Funny; I expected this to sound gloomier than it turned out.

Sifting through some college folders a few weeks ago, I found an old letter.  One of mine.  It was one I'd written so carefully, but never had the chance to send.  I know why I held onto it.  I can remember the day I tucked it into this beat-up old Star Wars folder.  I always kept thinking - you know, maybe one day I'll have a reason to finally send it, or I'll find something that my older self will still want to say and use in another letter, or maybe I'll just bust it out once in a while for old times' sake.  But that afternoon, I read through it all again, and realized I had no reason to hold onto it.  I smiled at it, then let it go.

I had a voicemail saved on my cell phone for the longest time.  Periodically you have to clean these things out, and every time I did, from the time they first left it, I'd end up hitting 9 on that instead of 7.  For all the twists and turns that story took, I think I remember when and why I convinced myself to keep it.  When I was sitting in bed a few nights ago, saving the old ones again (Grandpa is still there, telling me he was thinking about me and that he wanted to know how I'm doing) and clearing new ones out, I came across that one.  I played it one more time.  Then I finally hit 7.  I smiled at it, then let it go.

It was around this time of year in 2001, ten years ago, that I first signed up on Final Fantasy Online.  Last week, after looking around the new forum, some consideration of what I was seeing from the people there, a cursory weighing of the good and the bad from the community over the last ten years, and a measurement of the administrative climate as it is now, I signed out with the decision that I won't be logging back in.  No farewells; no regrets.  I smiled at it, then let it go.

Really, I think you get the idea.

I bring up all of the above (and couch them thematically with the subtlety of a tuba player trying to blow a stuck pig from the bell of his horn) because they're the broadest strokes on this picture I've painted for myself, this last year.  It's felt like every other week, there's one more tie that's being cut in my life, and not always against my choosing.  Sometimes it's depressing; sometimes it's for the best.  Sometimes it simply, naturally feels like I'm out of reasons to hold on anymore.

Every time, though, it leaves the environment around me a little more alien.  Life feels relentlessly strange to me now.  Some nights I realize all those ties I've lost, cut, or drifted away from have become so far removed that I'm not sure where I am.  And I'm not sure why I don't feel so broken up about it.  I wouldn't call those smiles happy ones, but they're smiles nonetheless.

I guess wherever I've ended up, whatever point I've reached, it doesn't have anything to tie me down.