It's hard work being out there. And everyone is.

Everyone is out there with their pasts stuffed in to invisible luggage by their sides as they sit on bar stools waiting for someone to make things right (as though some stranger could possibly fix all the broken hinges that are somehow, miraculously after all these years of abuse, still holding our hearts together).

And any day that someone could be anyone and most days we’re too busy to notice or particularly care. We keep on thinking we have more of the one thing in this city there’s never quite enough of, time (and an infinite number of chances), and we let it slip by us (December, already?) more easily than we should.

Isn’t that so funny about time and December and how that last month of the year always comes up slowly and then bam! there it is right on top of us, suffocating us, leaving us all asking the same questions: where has the time gone, where has the year gone, where has my life gone? It’s as though we’ve misplaced all the days of the year in the attics of our lives and here we are now frantically trying to find them beneath all the dust to take some of them back, to make things right (and there’s just so much clutter). And we make many failed attempts and that’s okay because it’s the holidays and we’re told repeatedly in greeting cards and by Burl Ives and George Bailey that this is the season of perpetual hope.

But we will not find the lost days of our year hidden under Christmas trees or in wrapped packages, boxes, or bags. They are gone, and so too soon will this season and then where will we be? Having to start all over again, I suppose. Out there tediously searching for the same things in different people at different bars - only then our bags will be heavier. We’ll be carrying with us what little we were able to salvage from before and everything we were able to survive. We’ll continue to chase time because that’s what you do when there’s something you want that there’s never quite enough of, give chase, pursue persistently, (possibly forever). And everyone will say the same thing they always say to me as though somehow it makes it all better, all worth it no matter the end – well hey, at least you’re out there.