The Magic Hour is Now

Since we’re at the beginning, allow me to go back.

TimeHop and I are in an open relationship. The commitment-free kind where we avoid public eye-contact but hook-up on Friday nights. Some evenings, it brings me pure, unadulterated pleasure in the form of old photos and recovered retweets while others, it shatters my heart into a million jagged pieces. Most nights, TimeHop stands me up, left alone with still-frames of college day-kegs and a half-eaten tub of Ben & Jerry’s.

This week, we’re on speaking terms (sort-of).

This time last year, I was blacking out at Beechmont Tavern for Halfway to Saint Patrick’s Day, still lugging around unnecessary baggage from a melodramatic breakup and, of course, still nursing a gnarly knee-scrape from Labor Day. (Subtly wondering how I still had friends,) I was suiting up for senior year.

Roughly 365 days later, I can safely say: It has been quite the fucking ride.

I watched my cousin get married while, less than 48 hours earlier, I was holding a fraction of my front tooth in my palm after an average elbow-meets-beer-bottle-meets-face incident in a crowded bar.

“Just wear it down with a nail-file,” said a girl on line for the bathroom. I did not take her advice.

I survived the almost-apocalypse, frequent near-death games of civil war, approximately ten to twelve gin buckets and one six-day trip to Puerto Rico with almost 20 of my closest friends. I lived through my first seven minutes behind the wheel of a car (I can’t say the same for the passenger…kidding, though his head did hit the windshield and that is no fucking joke).

I decided to put half a handle of vodka in a pitcher of boxed-sangria and, somehow, no one died.

I moved from one home to another, 20 miles away from girls I hadn’t lived farther than 10 feet from in four years. I finally got closure from above-mentioned breakup in the form of an 18-speed-mountain bike gifted to me three years earlier. I said dozens of painful goodbyes, one of which was to said ex-boyfriend’s mother whom I no longer had a valid reason to see. But, the hardest goodbyes were to the gals I no longer shared a lease with.

I graduated with a degree in what I love, treading carefully across the stage at Radio City; the gauze around my post-senior-formal feet clearly visible.

My mother was punched in the face by a Hell’s Angel — and then she got cancer.

In three months that felt like years, my mom beat cancer and still holds onto her sanity through remission, minus that time she thought she saw the Notre Dame mascot in a bruise on her arm. I sat shot-gun in a cross-country roadtrip to Chicago, saw Lil Jon live at Lollapalooza, browned out at Wrigley Field and spent one-third of my Chase savings on a shot of v8. I spent five days with ten boys who, in between literally choking each other out and blaring Miley Cyrus on repeat, made me feel like one of the guys.

I took a job that I adore. I saw Shaggy live. I made it to 22.

About a year ago, a good friend referred me to the record “Would It Kill You” by Hellogoodbye and, in an intimate drunken stupor, repeated the lyrics to me: “Would it kill you just to let it all work out?”

I’ve spent a year free from the reigns, letting life fall into place.

A year later, I’ll pull from the band’s new single, less than one week old:

The thing about the sun is that it’s gonna set and rise again, over you.

The magic hour is now because we’re not guaranteed another.

To make a long story short, consider this an introduction of sorts. I’ll be using this platform for good (and for evil), sampling some of my deepest, darkest and painfully honest thoughts on life, love, the pursuit of happiness, dating websites, binge drinking, tracksuits and more.

Cheers to another year in life and in writing.