This is the anthem of 2009, I have decided.  Each year seems to become about a certain mood or song, for me.  For 2005, it was Common People by Pulp.  For 2006, it came down to Fly Away by Poe.  For 2007, it became about You Look So Fine by Garbage.  2008 was 99% Of Us Is Failure by Matthew Good.

But this year, I am going to rise from the ashes of the sorrow of 2008, as any good Phoenix should do.  In 2003, I understood it so clearly, the message I fought to embrace even as I tattooed a symbolic reminder of it on my back:  I’m alive.  I survived. I will always survive.  If the past I have endured already has not killed me, nothing will.  It’s given me blows that left me gasping and bleeding, figuratively and literally, and I have always found that elusive light to follow out of the dark.

This song reached out to me later in 2008, and rings truer than ever.  It rings true for several of my friends, fellow survivors who surely, as I do, need to be reminded in darker hours that they too have survived.

There are stories we will never tell, stories from the hell we have endured.  Some stories burn so deeply that only the scar remains to testify, for there are no words to articulate it.  The past, it may haunt us, voices whispering in the back of our heads as the sun sets on another day.  But the sun will rise, and the light will shine again.  And even in the dark, the moon lies near to guide us.

This is my resolution.