Month: December 2020

Just about every December I have the song by Counting Crows called “Long December” playing on a continuous loop in my head pretty much from Thanksgiving right up until the new year.

The melancholy candle-lit mood of brooding next to a rain-speckled window and sullenly, yet hopefully, looking out into the distance and hoping for better.

Just about every December I remind myself how cliche it is to brood on a schedule like this and every December I tell myself I will not mentally loop that song for 5 solid weeks because I will somehow not be brooding when December comes.

I will somehow not think of the family members we lost this year and I will somehow not think of all the ways my Dad failed me and I will somehow not think of the tiny 17-year-old Chihuahua that we said goodbye to only a day after the Christmas festivities this year.

And while we’re at it…”Christmas festivities”. Yeah, we are still in a weird pandemic and grieving for so many deaths and it’s just not festive.

My soundtrack lately is the hum of the dishwasher, JD killing electronic monsters with much crashing and beeping, and the slow steady hum of dissatisfaction.

I’m antsy in my bones to connect to the world again but also might be just fine if we go on living this way physically disconnected from one another, pinballing through endless Zoom meetings, random text messages, and photos on Insta that make everything seem ok for a split second.

But I miss Josephine. I miss her savage love for interrupting my thoughts and I miss the way I feel like nothing else is important but doing her bidding by slamming out words on a page or slapping paint all over a canvas or just thinking of exotic ways to exist. I conjured her when I was 19 and imagined she was a fanged red-haired maiden in a lush green velvet dress and she would show up unannounced at the bedroom window of my mind and we’d explore memory and emotion together, sometimes late into the night.

I miss her. Hell, I was her at one time. I’d say I don’t know what happened to her but I suspect I do somewhere under all the things I do to stay busy when I don’t want to think.

I’ve been busy for 20 years now.

The house is clean. The bills are paid. My career is noteworthy. I’ve built countless circles of friends and social frameworks. I’ve transformed my physical self a million times. I’ve uprooted myself and morphed. I’ve done all the things except sit down with Josephine and ask her what she wants of me at this age, now that I am wrung out by life.

“More”, she will say.

This I know.

The train rumbles in the distance as I write this. Poetically and not. Rusty, rumbling with a silky thunder, and coming long and black into the sea of tonight.

My therapist is talented but is not an excavator. She pats and soothes and uplifts but I need someone to slap the shit out of me when I am tip-toeing around the truth that we both know is crouched in the corner. I’d confront her myself for the millionth time but she’s crafty and slithers back into memory and marrow with the greased ease of a well-rehearsed excuse.

I’ll ghost her, I’m sure. Maybe I’ll be kind enough to cancel the appointment and give her some feeble excuse about how work has me too busy and she will either be too polite to call me on it or she will be too busy to care. Either way, I’ll be that barefoot girl on the porch at dusk just waiting on the cicadas to start humming so I can crush the sweet, cool, wet grass of relief under my feet. And then it’ll be another 6 months before the filing cabinet starts to overflow and I’ll avoid interviewing a new therapist because it’s just. so. fucking. exhausting. and eventually, I’ll write and eat and sleep and avoid. Rinse and repeat.

If I found a new wizard, I might sing my greatest hits of trauma over the course of 2 appointments and give them a snapshot of the girl who has lived despite a lot. And no, that’s not pity or “look at me, I’m a survivor”, it’s just the truth of being able to look back at my life and say, “Yeah, I made it through that and that and that” and know that it’s not nothing.

I didn’t jump out of the hayloft with the rope tied around my neck when I was 12. I didn’t overdose on all the snorty, tarry things when I was 20. I didn’t just drive into the river when I was 30. But I thought about all of it. I thought about the mechanics of it but ultimately was just too chickenshit to do it. And I think about that too.

This fucking Pandemic. I fantasized in the beginning about the time and how I would spend it. Maybe I’d lose 50 pounds. Maybe I’d finish one of my books. Maybe I’d finally paint the fucking bathroom. Maybe I’d heal. These days the “maybes” are “maybe I’ll not do anything productive other than make it through this the way I’ve made it through everything else”…by sheer, stubborn, prolific living. Un-shiny and un-special some days. Just breath in and breath out and a zillion breaths in between where I am doing nothing more than living.

I’m learning how to sit still. Without lists or tasks, without music or movement. Just still. Breath in and breath out. Swirling memory and emotion or sometimes nothing more than the dull buzzing and humming of the human body being alive in a chair late at night looking at a screen and spilling words out onto an electronic page as they come because the words in the body’s head are all that’s left.

I might look back on this time next year and want to kick my own ass for “wasting” a year of working at home and having all this “time”, yes, in quotes, to improve myself. I might even do that negative self-talk thing where I’m like, “I can’t believe you squandered that “opportunity” and got nothing accomplished other than a few little side-projects”. But I know the truth. I know it now and I’ll know it then: people died. Not strangers, OUR people. And my knees hurt. And JD needed me. And the dogs needed me. And work was busy. And we were in a Pandemic. And the election was emotionally draining. And and and and and and and.

And unfortunately, when you are a person with a little depth of spirit, you can’t just catfish your way through a year of fuckery by pretending everything is ok when it isn’t.

The “opportunity” was to learn to sit still. To be slammed down in the stony chair of “lessons on being present” and feel the concrete biting into your legs for a year. To want to get up but discover you can’t.

You’ll sit still and you’ll hate it at first. It will hurt. You’ll use every tool in the book to try to get up but you’ll wear yourself out digging and scraping and you’ll finally say, “Fine, then, I’ll wait it out”.

Your breathing will slow and your body will sink into the stony crevices. Your heartbeat and brainwaves will hum quietly and your eyes will soft-focus on colors and patterns. You’ll hear memories bubble from the bottom of your guts and you’ll be too exhausted to fight them off. You’ll say nothing for months but rather listen to the swirling cacophony of silence that is at once maddening and unnerving.

And then it will happen. The lesson.

What is the lesson, you ask? Simply this: This is being alive. This is being alive. This is being alive. This is being alive. This is being alive. This is being alive. This is being alive.

This is being alive.