Anniversaries

Repetition. It's not how memories are made, but how they're kept. The anniversaries remembered recently:
August 27th
September 26th

...and then there are some that have to be remembered every month, not because you want to remember them, but because you can't help it.
April 17th
May 17th
June 17th
July 17th
August 17th
September 17th

A year ago from yesterday (September 26th), I was admitted into the ER as a psych patient. I had welts from failed cuts on my wrists, and the paper bracelet they put on my wrist stung as it chafed my raw skin.

Someday I'll publish the journal entries I wrote during my subsequent 4 day ER stay, 10 day inpatient stay, and 8 day outpatient stay. I feel as though I should re-read the entries to acknowledge how far I've come in that year, but part of me knows that's not the right decision. Because when thoughts are repeated, the mind goes back to where it was the first time those thoughts existed--not completely, but it's transported momentarily. Yet however brief the visit is, that flashback can be dangerous. If revisited too soon, the cuts may not have healed and the picked-off scab will just bleed again. Obviously not as much as the first time around, when the knees fell to the ground and got scraped up on the asphalt. But blood is blood.

Every month is a new triumph. I've made it this far, when a year ago I barely made it out alive. My most recent birthday was celebrated as a day of congratulations to me for making it through the year. I've decided lately that every morning I want to thank the universe that I'm being given another chance to have a new/better/different/etc experience than the one i had the day before. And of course I want to thank it for being able-bodied and relatively able-minded, and not in poverty, and not ill or in poor health, and not in prison or a large public high school. To all those things I'd raise a glass, a glass of water to that, because alcoholic beverages are an anniversary unto themselves, a remembrance of 17s and 17ths. Alack, a story for another night.