I am growing up and making healthy choices.  At least when it comes to life, if not food.  The day after Halloween in New York is accompanied by a city-wide hangover.  You can almost feel the headaches and nausea lingering on the streets as if they were airborne.  This year, I did not have a hangover of my own.  This year, the BF and I celebrated our first Halloween together by leaving the party at a sensible hour, efficiently avoiding the transformation back into pumpkins.

Which, along with falling back an hour, allowed us the good fortune of arriving at Penelope early enough to not wait two hours for seats.  Penelope is that rare New York restaurant that refers to its cooking as homestyle and actually warrants the description.  The coffee mugs are all mismatched (my favorite is labeled “GRANDDAD”) and the pumpkin waffles taste just like my grandmother’s would have if she had ever made them.  The coffee is heaven.  The fries are the kind that are orange and crunchy and herbed on the outside (any fries with an “outside” and “inside” are, by definition, delicious).  They even offer seasonal drinks to go along with the pumpkin waffles; on this occasion, we shared an apple cider mimosa.  (By “shared” I mean that I drank most of it.  Atypically, this was not due to my selfishness but to the fact that the BF feels about as manly drinking a mimosa in public as he would wearing gingham in Chelsea.)

While we worked on our coffee and discussed the night before (remembering the night before is so convenient!), I noticed the girl next to me.  (Yes, we had gotten seating, but it was at the bar.  A table would have taken an hour.)  She was having a rough go of it, hanging her head over her plate (and leaving her fries untouched–that’s how I knew the situation was dire).  The guy with her wasn’t talking to her much, and I assumed from the look on her face that he was trying to avoid getting puked on.  I almost felt her misery myself.  I’ve certainly been there, way too many times to count.  With some dude I didn’t even like, wondering when this hangover of alcohol and bad life choices would end.

Well, next month it will be a year.

I was talking to my aunt today, catching up on the lives of her daughters.  My cousins, ages 13, 18, and 20.  The theme with the older ones, who are in college, was her concern over their choices in guys.  Her fear that they would make the wrong choices and face way too much heartbreak.  Man, was she preaching to the choir.  And yet here I am on the other side of it, 32 years old and not the 22 when she and my mom and my grandmother all got married.  And there are regrets, naturally, because I have done some pretty boneheaded things.  But even after all that, I landed in the best place possible.  I could have avoided navigating some shit tunnels a la Andy Dufresne, and come to the other side with a few less scars.  But who knows?  Maybe Kanye West said it best (the only time he’s said anything best) with the words, “I’m tryin’ to write my wrongs, but it’s funny them same wrongs helped me write this song.”  Or this blog.  Or the advice I will one day give my children.  At the end of the day, or on the night before, or on the morning after, I have no idea what unseen strings are being pulled and cut and woven together to create the pattern of my life.  I am convinced of two things:  one, that I know infinitely less at any moment than I think I do; and two, that there are hands holding those strings, and they aren’t mine.  They’re scarred hands, but perfect.  And that single image takes everything, even a hangover, and turns it into glory.