On The Passing of 2022
Almost a year ago I sat on a zoom call and was asked, by a now good friend, if I had any intention to write a book. I said yes and before the call was over I had a goal that by the next January I would have the thing written. The following morning I began a new job that paid more. I had no other options, but these did not seem so bad. The year was starting good, the year already seemed better than the last.
Most nights I’d leave work so depleted in energy and hope I’d reach the M, right before the last one of the evening puttered out into the station and I’d think of some line, write it down, and regardless of how late it was I’d post it somewhere for people to read. Nothing was about the future or for it, nothing was meant to last. I had no intention or desire to work towards anything but my days off. On my days off I desired only to rest and prepare for what was to come the following week. It was all I could do to stop this despair and exhaustion from consuming me. Trapped, I had felt, in a cycle of surviving. Walking through snow and ice to a subway that always felt far away in a too-thin coat. Waiting for a payment that was always late to a bill that was always overdue. It was not the year I had hoped for. It wasn’t a year at all.
In the thick of this time when I was too tired to write toward my future I would go to bed, board a subway home, and I would dream. In my apartment before or after work, between shifts, on the weekend, I would write down the stories I had made about myself. Narratives for a universe away, awards I would win for the book I felt incapable of writing despite how much I wanted to. It was the only way I could sleep.
I am drawn to this time. I feel compelled to see all these strange details put together. No year is totally irredeemable to me. I keep returning to what I wrote when I felt I could scarcely bare to do so. When I reread them I can see what I did not feel, but had nonetheless. It was all hope. It was nothing but hope. Many pieces are my favorites of the year, many are out of my usual range of topic and comfort. Experimental ways of seeing real life in fictional narrative. Imagined scenes or episodes of longing, fleshed-out fantasies with arcs and beauty. The terrible truth of my life written always with something to wish for.
Through these too I see something else. Love. All those stories and scenarios, all the universes I wrote about contained in wild imagenings, the people here who loved me most. The people who were waiting for me to get off work with a hot plate and a movie already picked. Who let me cry over broccoli before we opened a soda for our relality show binge. People who made plans with me so that my year wouldn’t totally dissolve while I tried to write away the pain of its occuring. Friends and family who would call, who had news, even if my life was ultimately always in some ways the same.
I feel now more capable of writing through the fog of life. I have an idea of what the future looks like now. If only because it was a bad year and it gave me an idea of what I should never ask for back. If only because the dark place was quiet enough to close my eyes and dream. I have always lived with a strange sense that I was going somewhere. I would be lying if I didn’t say somewhere big. I can never say how I know or why, it feels as sure as the word that follows these ones. I feel this inevitable future closer in 2023, maybe not arrived but close. I have the same unshakeable sense that this year is going to be good without much reason to back it up. All I can ever say is I just know it. I have always known it.
Sometimes believing in a year is about the desperation of it. Last year I believed 2022 would be good because I needed it to be. Recently I’ve felt a distinct difference. This year will be good because I have no other choice, because I am not the same person I was when we got here. And even so, even if I come out next year to say again it wasn't good, I also know what this year brings for friends and family. Promises of enriching expansion and challenge which will reveal themselves of what I have always seen them to be. Their strength and resilience, their kindness and goodness which should be celebrated and cared for. That their lives are full of beauty and that struggle ends to give way to something I have always known they were more deserving of. We are not on the same path anymore, but we are all headed in the right direction. And thus by default I can never lose, for that is already a sweet and good thing to look forward to.
I've never been one to admit it. Sometimes things end. There's no outrunning, outlasting, no poetry or synthesis into the new superior moment. There's not even a whisper of what has ended somewhere else as a reminder to where you’d been. I suppose 2022 felt over yesterday and this instant now is for realizing that I will never have it back again. It was a year to dream for—to say in spite of this I see another life for myself. This is not forever and I have a say. I won’t stay here. Even if the only way to conquer is to sit down when I’m too tired to move. All I could do was dream until it was over. This is the end but on the other side begins the dream. Tonight while listening to New York, New York I will have been the better opponent as there is no other thing I can be.