tuckova

Bye 2020

It's 8:15 pm, New Year's Eve. It sounds like a war outside already, all the fireworks. I admit that I've somewhat lost my taste for small fireworks in the last few years (I still like the huge ones overhead, though I feel sorry about the damage they cause, now that I know. I still like them, it's just not unmitigated joy). Still, I'm glad that people are celebrating, however it brings them happiness. Supposedly at 9 pm we should all be safe in our houses, breathing only the air of the people we already live with. We'll see.

Strange year, no? I had a glorious vacation in California in January, loved up on my family and friends, had adventures on planes, trains, and automobiles. I felt loved. Then I came home for about five minutes, turned around and went back to the other side of the US for my aunt's funeral. She was important to me in my childhood and it was nice to see her husband, sons, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, cousins, all gathered. I still have a peppermint lifesaver to remember her by, but my memories are solid anyway.

Then I came home, Czech Theater put on a play, and the next week the whole country locked down in response to the pandemic. It was ... I don't want to say "funny" but that's the word I have. I was so absolutely exhausted, like exhausted in my soul, and I needed a break. I didn't mean for the whole world to have a pandemic, I would have just stayed home quietly alone! I did not need existential dread for people in general while simultaneously being personally glad for the time out, and then the whiplash of guilt for that feeling.

People kept saying that Now We Have Learned and Now We Know and When This Is Over We Will Be Different. Will we? I think that some of us already knew that about half of the people around us, many in positions of power, are selfish and horrible. Let's say a third. Maybe some of us learned that another third already understand deeply and intrinsically what community means, the needs of the many are entwined with the needs of the one. I don't think I learned anything I hadn't learned four years ago. I'm glad if somebody did. When this is over, we will go back to how we were before, is what I think, though I'd be delighted to be wrong on that.

In the summer there was a moment where it seemed like this country had made it through by shutting down early and hard. I took a lovely vacation in Greece, where I ate my body weight in feta cheese and swam in the ocean and read and slept and laughed until my sides hurt.

Then we came back and schools reopened and we went back to something like normal and now we're shut down again. If I knew I had a week, a month, a year, it would be easier to just buckle in and sit, see where we go. I try to guess but nobody really knows.

What have I processed this year? I am afraid of being unwanted and of being useless. I've seen how I respond to situations where I feel that way and it's not how I want to be; I've seen it before but now maybe with greater clarity. It feels like I may eventually get to the point where I respond in a way that pleases me; I'm not there but it's a thing I can imagine. I think I've gotten better at accepting people where they are and arranging myself accordingly. I find it difficult to say what's changed when a lot of the things that were hard for me (social gatherings, for example) haven't been a presence, but I think I've gotten a little better at being in the moments I am in, whatever they are. 

I worked a lot. I meditated more. I watched a ton of movies, which mostly made me happy. I slept more than usual but still not as much as I would like. I remember in my 20s if I could sleep I did, for hours, I would spend a day in bed drifting between books and thoughts and writing and dreams. I can't seem to do that anymore. Still, I slept more than usual. My cooking got a little better. Squire and I settled into a pretty pleasant roommate routine. I got better at standup and did ok with shifting to online. I adapted and performed a play with some friends. I increased contact with some people, regular phone calls or longer letters, knowing that we wouldn't see each other in person for who knows. I am sometimes profoundly lonely, but that was always true.

Anyway, it's 8:45. I'm going to go stand on the balcony and look at the moon. It's midnight somewhere. Happy New Year. 

fallacies of morning rose

Today would have been your birthday. I don't want to say I think about you every day because that would be a lie. I didn't think about you every day when you were alive, though probably every week at least, because that's when we talked, when we were talking. I think about you in passing probably once or twice a month, and intensely (and with longing for the good parts of you, which I miss) maybe every other month now. Ten years. 

I remember a lot. I remember good things. I realize that, as is my way, I shut a lot of sad things in a room that I try not to visit but I do try to remember that they're there. Not to make anybody better than they really were. Sometimes you were cruel, sometimes you came very close to hurting me. I usually didn't let you close enough to risk that, and there was a reason I held back, and I try to remember that. When you died I wasn't sure whether I had the right to mourn you, because we were never tangled and messy and I didn't know whether twenty years of visits and letters and phone calls was enough. I tried to talk myself out of my tears.

I've been thinking lately about pain and about how if we numb ourselves to it or remove it from our lives we feel considerably stronger, but it leaves us incredibly vulnerable to any pain that gets past those barriers. I think about the pain you were in, and your glorious anger, and how much I learned about pushing through pain from you. Only to watch you become someone who numbed yourself into a stupor from which you only sometimes emerged. You were hardly ever angry anymore, which was good in some ways, though it made you sloppy in other ways. You were much less alive. And then you were dead.

I mourn you at your most alive, man who made me laugh so hard it hurt. I mourn who you were when you became a person who couldn't keep up with me half the time, your once-quicksilver wit flashing out to remind me of what it was like to be in the presence of someone that sharp, then fading back into tarnish. I mourn who you might be now, the person I'll never know, who would have been one of the few who knew me then. What would you think of that? What would you think of this?

Ten years. I'll always love you. I'll always be angry that you're gone.