right now in the bookstore where I’m writing this, and the quirky and confused and striving and random characters I met. Thank you for the dancing. Thanks for fingernail polish and shoes and beautiful things, like satin and wrinkles around eyes and curls and the way that things shine. Thank you for dresses with superior twirling capabilities.

Thank you for never being predictable, for turning tragedies into blessings, demons into angels, tears into lessons, strangers into friends, children into prophets. Thanks for the contradictions that make life interesting, the adventures that make life worthwhile and the beauty in authenticity, in finally finding yourself and giving yourself a hug, and maybe a high-five, and then being embarrassed that the true you is such a big dork.

Thank you for piano notes. For snow days. For game nights. For dress-up parties. For scarves and gloves on cold days. For love that never dies but does change. For circles. For forgiveness. For coffee shops. For the amazing way it feels when you stop and stretch your muscles and loosen them up for the next big task. For the word “journey,” even though it is so overused, and for the word “dope,” which is totally cool to say again, despite what all the haters say.

Thank you for this moment, and all of the moments that are glued together to make up a year, and all of the people that comprise those moments, and all of the beauty in those people, and the quirks that make up that beauty, and the lessons embedded in those quirks, and the way those lessons fold into your own being, like little etch marks in the portrait of who you are and who you are ever-evolving to be.

Thanks for one crazy year that has left me in a fur-lined sweater, tall boots and with pink hair, empty tea pot, slightly chipped nail polish and a lightness of heart. I think that feeling inside is a little something known as “hope.” Thanks for that, too.

Love,
Aimee

PS, Hair done by Juno Salon in Boulder.

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