reset

Imagine a giant reset button – like the one on the original NES: a big, grey, spring-loaded button.  When the game got stuck (as was wont to happen) or you wasted too many of your lives, you could reach up, push it, and with a satisfying screek of the spring-action, all would be made right in the world of Mario and his brother (maybe it was just ours that made that noise after too many resets).

I feel as if I have been lent a real-life version of this button. Not because I’ve wasted too many lives, but because I did get stuck for a little while, mainly in the depression that encompassed me after Katie died. There was no way to prepare for that – why would there be – and it literally turned my life upside-down; sucked the life out of my sails; consumed me. And now, thank God for therapy and amazing family and friends, I can look back down at those valleys and it hits me so very clearly that I was not myself. I was a shell of myself. And I am so very glad to be “back.” And though that experience has left its mark (on so many folks), I am now grateful – and not just sad – when those memories crop up, such as the little notes I’d find from her when I was packing up my apartment. Bittersweet, yes, but now I can see the sweet after the bitter, whereas before I couldn’t make it through to the second half of that word.  

So now – as I sit in the airport waiting for my flight home – home! – to Denver, my brain races with anticipation. My boarding this flight is the push of the reset  button . . .  and when I disembark on the other side, well, that’s the screek of the release. The release into a somewhat unknown world.  I am the same player that I was, just a more knowledgeable, experienced and hopefully wiser one.

Thrilling. Terrifying. Exciting. Bring on the Koopas!

(Remember the Game Genie for the original Nintendo system? You could figure out the codes and cheat your way through a particularly difficult level of say, Super Mario Bros 3. Or if you were just feeling lazy, you could also use it to beat a game faster than you normally could.)

But I digress. Okay. Time to board…