at the end of a tough year

I absorb sadness

(the soaking kind)

Like a sponge

Too full to wring

What is a little more

To add to the end of

An unfixed dripping

Tidal

Swing

Unanchored

Stream of months

Porous and poor

Another year

more comfort than courage

When it starts getting darker early

Layers and thicker socks

And by 7pm I'm ready to give in

Those liminal minutes

That feel like an actual pull

And my body feels heavy and far away

My mind deliciously blank

In those moments I am fearless

I am most ready

For nothing

years of it

Everyone got wider and a bunch of people got divorced and no one is really saying it in so many words but wow this has been a challenging decade and it's been awhile since anyone's felt especially hopeful and there's no real end in sight but we're too tired, now, to manage anxiety spirals so this mild depression can almost be mistaken for calm. 

bike camp

I went away to bike camp for the weekend where most everyone was either ten years older or ten years younger than me.

The older folks wanted to talk about bikes. The younger ones wanted to talk about AI and revolution. 

turn turn turn

first infection

while I was infected for the first time,

the world mostly kept on

while I mostly slept for hundreds of hours 

and took three days to finish a movie.

I read nothing meaningful and thought nothing important

and had no energy to care or worry about health or wellness at all

(except for a few anxiety spirals that sent me right to sleep).

a bunch of people got shot in America and 

artificial intelligence continued to advance at a rapid rate

and no one cared much or knew what to do if they did.

that's all.

more or less.

nostalgia

What a thing to crave- 

catastrophe.

When days shrink to surviving and little else. 

Congratulations due for getting through.

The simplicity was an odd, unexpected comfort. 

Whereas now, 

in some quiet in between or after,

the questions announce themselves again.

Regrets and wondering at purpose.

Looking in the mirror for the first time, maybe, in years.

Wasn't it somehow easier, then?

In surprising ways?

In 2020 when I saw no one and sang the Cranberries

Empty

in a hot shower twice a day.

Took two hour walks to get to a mailbox and 

swept up rollypollies, 

heaps of them dead at the door,

every morning.

I didn't feel old or complacent and

it wasn't a question of having settled 

or having lost my spark 

or much of anything related to a self at all.

I was nervous about the world,

alive in it,

and little else.

oh, to be

the panic, twice

It's been, what, a week or so now and it seems distant again-

unless I check the news.

Twice in the span of a few weeks,

looking down to see the words ACTIVE SHOOTER

alive on my phone.

Once was the first thing I saw in the morning,

and I stumbled out of the room mumbling about it in a hushed, incomprehensible tone, doom-scrolled for ten minutes before the picture became clear, and then promptly fell back asleep.

"What were you saying about his school?" he texted later.

"OMG" he replied.

Hoax.  

It had been a hoax phone call.  But the kids had been locked down and dismissed and they parents remained actively rattled.

The panic came back to me in strange ways throughout the day.  

Needing to pause to catch my breath at odd times.  Muscles tightened for no reason.

All that, and I was steps removed and an entire country away.

Imagine.

The second I was attempting to make my first carrot tartare,

carrots cooked and ready to be diced

chives and capers-

(the way I'd been craving capers-

just the thought could elicit a physical response)

and it was all coming together.  

But this time it was not a phone call

and there were real bodies emptied

and no followup outcome article

because the shooter was still at large

and people were hiding in their apartment showers

and new information was not being shared 

but conspiracies were all over screens

and in between dicing carrots I was 

refreshing my phone

and reaching out to a friend who worked at the site.

She was not at work, but home,

grinding egg shells for her worm compost

and exchanging frantic texts with me about

the strange disconnect of this

very domestic moment

in a terrifying world.