Next Year Will Be Different

New Year’s Eve is a funny time. A night when we gather with our loved ones and toast to the memories we have made over the past 364 days. Our dreams and aspirations for the coming spin around the sun glint like jewels in our eyes as we sip champagne, light off fireworks, and imagine how we will narrate the coming seasons with our internal monologues. What trips we’ll take, what skills and trades we’ll try, what we hope to accomplish. How we’ll be better, how we’ll actually do the thing we’ve been putting off, how we’ll make the choices that really reflect who we are as a person instead of who we are when we’re treading water. How our lives will unfold and lead us to this same day next year. On New Year’s Eve, we all tell ourselves the same thing: Next year will be different. Whether this is a lie or not depends on what kind of person you are.

At the beginning of 2024, I moved in with the love of my life and his four children. For months, we had been driving four hours each way between Tulsa, OK and Kansas City, MO. I enjoy road trips, and four hours is not something I considered to necessarily be a long drive, but when you’re doing it two and three times a month, it becomes very long indeed. It had been a very long time since I’ve lived with a partner; the last time ended with me moving out in 2017 after my ex’s mother told me she was increasing my rent by 50% after her son and I broke up as we lived in a house that she owned. My Kansas City partner and I only dated long distance for seven and a half months before I packed my apartment into a U-Haul along with my two cats and dog and made my last four-hour trip from my old city to my new one; my second trans-state move in less than a year.

Moving in with someone after seven months is a timeline I would have called myself crazy for in another life. Coming from Utah, everyone I’ve ever known has rushed their relationships. The conclusion I have arrived at is that this practice must be written in the Book of Mormon, and that’s why everyone does it. I was a shotgun baby, born four months after my parents were married. My mom’s second husband proposed within a couple of months, my sister was proposed to on her second date, my other sister eloped with her first husband after knowing him for a couple of months, and my last sister had her own shotgun wedding after a few months as well. Having witnessed all of these jarring spans of time in my life, it had become very important to me to not rush relationships. However, by early 2024, Bryce and I decided that we wanted to live together more than we wanted to drive for 16-24 hours to see each other each month. Being with someone who wants to be with me as much as I want to be with him made a big step like this easy, and doing it was without a doubt one of the best things to happen to me in 2024.

When I told my dad that I was in a relationship with a man who has four kids, he squarely looked at me in the eye and tried to hold back a laugh. “You,” he said, “are a sucker.” What he said in his own context was, You and your three sisters raised hell together as children, and now you are going to understand the visceral burn of kismet. I have never before acted as a parent while in a relationship, and being actively involved with a partner’s children has been a new experience for me. Living with someone you love is one thing; living with their four children is another. Despite this, it has been chaotic, grounding, and beautiful in ways that I am still untangling as a new step-parent. I get to see the world in new ways through tiny pairs of eyes in a way that I never imagined for myself. I get to watch these small humans I’ve connected with have experiences that I had at their age and learn things that I was so eager and excited to consume. I get to be annoyed at them for all the same reasons that my parents were annoyed with me when I was growing up. I get to watch my pets love these kids so fucking much and watch them give love in return.

In May of 2024, Bryce and I visited Portland, Oregon, where I lived for almost eight years. When I moved away in May of 2022, I couldn’t wait to leave. I was irritated and exasperated and annoyed with my pretentious, failing city. I was sick of seeing garbage everywhere, paying high prices for meals and groceries and coffee, and watching my rent go up while my salary stayed the same. Once I left Oregon, however, I fell back in love with it. Fantastical romanticism is a hell of a disease, and I have since had a permanent feeling of homesickness lodged in my chest from Oregon’s absence in my life, which is why I was so happy to visit when we had a chance.

Getting to experience my city through the eyes of a first-time visitor and someone I love was a thrill. A friend let us stay in a bungalow he shared with a friend in East Portland, and the weather was a perfect sixty degrees almost constantly with not too much rain. I ran into friends at the first restaurant we visited and it felt like I was home again. We went to all my favorite places – Movie Madness, we waved at the Hollywood Theater as we passed, we had lunch at The Observatory and ramen at Marukin (now under a different name, but it will always be Marukin to me). We visited some wedding venues because though he hadn’t proposed yet, we planned on a domestic destination wedding from Missouri to Oregon and wanted to scope locations while we were there. We stayed at the Timberline Lodge in Mount Hood, and it made me wish very badly that I had taken the opportunity to visit the area when I lived there. On our way up to the lodge, snow piled up around us five, six, seven feet, and was bulldozed into piles all around the hotel. We had the greatest meal of our lives at their Cascade Dining Room, and the girl at the front desk let Bryce hold the ax used by Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

We took an hour journey south to Silver Falls State Park, which is my favorite of all state parks and boasts ten waterfalls throughout its trails. The feeling that comes over me when I am in this place is how I imagine people feel when they go to church; it feels like my cathedral. I wanted to visit in May specifically because the spring runoff would be heavy and the waterfalls would be thunderous, and they didn’t disappoint. My favorite moment of this year happened after we passed beneath the first falls: as we were engulfed in mist and moisture from the South Falls tumbling all around us, Bryce looked at me and told me that if he had a ring on him, he would have proposed right then. It was a perfect moment.

The worst moment of this year is when I watched a car cross two lanes of traffic and careen toward Tallulah and I at high speeds on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 7th. The worst moment of this year is understanding in a split second that the car rocketing toward us was going to hit us. It did, and when I opened my mouth to scream no sound came out because an airbag was slamming into my face like a brick of concrete instead, and suddenly time was missing from when my car had just previously been traveling in the right flow of traffic to now when it was facing the wrong way and everything in front of me was annihilated. The worst moment of this year is hearing Tallulah through the ringing in my ears making noises of pain from the back seat of the car. The worst moment of this year is when she jumped out of the car and I couldn’t go after her because I was trapped in my smoking car, unable to move. The worst moment of this year is when I could hear cars passing by slamming on their brakes around me after she jumped through the shattered window. The worst moment of this year is being unable to turn my head or see where she went and being certain that she would be hit by another vehicle or that I would never see her again. The worst moment of this year is being dragged from my car and screaming, asking where my dog is and feeling pain, so much pain, oh my god the pain, but screaming louder for my dog. The worst moment of this year is being unable to move my right leg in the ambulance and crying and screaming, asking where my dog is. The worst moment of this year is being unable to reach anyone that I know or love because my phone was shattered beyond recognition, and I don’t know how to reach my mom or my boyfriend or anyone at all to tell them something has happened. The worst moment of this year is the doctor telling me that my pelvis and heel had both been shattered and five of my ribs were broken. The worst moment of this year is not knowing if I would ever walk again. The worst moment of this year is having the driver who hit me withhold insurance information from me. The worst moment of this year is hearing that the driver who hit me had his wife call and claim to my insurance that the accident was my fault. The worst moment of this year is when I wondered if I should have just died in the accident. The worst moment of this year is understanding that my life as I knew it would now and forever be different.

The accident was not my fault. I know this, the police know this, my lawyer knows this, the insurance adjusters know this, the doctors know this, the surgeons know this, the nurses know this, the physical therapists know this, the shitstain who hit me and his bitch wife sure as shit know this. Everybody fucking knows this. I know that the accident was not my fault, but nevertheless I wish that I had not been on the road in that exact place in that exact moment at 2:37pm when I was collided into by the other driver. I wish I had been doing anything else at the time other than picking up Tallulah from school and coming home on the road that I picked. I wish I had read more books. I was heavily gearing up to start my baking blog in earnest before the accident, and while it’s a good thing I didn’t because it all would have fallen apart, I still wish I had been able to pursue it. I wish I had done more walking and hiking and appreciated my mobility. I wish I had explored Kansas City more. I wish I had visited the surrounding areas and states. I wish I had taken a deeper interest in photography. I wish I had picked up drawing again. I wish I had studied more languages like I’m always telling myself I should. I wish I had been kinder to myself, and I wish I had asked for help. I wish I knew how to stop seeing that car coming at me when I close my eyes. I wish I knew how to navigate trauma and post-traumatic stress of nearly dying and being reminded about that fact from the condition of my body every single day.

Things before the accident seem fuzzy and very far away, like I am watching them transpire on a magic lantern in a format of very poor quality. My move to Kansas City makes this the seventh state I’ve lived in. This year I kayaked for the first time by myself, and it was one of the most peaceful experiences in nature that I’ve ever had. I started a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with Bryce and the kids, marking my premiere as a DM. I started writing again this year, which is something I have not done in a long time. Staying at the Timberline Lodge was an achievement in itself, and it convinced me to finally pick up The Shining, which I now consider to be one of my favorite books. Frankly speaking, I am quite certain that there are a great deal of things that I did this year that are worthy of note or boast, but the simple fact is that I cannot remember what they are because much of this year has been eclipsed by incidents stemming from August 7th. My greatest victory this year, though, is that I lived from the accident.

In 2025, I want to get better. That’s the thing that I want the most. It informs so many other things that I want to do: go on trips to see the wonders of this country with my family, go camping, go on walks and hikes with my dog, explore Kansas City, which I haven’t been able to properly do yet. Get more into photography. Bake. Learn how to pipe correctly and make beautiful frosting floral arrangements. Make things in the kitchen. Make cocktails and mocktails. Open a tiny mobile bakery and online bakery. Having the opportunity to have done all these things when I was able-bodied is excruciating to not being able to do them now. I want to read more. I want to draw more. I want to be able to take care of my plants. I want to not be exhausted after I shower or go up or down the stairs or make a single meal in the kitchen. I want to move more, I want to take more steps. I want to exercise and get my strength back. I want to be able to walk unassisted. I want to cure my foot drop. I want to be able to walk.

I have high hopes for the future, and for my stubborn determination to not allow myself to wilt into nihility. I have to have hope for myself and for my healing because it is the only thing that is going to get me to all of the places I want to go, all the things I want to do and see. At a high optimism, I probably only have another forty or so years left on this planet, and the thought of not being able to get through everything I want to do now leaves me with a very deep feeling of dread.

The best thing that happened this year is that I didn’t die in that crash. The second best thing is that my dog didn’t die, either. I thought that I had already lived through my worst year, but 2024 had other plans. One day I will write more in-depth about the accident, but I don’t think that I can authentically do that until my healing journey is farther along, especially since I haven’t been able to process what has happened yet.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next year, but I hope that I can look back to this moment in time when I’m writing this and know on an exalted scale how far I’ve come and how much fortitude I exhibited to make that happen. I look forward to the future when I won’t have to say that me and my dog not dying was the best thing to happen to me. One thing I can say with certainty is that when I told myself in 2023 that next year will be different, I wasn’t lying.

Next year will be different, too.