Repeat after me, you say under your breath, it is the illness speaking, it it the illness hanging over your eyelids, the things you tell yourself today isn't the way you'll feel forever.
You start drinking at noon.
If you can't sweep the demons from your doorstep, bring them in and knock them out
instead.
For days, your spirit soars, covers the distances with featherweight strides that seem impossible in the empty depth of winter. You think perhaps you've unearthed some long-harbored secret to survival and wonder if you're too well, now, to complain.
But then the morning comes with ice picks for alarm clocks, draping boulders across your chest, no explanation, no excuse. Your health insurance company says you are fine, so they will no longer pay for your attempts at climbing out of the chasm. An airplane reels into the Potomac River, you can't remember the last thing someone said something to be happy about.
You're out of milk for your morning coffee.
There was a time when you thought if you only made it out of your 20s, you could live forever and die when it was time. Saw the impulses of youth claim people who felt like kin, counted days until you aged out of the woods.
Neglected to see how many of your ilk gave up at 31, at 47, at 62. How the woods do not belong to an age, but to a blood stream, to a temperament, to a destiny. You wanted to be one of them so badly that you forgot to read the fine print.
When you sign up for sifting through the madness,
you agree to carry the woods
for as long as your legs will hold.
When you turn around, you see mountains of words piled at every corner, see years of quips, of meandering verse, you have not been silent, only mumbling. Some years have better words than others, some years look different in hindsight, some are painful in their optimism, knowing what you know now to come after. She explains to you how what you write doesn't matter if you don't network your way into getting it out there, and you wonder if out there really holds the allure people think. We all think we are unique, but suddenly we are living through the collapse of an empire, and they don't tell you what that's like after the credits have rolled. We all have dreams until the war comes, then we just have survival.
You don't know how to write prose in a world that's falling apart.
You just know it's been done before,
so who are you to be weaker
than that?
The bursts of energy behind your retina begin to feel like the last sputtering efforts of a gas tank on empty, a lighter down to its last drops of fluid, wanting so much but collapsing before both feet have really left the starting blocks. It's a grueling roller coaster ride, an act of sitting on the giant's chest as it breathes heaving breaths in and out. You soar in the air, only to compress under the weight of your own gravity at the bottom.
You are determined not to give in to the g forces as they play with you.
Thumbing through pages (upon pages) of previous years' words, you find patterns too astute to be ignored. Your words are better in despair, simple thoughts emerging like poetry from your melancholy fingertips. In peacetime they arrive at the door like newspapers, like bar food menus. You cannot force the melody, only sit back on the ride and wait for gravity to press the words from your lips.
I am tired, now.
I will not always be.
You worry about the end of days, about the end of your creative solitude, of demands from the outside world, but when you count your pennies in minutes, you see that you have eons of time unaccounted for, minutes and hours in piles for your creative stretches. Yesterday I saw myself in a light that I thought long had been extinguished. There is magic in Words, still. January spreads out less like a villain and more like a promise, less like the monster that hides in every dark corner and more like a moment's reprieve to hear yourself think again.
My physiotherapist gives me a hesitant nods, lets me out onto the pavement with a hundred conditions and stern reprimands, says you can jog, only jog, I take trembling steps like I do not know this ground beneath me, do not remember this air in my lungs, but of course that is a lie.
For every step I take, I feel more familiar. Every breath leads to another, and things begin to make sense along my spine again. I learn new words, new songs, only to find that they are well trodden paths, that these muscles have memories that are not just darkness, not just step-by-step instructions for grinding a life into pulp, beacuse they know, also, how to run into a sunset, how to be weightless in the frozen air. The last few blocks I sprint, I gain speed like i'm trying to fly, I hear her voice saying jog, inly jog, but January is giving me gifts I didn't know I could ask for, how do you expect me not to break myself
to catch them?
The remains of the snowstorm linger, patches of ice untouched by blue salt pellets which get strewn like rice at wedding, like an act without consequence, everywhere else in the city. I navigate slick sidewalks in morning light still piercing in its chill. You remind yourself you were born to live through this, and worse. A furnace within you hears the call and kicks into high gear, you return home steaming.
It hasn't passed me by unnoticed that this returned derangement has set affairs in order around my spine, has opened treasure chests long closed in my imagination. The irony is not lost on me how the flood of mental illness seems to break the dams and release the floods without which I have been aching. I resist the trope like I paid a full college tuition to be delivered out of it, and I'm not yet prepared to swallow the debt.
But I wake with the remains of intricate dreams on my tongue, long stories weaved like ribbons out of the air. I sit quietly on the bus with the constant chatter of podcasts and top 40s muted in favor of letting my thoughts wander, my eyes follow their flights of fantasy to illogical conclusions. Any moment I don't spend bleeding sorrow and despair into the January winds, I am carried off into stories, into the idea that the walls are porous and if one just takes that first step, Wonderland lies waiting beyond.
I said long ago I'd give up all the comforts a Normal life affords, that I would accept this disease willingly, so long as it let me remain in the land of the Word, and so many times I've had to eat those words when held over the cliff's edge with nothing to show for it but empty pockets. But then there comes a moment, in the unending night, when you see the tendrils of a story sprout from the darkness, see them coil and twist around the tar in which you've been buried, see them grow and turn to stars in your hand, and every prayer you've ever held to join the land of the living melts from your lungs like an ice patch on the street. Perhaps it kept you safe, for a while, and shielded.
But the bruises are what tell us we've lived.
A cycle repeats itself, twists and turns in uncomfortable threads, you've seen this wolf before but the sheep's clothing is abandoned, there was a time when you rose in rebellion, marched on the bastions of rule, but those days are gone now, you are tired, defeated.
But there's an ember from the last round that lingers, there's a Santa Ana wind in your ear drum that remembers how to set itself aflame, the four years that followed the last time you fell were also the most beautiful in weaves of creativity, in beacons of potential. When everything crumbles, you have no choice but to put yourself together,
When everything turns black with evil,
you have no choice
but to turn the flame into a
flashlight
and lead the way
out.
The wagon wheels sink into the mud, their tracks deeper and deeper until you fall in and they run you over once and for all. It’s only the disease talking, you repeat to yourself like a hex, like maybe if you say it one more time you’ll believe it.
You do not.
A snow storm arrives, blankets the northeast, hides Manhattan behind its front. One day in the future we’ll try to tell our kids we saw this kind of snow all the time, and they’ll roll their eyes. You wonder if maybe humanity should dip out early, leave the host to clean up the mess we’ve made.
It’s only the disease talking.
There was something else you wanted to do with your life, something other than wither away on a deep couch in a dark room, counting tree rings on the ceiling, counting your blessings and coming up short on change, there was something you meant to do with your precious minutes other than squandering them into an abyss that won’t give you the time of day in return. The monster doesn’t owe you anything.
A disease isn’t here to hear
what you have to say
in return.
You have to tread yourself into the same wheels you've attempted to lodge yourself in for decades. If it is the thing you want most, why is it hard? Is it supposed to be hard? You shoehorn your way into a day of it, try to sink in when the clothes don't fit, try to remember what it is to do something for sheer enjoyment, try to remember what it is to enjoy something. Your chest feels calloused, like anything alive in there is ensconced in eons of cement. Surely there was a time when sparks coursed through your veins? Where are they now?
Where are you?
The madness must be in there somewhere, still, the colors and fireworks and ridiculous dances that lead nowhere but to joy. They must be there.
If they are not,
it seems,
neither are
you.
“Sit with the discomfort,” the note says, and you immediately have fifteen reasons why it’s wrong. Later, in the safety of your own silence, you have only reasons for why it’s right. You feel January sink its claws in you, drain the light from your eyes and hang cement around your ankles. I run every screen and sound I can to keep it at bay. Sit with the discomfort, my ass.
I know what it feels like to be eaten alive.
What lamb sits gently and lets the lion feast?
We sit glued to house listings, generations of movers looking for dopamine hits in pictures of sunny kitchens, of grassy porches. We calculate pros and cons of someone else's life, pass judgment around the table like a parlor game. The same blood runs through our veins, it is how we make order in the world. She writes from the Lower East to say I'll meet you at Penn Station, that's true friendship, and you know in your bones there is no way you'd rather return to the city. (Your father asks you, as he does every time, if it has to be New York, and you've stopped giving him nuance. All you have left to say is yes.)
Nothing and everything changes all at once, in every minute. There are rules to this game you have yet to figure out. The mountains lie quiet, snow-capped, stoic around you. A flight prepares itself in the other valley. You grab the loose ends scattered around you,
wonder if this is the year you teach yourself how to tie knots.
A year of play, she says from across the country, and you let your neurons run with it. You played for much too long as a child, you were meant to have left it behind ages ago. but you refused, you couldn't help yourself, your mind was a mile a minute with imagination.
A year of play, she writes inside your eyelids, across the whiteboard of your grey matter, into the oxygen you keep trying hard to breathe. What would happen if you let yourself, just for a little while, be free?
The year is long but the life is short. Or was it the other way?
You throw out the clocks.
You were never on time, anyway.
The moving truck expands into the universe, grows by the cubic foot into an unwieldy caravan across the desert. Nothing goes according to plan, but since that's what you expected, it suits your plan nicely. You didn't know you would start the year in communion with the long-haul drivers of the right lane, but we are not always masters of our fate, and sometimes it is best to roll with the punches you've been dealt.
As the palm trees of southern California give way to sprawling deserts and climbing canyons, a peace begins to settle in your foot on the gas, your elbow in the window. The truck hems and haws through the mountain pass, but makes it to the top, rewarded with its blankets of stars, its slow roll into the valley village.
What do you want your year to look like? What do you want your world to look like?
We can't control everything. You do not build the mountain.
You only try to make it across.
A new year begins as they so often do, in red-eyed delirium, in the slight aftertaste of nothing new under the sun, these celebrations always leaving you wanting so you thought you had stopped looking. Morning is heavier still, dragging last night’s lipstick past the early morning yogis of Fort Greene and landing world-weary on your Red Hook front step.
There seems to be little to look forward to this year. The country falls apart under the watchful eyes of those frothing at the mouth to be first to set it aflame. You grow older but seemingly no wiser, you are tired.
A podcast host speaks of play, of how the very essence of humanity is that which our modern supposed civilization has cast aside in favor of rationality and capitalist productivity. You mourn the passing.
Wonder if there’s a way back.
