I've lived away from Yorkshire for the last 20 months - dragged all of 50 miles down the A1 motorway for the purpose of stable, regular employment.
In that time, I've made no attempt to get to know anyone in this new place; I nod to my neighbour when I encounter him as I'm leaving the flat, but couldn't tell you his name.
To my regret, being here meant that I missed the sad, inevitable conclusions to the two most important days of last year - August 2, when my grandmother died, and November 10, when Danny was put to sleep.
In the former case, I got in contact with my family just as my grandmother was drawing her last breaths. I was unable to even cover the few hundred yards to the train station before my phone went off and I received the news that she was dead.
I thus travelled northwards knowing that I was too late, and trying to remove the guilt of being absent is one of the goals of this coming year.
In the latter case - with Danny - I was there on the morning of his death, aware that I'd never see him again. I had to leave him at something after 8am, as a consequence of needing to come back here to work, and he was put to sleep at 10am. Again, I regret not being present at the decisive moment.
When I posted in the early hours of New Year's Day, I spoke of the urgent need to obliterate the aggregation of past sorrow. To that can be added guilt and loneliness; all these things must be assuaged if we are to arrive at any semblance of happiness.
It'll help, then, that I received the news last week that my job is almost certain to be moving back to Yorkshire, and within the next month. It'll not alleviate loneliness, and nor will it alleviate guilt, but I'll no longer feel as though I am drifting.
Drift has been the prevailing emotion in this town; going nowhere at all in a place I don't belong, detached from family, whatever friends I managed to accrue, and from the comfortable certainty of being near familiar places.
It has felt for a long time as though I am observing my own life, watching myself fail and refuse to communicate and with personal goals reduced to one: get out of bed at some point during the day. There is no future here that I'd wish to contemplate, the perpetual re-ignition of ambition itself the infuriating start and end point of ambition.
I long to get away from here, and never return. The stock of memories around every corner is too great, and contributes to the stasis which I have become. In one more month, I hope it will be over.
