May
5
19
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Today is our wedding anniversary, which really and truly snuck up on me this year. Wait, what month is it? My brain has socially distanced itself from calendars.
John and I have been married for 19 years, which alternately seems crazy (nineteen??) and like a giant no duh because I feel like I have known him forever. I mean, I obviously haven’t, because I am not — checks jowls, chin hairs, wrinkled belly, bottomless well of cynicism — nineteen years old, but we have been part of each other’s lives for a real stretch of time now. Through the young carefree years, through the terror/ecstasy/boredom of early parenting, through career gains and losses, through sickness and health, through smooth easy stretches and the rockiest terrain imaginable.
We were at the cabin last weekend and I caught sight of John outside, standing there talking to Dylan. He was smiling — that great smile, the way his hazel eyes crinkle at the corners — and I was just struck by how dear he is to me. Wearing the same red flannel shirt I’ve seen a million times, his beard and hair now shot through with silver.
He can be unfamiliar in some ways now, a man whose passions and politics have evolved over time in directions that are utterly foreign to me. Then again, I too have changed, I have followed my own paths and addiction has led me in the same dumb damaging circles over and over through the years.
There are times when the space between us feels insurmountable. But they do not last. We always seem to find our way back. To me, it feels like coming home, when the ice melts and we go back to our silly pet phrases and eight trillion shared habits and memories.
I can’t know what the future holds, whether we will make it another nineteen years, past the children leaving home and into whatever that life looks like. But my god, we’ve made it this far, nearly two decades of being intertwined, falling apart and coming back together. So many unpredictable twists and turns — here we are living in a global pandemic, for crying out loud — and he is still so dear to me. I love him fiercely, I love him grudgingly, I love him when it’s easy to love him and when it’s hard. It has and always will be worth it, this great and complicated love I am so lucky to have found.
Apr
30
Boredom, restlessness, anxiety, fear, frustration, despair, impatience, sorrow; then, shame for feeling all of those things when I compare my situation to others. Repeat, then eat another brownie.
A newish addition to this stew of bleargh is the unpleasantness of all these opinions being slung around by a society of armchair experts who apparently just received medical degrees issued by Wake Up Sheeple University. I feel like a walking Jonah Hill gif: sorry I find the information shared by actual scientists to be more worthy of my attention than that one article you found by some rightwing crackpot blatting on about how this is just like the flu and no one freaks out about the flu, FUCK ME, RIGHT?
I can agree that information has been messy and inaccurate in some cases and I also feel deeply mistrustful of practically everything I read online these days but also can someone please explain using very simple terms what the nefarious end goal would be for any person of authority to oppose reopening businesses and services? Like, I honestly don’t get the conspiracy vibe around this. They want everything to stay shut down because … then the libs win? What?
I hate how this whole mess has become yet another political game piece, and I am having a really hard time being the sole citizen in my married family who’s on Team Hey Let’s Maybe Try to Kill Less People by Proceeding with Caution especially when that point of view is treated as unnecessary (foolish, informed by the wrong sources) economy-tanking worry-warting, and I am also aware that however many days of house arrest this has been probably hasn’t been ideal for any of us in terms of maintaining the ability to engage in polite disagreements.
Repeat. Then:
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