New Year’s Eve. I should say something profound. I should say something deep and hopeful about the “tenacity of the human spirit” or at least something witty and cute.
There’s too much pressure.
Last year on this day I was frantically searching for a doctor to see my husband because all the tendons on his hand were severed and nobody would help us because we were a workers’ comp case and apparently America hates workers.
It got sorted, though, and it was nice to have him home. He can move his fingers.
A couple weeks after that somebody hurt someone very close to me who I am supposed to protect and I felt a pain that damn near leveled me. I had the same pain when I was a kid but nobody helped me heal. I guess I healed a little by helping this person. I wish it were back the other way, though. I’d rather remain split wide open than have her hurt.
Forgive my vagueness. There is no other choice.
And then a few weeks after that, as you know, because I’ve been bitching about it for months and months on end, Mac was called out of town for 10 months and I got lost in self pity and resentment and rage that morphed into almost-depression, the deep-black-pit kind.
In the middle of it I leased an office because “I’m a real writer.”
And I taught a couple classes but they were the last ones I’ll teach because I’ve convinced myself “I’m a real writer.” I teach workshops. I love that. You keep signing up. Somehow in 2015 in spite of it all I found a way to “make a living” “as a writer” with this blog and with these workshops and THAT’S SOME OVERWHELMING SHIT.
(thank you.)
I don’t know what I learned from Mac being gone all those months and the screaming and tears that ensued as I stamped my feet and raged at my own inability to control life circumstances. Wait. Maybe that’s what I learned. That’s what I’m always learning.
I can’t. It’s too clichéd.
Move along.
This past month a friend was killed in a car accident and a man who was like an uncle to me died during a routine surgery so it was the first Christmas without him and it felt weird. I saw the sadness in my dad’s eyes. They were cousins. I learned why my aunt always cries when we sing “Have yourself a merry little Christmas.” Because there are a ten or a hundred people not there to hear it. It’s impossible to make sense of it all.
I watch Georgia create hand motions to “Frosty the Snowman” and let that be enough.
Today right now I sit in my office with 100 pages of a manuscript to my left and an almost-done book proposal to my right and I think 2016 will be amazing.
Is there anything else to think?
The son of my friend may think otherwise, the one whose mother was killed.
And there’s a part of me that thinks otherwise, too, but just a little and in moments of tickling loss, because I’m lucky enough to only have that. Right now, in December 2015.
On New Year’s Eve there’s a hope that travels around each tragedy anyway, unless it’s too huge and all-consuming and only time will lessen it (does that even work?), and I feel the hope too, next to the side of me that’s like “Wtf I just want to go to bed. Fuck your anti-climactic ball-dropping.”
And then I laugh. Because “Anti-climactic Ball-Dropping” is a fucking funny thing to say. I mean, isn’t it?
Happy New Year.
Let’s all suck slightly less than we did in 2015.
It’s the tenacity of the human spirit. The only way.
Striped pajamas.
Puke.