Writing From 2020
From December 2020, this is likely one of the last pieces I wrote on Facebook before leaving it. I don’t think I’ve written a “last day as” post like this since. I might need to do one this year, now that I’ve got a platform to publish it on (thanks, micro.blog!)
#The Last Day of Being 41
“So it’s been a long year Every new day brings one more tear ’til there’s nothing left to cry.” -Over the Rhine
I think using that quote is my sweet way of saying it’s been a fuck of a year.
Normally, I write this yearly update on Christmas Day evening, the night before my birthday. This year I’m writing it a little early. I’m sitting up in the bed where Lucy is sprawled out and Maggie is curled up. The curtains are open and the natural winter light flows through the grey sky and fills the bedroom. I finished drinking some coffee and want some more. I’m a little chilly; I don’t have anything on except my laptop and some covers. I just started playing Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis by Tom Waits. (God I love this song.)
It snowed last night.
Michael is in the living room, fresh home from the hospital. He had a lung transplant. The severity of the situation didn’t really hit me until I walked into the hospital to pick him up and bring him home two days ago. Seeing him standing there packing his bags, well, I just don’t know why it sucker punched me the way it did, but I broke down and cried in his arms. He had his color back in his face and all those tubes and machines and IVs were gone. It was like nothing had even happened - the last time I’d seen him he was sedated and still had a breathing tube in. I don’t know what emotion I was feeling. A whole bunch of them at once, I guess. Maybe even a year’s worth of them, finally ready to come forward and show themselves in a single, fragile, human moment there with my husband, standing on his own and breathing new breaths clearly, deeply.
Yesterday mom & dad drove up from Cincinnati to give us our Christmas gifts. They watched us open them through the big glass window in the front of the house. We cried, and we wanted to hug them, but we couldn’t. So we thanked them the best we could, and they got back in their car and drove back home.
I really don’t know what to say about this year. How do you reflect on a raging pandemic made worse by the most incompetent leadership I’ve ever seen in my life? How do you reflect on racial injustice and police brutality in a pithy facebook post? How do you make up for the friendships you might have lost because you just kinda quit talking to people? We’re so connected through technology but I swear I’ve seen 5 friends in the past 9-months and it’s not just because of the pandemic.
I don’t know.
I don’t know, but it’s still snowing. Somehow the world is still turning. Maybe that’s how you do it, how you live. You reflect more on the future than on the past. Or maybe you just live in the present moment. That’s what the mindfulness people say. (I like the mindfulness people.)
However you do it, I’m still figuring it out. I guess we all are.
If I haven’t seen or talked to you in 2020, I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better. I hope that you are safe. I hope that you are as happy as you can be. I hope that we all see a better side of America in these next four years. I hope that we heal. (I know I have some healing to do.) I hope that we can keep reading and dreaming and singing, and somehow surviving. And I hope that we all come out on the other side of this thing better, stronger, and more humane than we originally thought was possible.
I have to get going now. So here’s how I’ll end this post, on the day before my 42nd birthday: Here’s to looking towards the future, reflecting on the past, and cherishing the present with each other.
Love, Matthew