New Year's Day

Yesterday was a huge day. One of the biggest days of my life and a very fitting kind of day for my own personal New Year. Although, it took a lot of crying to get there.

I spent Saturday night up in Canmore with the fam. Sunday morning, I opened some of the most thoughtful birthday presents of my life. Gifts that support and acknowledge my creativity, my dreams and the fact that I'm currently residing in the seventh level of hell. I sobbed my way through all of them. The front of the card from my sister read: Find your song and sing it. My dad's gift was the most beautiful leather bag in the entire world. I feel like a female, 21st Century, non-alcoholic version of Hemingway when I sling it over my shoulder.

And then we drove home to the suburbs, where Boyfriend immediately began cutting into a big IKEA box.

See, the retail therapy didn't stop when it should have. We went back the next day and bought a bunch of stuff from that glorious office. Only this time, when I looked at the showroom, it was just an IKEA showroom. It was no longer a soul-lifting window into all that was possible in my dream-filled life.

But Boyfriend wanted so badly to make me happy that when he suggested I buy it for myself as an investment in my creativity, I thought it might work. Maybe, just maybe, $1200 worth of IKEA home office solutions would lift me from the miasma of despair and I would become a functioning suburbitron.

The next day, when I returned from the Walk of Clarity, it occurred to me: There is a return flight to Paris sitting in my garage.

So, when I heard him cutting open my plane ticket to assemble more walls in this beautiful prison, I knew it was time for The Big Talk. The one where I tell him I don't want him to assemble that ottoman because I don't want to live here.

He was silent for 2.5 seconds and then said, "Okay. We'll sell this place and get a smaller place in the city. Then we'll have enough freedom to travel. We can even go to Paris for a month or two." He said he'd call his realtor in the morning, and I nodded, a bit stunned.

It was a good, logical solution, but it wasn't enough. It didn't feel right. I called the BFF Helpline, knowing that Drea would give me some perspective. She said, "If you aren't happy, you could be living in the most beautiful inner city loft condo extravaganza and it wouldn't make a lick of difference."

Selling the house is beside the point.

I went back for Round #2 of The Big Talk. I told Boyfriend that I have to go back to Paris. That if I cut even the tiniest of corners off myself, my dreams and everything I want in this life, I will end up breaking both our hearts. So, I have to go back. And I have to stay as long as it takes.

He looked at me with his big, beautiful eyes and said, "When do you leave?"

See, Boyfriend is a less complicated soul than I. While I am tortured and twisted and passionately driven by a force beyond myself, he is usually watching me with a bemused smile. In his life, he has no need of sweeping epic journeys of the heart. He has found a few things that make him happy, and I am one of them. So, he'd like to keep me in his life. And he'd like me to be happy. If that means letting me go chase down a dream halfway across the world, so be it.

I will leave in October, after my Banff Centre writing course. He will come visit me in November-ish, and we'll take it day by day from there. He is, of course, worried about the Jean-Lucs and the Pierres of the world. But, I swear, the Parisian men were not my cup of tea. The women were way more beautiful. But, given the fact I only hang out with lesbians in Paris, that is cold comfort indeed.

Regardless, I'm going back. I'm going back I'm going back I'm going back! I'm giving myself the only gift that matters – to live my life to the absolute fullest. To reach the soaring heights of the potential God has given me. To take a risk in the name of a love so deep and beautiful I might start bawling again if I think too much about it.

And to do it all now. Not sometime. Not later. Not one day. But now.