Not Dead, Just Rearranged

Every year is mostly a repeat of the one before it, which is why you have to pay attention to the specifics—the details that made 2008 sharper, stranger, more painful, and more alive than any year I can remember. The first half wasn’t worth living through, to say it plainly. A breakup. A spiral at school. And then losing my best friend without any warning, no chance to say goodbye, just gone—the kind of thing that makes jumping from a TV tower start to make a certain logical sense. Except that would have been the ultimate act of cowardice, so here I am.

And here’s where the second half gets its due. The parties, the people, the new apartment, the city, all of it accumulating into something that felt, unexpectedly, like being alive on purpose. And the music—the music. My iPod spent most of the year on the verge of structural failure because there was just so much good stuff that showed up at exactly the right moments: Lykke Li, The Ting Tings, Santogold, Ladyhawke. It would have been a genuine tragedy to miss any of it.

So I bow to you, 2008—instructive, unfair, stuffed full of emotional rollercoasters I never asked to board. Mandy and Basti agree with me: 2009 has to be better. It simply has to. For my sweet little angel, who I’d have wanted beside me at midnight—don’t let the fireworks hit you.