The Various and Sundry

It’s been awhile, my friends.

Or at least, it’s been a while since I did anything other than post sad poetry on here that might make you wonder if I was doing alright. The good news is that, happy or sad, I’ll always be writing sad poetry that might make you think I’m not in a very good headspace. The bad news is that these last few poems were definitely written while I was, as the kids might say, “Going through it.” This is all to say that, well, 2022 was just a bit hard on me; the last couple months of it especially so. There’s a running joke I like to tell people (for my own benefit, as all good jokes tend to be) and that joke begins in saying that December is the end of a gauntlet run for me and it’s one that has been harder and harder to get through every year since 2012. I tell them that, once January hits, I feel like Doc Holliday in Tombstone after he saves the day and tells Wyatt Earp that he wasn’t half as sick as he made out. The key point of this joke is that, I used to use this reference unironically before eventually realizing…well…Doc is still very much sick. And in the movie he dies not long after, even if he does manage to rally and save the day.

So I make that joke, I make that reference, and I say “I wasn’t half as sick or badly off as I made out.” and then I chuckle to myself because it’s a little gallows humor that I can wink at because I know how hard the ways of life can sometimes be.

It was a strange thing, last year. I had so many highs. I finally quit my job at FedEx, I ran my third marathon, I finished my ninth book, and I met new friends. I went back home for the first time since my big move, seeing my old life and those who still lived in it. I got to celebrate my Mom’s birthday and cook with her for the first time as we made Indian Fry Bread, a memory that I will hold onto forever. I went to Seattle, I went to the beach, I saw whales, I saw Neil Gaiman, and I managed to track down a duck that I’d been wanting to see since I was four years old and paging through a bird book. There were so many good things. So many memories that should live like forest fires inside of me and keep me warm on the coldest nights. And they do. But as with everything else in the world we know, nothing can go on forever.

2022 was also hard. Three people in my life died, passing from this world in a blink; there one moment and gone the next. Every now and then I think I’ve processed it all, but then I’ll find myself thinking about them and wondering what they’re up to, only to remember that they’re not up to anything at all anymore. My closest friend out here in Portland got a cancer diagnosis in November and, while we both stood strong for over a month in an attempted beam of positivity, the final word came back and at best she has three to five years. It’s a cruel thing to happen to a kind person, and she is that. In truth, she’s one of the best people I’ve ever known, and the idea that someone like that will barely reach 40 years? It’s not right, really. And it’s not fair. Her smile and laugh should go on forever. They are lights that should never go out.

And through it all there have been other things. The new job I fled to from FedEx hasn’t been what I’d hoped and wound up packed with all its own traumas and oddities. Two days before Christmas, one of our regulars was struck by a car and killed outside the store. He was a kind man, and I’ve never in my life seen so much blood or had to watch a kind man die. I spent the next couple weeks trying to process the event, routinely breaking down in tears when I thought about it too much, and to be perfectly frank I don’t think I’ve yet to come close to moving past it. I wish I remembered him more clearly. I think anyone who’s gone deserves that. Instead when I think about him, I just see blood lit up by cop car lights and find that I’m unable to cross a street unless there isn’t a car anywhere close.

And then there were the poems. I write sad poems about sad things, because I don’t particularly know how to make sense of my life otherwise. Writing helps, it always has, and I think there is a better than equal chance that I never really wanted to be a writer, I just had to. It’s a hack thing to say, but I mean it with quite some earnestness. I’ve thought about it a lot these last couple years and I don’t think I ever had a chance of being anything else. It’s the only way for me to make sense of my life, and so it’s the only way for me to keep going. In the spirit of that, I wrote a lot of poetry toward the end of the year, and I wrote a lot of poetry about the sadness in life. Not all sad things are inherently terrible, of course. Some start out as good things, such as when you meet a special person and think there might be something even more special to come, only for that flame to flicker out as all flames do. There were many poems written about that, because you’d be shocked at the effort it takes to tear down walls you’ve built, only to have to build them back up again. It’s a strange thing to care about someone. It’s a strange thing to hope. But even though I’m a romantic at heart, I’m not a child and haven’t been for quite some time, leaning more and more toward a novelistic fatalism in my deepening age. So you’d think that sadness and heartbreak and sadness revolving around heartbreak wouldn’t hit quite as hard as it once did, but it does. It really does. And isn’t that just the funniest thing?

Still. Through all of this, I come time and time again to the simplest realization. It is the realization that has kept me alive and will keep me alive for as long as I meander through a world that often seems pointless in its endless trials and trivial tribulations. Feeling the worst things in the world, no matter what they happen to be, is better than feeling nothing at all.

At least there are the friends who are here, so you can be there for them while they go through things they should never have to face, making memories together along the way. At least there are the beginnings of things, the hopes and smiles and romantic thoughts, even if those things will so often always end. At least there are the birds in the skies and the sounds of the crows, constant reminders of the beauty of the world around you. At least there are the memories of those who went on without you, those shadows of someone that used to be that can shelter you from the overwhelming heat of the sun. There are so many good things about the world, and yet they’re so easy to forget when things get bad. And things have gotten bad. They really have. And things have gotten worse since we last spoke.

But I’m still here. I’ll always be here. A loved one teases me routinely about my excessive use of superlatives, but I mean every one of them sincerely. “Always” to me means the simplest thing. It’s a personal statement. It holds a personal definition that can best be described as: “As long as I can. As long as I’ll ever know.”

In the meantime, as I get through these rough patches, just know that I’m thinking about all of you. I appreciate you being in my life and caring about what I have to say. Things have been difficult lately, the nature of life has been cruel, and I don’t know that the road ahead has ever seemed longer or more poorly lit. But I’m here, writing, living, and doing my best to find joy in the little things, and I always will be.

Things aren’t all bad.

And I’m not half as sick as I made out.