In Time

The first day of autumn here was sometime in early September. It had been a mild week, but the breezes still carried summer’s lazy humidity tinged with heat, right up until one Thursday morning when the 65 of the beautiful evening before had been transformed into a chillier 65 that threatened to bite. Ordinarily that might be cause for celebration: October is usually jam packed with fun events, the warming spices and knitting come out again, Christmastime is on the horizon, and I begin my annual determined few weeks of seeing all of my good friends one-on-one for coffee or drinks, which is how I’ve taken to celebrating my own birthday as a boring ass adult. But as the sun rose on that morning, it felt like one more death than I had left in me to handle. 

Jo March is the Gryffindor of Little Women: everyone thinks that’s who they’d be, at least initially. But I always identified more with Beth. Not the melodramatic dying bit - thankfully I’m in excellent health - but the grief on Claire Danes’s face when she asks, “Why does everyone want to go away?” On grayer days, that’s the frame for my world: there was a moment that I didn’t know was perfect until slowly its components slipped away one by one. First, my sisters moving to Seattle one after the other, and somewhere in there, my parents selling the childhood home and moving several states away too. Then losing a beloved roommate to work in yet another state. My boyfriend moving around the region, following post-doctoral work 2-5 hours away. The severings of COVID, which were more ambiguous but felt the more intensely for introducing physical isolation. Bear limping to me as I opened my front door coming back from a long weekend, and six weeks later she was dead. Moving, at long last, because everyone else close to me had except Gwen, and more partings. Mom fighting cancer but not understanding the terms of the engagement and losing. Without her Dad not knowing how to want his own future, and he too has come close to slipping out of our hands.

I feel a little bit like I’m dying too. Again, not in that Beth way, but in one of the transformations we undergo at moments in our lives when the many adaptations we’ve made to survive begin to produce deeper changes. How do I perceive myself? What are my goals? What doors are being locked and unlocked at this moment? Being fully in one place for the first time in so long - no weekend trips to see Pierce, no weekly commutes to New York City for work, old ties weakening, new ties being formed - I don’t feel as good as I expected. It was exhausting to maintain at times, but cloistered here entirely I feel stifled and forgotten. Like stars being birthed in a cloudy nebula there are pinpricks of light: a spontaneous adventure, a new friend, a novel that soothes and then scalds, the pungent kicks of garlic and cumin and miso and chili oil.

It will be months til the darkness is turned back at the solstice. Little wonder that we’ve arranged several holidays to fall in that period when we most need the comfort and consolation of other people’s company. And perhaps I shall draw the shadows around me like a blanket, and use the months of gathering gloom to conceive, like my father, of what a future without the past self I inhabited so fully might look like.