I am not sure if it's this cold weather, or maybe it's this 2022 state of mind. I always knew from almost a year ago that this wasn't going to be easy. You know? If you go back enough years, you might well find me along with my sisters, dragging our parents out of bed way before they were ready to get up. I guess most kids are like that on Christmas morning. Heck, I remember being kinda that way as a parent when my boys were still little. Time passes, things change, people come and go from our lives, some by choice and others not so much. With each year we get just a little older. They say that getting old is a privilege that not all of us are lucky enough to get, I mostly agree with this, except I go back and forth on the words 'privilege' and 'lucky'. I am not exactly sure how to put these feelings into words this morning. I am not sure if the right word even exists. Imagine standing at the doorway of a house. Inside is a warm fire and soft light. Outside is the cold and the wind. The fire warms the heart. The light soothes the soul. The wind bites deeply, and the cold permeates everything. It is a strange mix of warm memories and cold grief. And even with this wall of text, I am nowhere close to articulating the depth of it all. Maybe the reason the right words never come is you don't really need them. You either understand or you don't. You've either been there or you haven't. Language is wonderful. Words can be beautiful. But the mind and heart are so much more.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, thought and feeling must be near infinity. I could only truly describe a place we've both been. It is just something we'd both have to know. Intuition and imagination (Wonderful though they may be) can never be enough. However... However... When it does happen, damn... I guess that's why a song can hit so hard. Seems the writer of the lyrics was there too. Maybe this is the importance of all art and culture, A song, a book, a movie, even a conversation. You see? There is something to be said of knowing you were never the only one to stand in such a cold and lonely place. And it kinda makes you feel that maybe you were never alone. The mind really is something else, you know. For example, through what lens do you see your world today? A rose colored garden? An aquamarine dream? The deepest shade of blue? I know I am not the only one. It only feels that way sometimes. And I know we each have our own battles, our own struggles. We don't always win, but we try, right? Some of us separate our battles into days, considering each beautiful sunset to be a victory, and each morning a new challenge. Some of us cannot even distinguish the weight of the day from the weight of our thoughts. I once observed that if the world stopped turning each time one of us needed it to, it would never turn at all. And that is where I gathered my understanding of why the sun still rises, the birds still sing, and people come and go as they always have. It is the only way there could be a world at all. So why am I going on about this? Well, I could blame it on the holidays, but in truth these thoughts have never left me in the first place. It's like the sun still being there, but with a nice festive magnifying glass to help it along. I guess my point, my humble request to everyone with a heartbeat, is please check on the loved ones you still have. Let them know they're not alone at such a time as this.
2022 has less than a week left now. I am not sure If I have ever been so grateful to see a year end as I feel about this one. I know this is only a calendar invented by humans. Yes, yes, the year is the Earth's orbit around the sun, but the year could have started and stopped on any one of those 365 days. I, myself would have started with the first day of Spring and not in the middle of the butt canyon of winter, had it been me to come up with it. Still, human invention or not, 2022 has been cursed for me and cursed by me almost from the get-go. I need a psychological reason to make a new start and be able to put a bit of this pain and regret behind me somehow. This has simply been the loneliest Christmas/holiday season I have ever had in my life, including the one after my long ago divorce. The coldness I feel deep within these old bones is both figurative and literal. I long for spring, again both figuratively and literally. And do you know? I really need a new reason to try. It's hard not to think of what has been so painfully missing this year. I miss my Momma, I miss Marsha, far more than I miss having the warmth of the sun in these especially frigid last few days. My emotions are so all over the place right now I couldn't even begin to describe them here. And even with being indoors, 2 shirts and a jacket, the heater going full blast, I still feel that deep bite of the cold. I long for warmth. I long for spring. I long for rhyme and reason. I long for a future.
I wish you all the best. I wish me at least better than 2022.
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