December Thoughts

There’s a lot of looking out of windows from my side of the couch these days. A tuxedo cat nuzzles into a fuzzy white blanket, pausing sleep only to vigorously scratch her face. Cars speed as if the street was a track and time was running out. The sun is light playing on the houses across the street. The stillness is in the magnolia trees, bent over in minutes as the Santa Ana winds make their descent upon the valley.

It is getting cooler now. I descend the stairs and check the AC thermometer, making silent bets with myself. 65 degrees? 68? Sometimes the weather will trick me, playing along with my game. I’m grateful for its trickery. The mornings are cool and clean and even when the sun rises highest in the sky it doesn’t hit our apartment. Instead, it highlights the concrete but leaves us in shade. The apartment remains indifferent to the climbing heat. The cats look for warmth around our human bodies.

I miss the sound of constant airplanes now. The helicopters still search the mountains, hover like a fly over the interstate. But I cannot follow the paths of the metal birds anymore. Occasionally a cargo jet will land at an airport, low and loud, but it is nothing like the sound of bodies being thrust into the sky. I miss being in the sky. The clouds outside the window where I traced their shapes on the plexiglass.

The year ends with more of the same but we are here. We’ve kept most of our sanity. Built the necessary barriers around ourselves to keep the mischievous depressive elves at bay. Somewhat. They still find a way to sneak in when we least expect it. Baking banana bread loaves. Checking the mail. Waking up to zero notifications. They watch us. We take another moment to make ourselves resilient against the onslaught of circular thought. What better time than now? we ask. Now that we have nothing but time?

It’s December where every day is Monday, is Thursday, is the weekend. 3 pm is midnight and waking up to go back to bed. How will we be—who will we be—once things resemble normal? Will we be humans with armor or travelers lost in the woods, finally escaping after three months, sleeping on beds of twigs?

We will know soon. Hang in there.

Best Case Scenario

May, 2020.

Like waking up in a brightly-lit apartment and seeing, feeling, nothing but darkness. You check each bulb to make sure they haven’t been replaced with something far more magical while you were “sleeping”. 60 watts have been transformed into an amount of lumens that makes everything feel topsy turvy enough that you hold back the want to choke on invisible fumes. The fact that everything, every single little thing, is just slightly off means that your new reality is through a set of goggles with a vertigo setting.

This morning I was not sure what was wrong. As most mornings go I watch as 6 a.m. becomes 7, 7 topples into 8, and only at half past 9 can I do something that resembles removing myself from my bed like a fly stuck to glue-lined tape. If I thought that I was alone in this waking dance then I would be sorely mistaken. I am living one life among many who reach out for the railing and find it missing. Stolen in the middle of the night, the object that tied us to our sanity has gone the way of the dodo.

Emotions are like a bouquet of multi-colored flowers. Each day we pick off a thorny singular rose and we don’t know which it will be today. A blue-dipped stem and we prick ourselves to the beat of anger, not knowing in which direction to aim it. Red the color of deep passion means something else entirely as we lie on our couch and even the way our cats sleep makes us want to cry. There is a bout of happiness as we brush our fingers on petals the color of a newborn chick, but it is short-lived. Every minute a reminder that the self-created smokescreen of our lives is still see-through and we can see the fabrication as well as the reality.

We creatives are in mourning. Days filled with minutes that feel stolen, hours that stretch on begging to be filled. With flung paint, pages of finely-crafted words, in front of a microphone with an emotionless weapon at hand. We told ourselves, “If I only had the time I could finally make my masterpiece.” But they never trained you how to paint in the middle of a war zone. How to write when you look at your hand around your pen and wonder if you need to wash your hands again. We go to sleep under heavy blankets of guilt, hoping we will feel better in the morning.

What does all of this even mean? Months and months of trekking through thick mud that tries to take us under instead of forward. Uncertainty like seeing a target but they’ve changed the ways to throw the darts without telling us. The only thing we can do, it seems, is to tell ourselves that getting out of bed, weighed down by our heavy thoughts, is a battle won. The war on the other hand isn’t something we can fight. We can only do our best to stay just outside the battle lines even when those lines are constantly in flux. A calmer mind once told me that we were now experiencing something that no one alive has experienced. Did this make me feel better? Worse? More unsure? I still don’t know. But I do know I have since put my fingers on this keyboard and put one word after the other. Reading this back I may even be able to comprehend it.

I wonder sometimes if it is true that they’ve given us a blessing in disguise. That fate has played its hand when it saw us overworking ourselves and losing sight on the things that matter. If that is true, then are these the side effects? The guilt that we carry in our pockets that jingle like rocks as we make our way from shallow to deeper water. 

Maybe we should make a list with two columns. We can write an effigy for the things that we miss in one column, ruminate on even the most petty things—though we know nothing now can be considered petty, not anymore. In the other we can think of the first things we will do once these restrictions are lifted. What are you most excited about? Running your hands down the bookstore shelves, sitting in tattered seats with the remnants of a prior patron’s popcorn pile. 

As lonely as we feel, we are oddly united by our longing and loss. We are holding on to things as if they have been doused in grease and are threatening to escape. It seems that all we have is an untapped amount of forgiveness we can use on ourselves daily. Hourly, if it necessitates it. There is no right way to spend your now open calendar, no matter what others try to tell you. Like a teacher who has been given a subject that has just been created a few weeks before. It’s a good time to hold on to those few things that don’t make their death dive out of our hands, grow legs, and crawl in between the cracks. Tell a friend you believe in them. Tell yourself that you believe in yourself. 

Read that book that has been burning a hole on your to-be-read shelf

Or don’t.

Begin writing the novel that has been haunting you for thirteen years.

Or don’t.

There is no right way, and maybe that is the best case scenario.