Sunset 4:45

I’m sick of doom. I’m sick of my own malaise. I’m sick of feeding it and writing about it and indulging it and staring at it and sharing it and this is the last I’ll speak of it. At least this week. At least for today. I know things are bad. I know things are really really bad and I feel the sting and everybody is saying it and I don’t need to say it too, at least not this very second. It’s the time of year where you begin to notice the sun setting later and later in our dark, northern corner. Inhale deeply for six seconds. We have made it through the first second of that inhale as the belly of this season begins to fill with light. This and the fact that I am out of New York City, a place I don’t think can ever truly be light, has put me in a buoyant mood today.

I spent the bulk of this afternoon searching for deer antlers in the woods. In January, bucks scrape their antlers off of their heads so new ones can grow in. Something about this makes me want to possess one (just one!) so badly. My mother calls them bad luck because the last time she found antlers it was January 2020. We followed deer tracks through snowy woods, wetlands, across frozen brooks. No dice. Yesterday I found a fully intact metal box of bandaids from the 80s and an old toothbrush with a beautiful, translucent emerald-colored handle in a mysterious little shed in the woods. Adding an antler to these treasures would have made for a powerful trio, but I’m satiated by the bandaids and the toothbrush as they are. I’d fill my own museum with stuff like this if I had the space. I want my life to look like an I Spy book.

This winter has been stunningly cold in New York, but especially in New Hampshire. It was 22 below at my parents’ house the other night which made all pipes freeze which made the heat in the house go out for days. This is obviously and objectively bad and I spent Friday morning trying to convey my very nebulous understanding of what the problem was to the plumbers who came to fix it. The whole thing cost hundreds of dollars. Bad. Bad!

AND

This depth of seasonal suffering is one of my dearest pleasures in life. I hate winter. I hate the dark especially, but there is something delicious about the air being so cold and brittle that your snot freezes inside your nose when you step outside. This past December I went to California which always makes me feel beautiful, languid and unbothered. The breeze through the palms and the light unique to seaside towns always tricks me into thinking I could reeeallly get behind California. But then a few days before Christmas I flew back into pitch-black New England and 10 degree weather and when I went on a walk where I could hardly see my hand in front of my face and the forest heaved and cracked around me and my ears got so cold I could understand how they might be able to snap off my head if it was a little colder and it was only 6pm I understood how these sensations grip me at my core. It stirs generational memories. I believe that if you are from New England you can never shake New England.

So in the most true to character public statement I’ve made all year this is all to say that the pleasure is in the suffering. In this deep season where it’s hard to even remember joy or the smell of plants, each additional minute of light tacked onto the end of each day is the only clue you have that life isn’t always like this. And when March roars then bursts and the whole world is wind and frogs and light light light there that sense of relief transforms into frenzied, animal ecstasy. A wave of desire and relief. May I present you with a confession of the most puritanical self-flagellation that you have (probably) heard today.

The light is pale and thin and it feels like there is a thumb beneath us gently pressing us into the belly of the sky. It’s 5pm and I can still see my hand in front of my face. Perhaps, somewhere, somehow, things are getting better. I have no choice but to believe this or to get completely trampled by the world around me. Time churns forward. Lately I repeat it to myself every time another thing in my life goes wrong. Onwards onwards onwards.