Today’s journaling / reflection prompt: How are you approaching these last few weeks of this year? What do you need to do for yourself? What do you owe your future self? What will you take with you, and what will you leave behind?
Here it is, open hand where a closed fist used to lay, a handful of weeks left to the year. At last, a voice says. Already? asks another. Either way - a small pocket of time, cupped ever so delicately, for taking and giving.
I love the new beginnings that each year represents. The chance to reset and start anew. I retreat indoors, solitary and hopeful, accompanied by steaming cocoa and reassurances of warm light and blankets, and turn inwards. Start from the first day of the year and turn the pages over in my mind 365 times. Replay the good memories, say what needs to be spoken, and see difficult experiences with fresh eyes. Process the living that I had done and note down all that I still crave.
This year feels different. Not just the closing loop of these final few weeks but the whole of it. A steady thrum of things left undone, the vagueness of a season that has stretched, somehow, into a year.
Overall, a feeling that I’ve been floating, still trying to find solid ground. How will I even remember this time, if I never felt myself truly here?
This year has been folding back into itself, a complex origami of days that feel like a reversal of last year. The slow-motion whiplash, a long rope of a lasso snapping back from one year ago today, after which I said yes to a lifetime with K, triggering a string of events in fast three-week succession: quitting my job, starting a new one, moving out of my home of 6.5 years to a new country, where I would build a whole new life.
This time last year, I was unpacking my two densely stuffed suitcases, watching a cheesy Christmas rom-com while kneeling in our barely furnished rental flat, wondering why I packed so few winter clothes, wondering when it’ll finally hit me that I was here. That I did everything I set out to do, and this time, it felt truly irreversible.
48 hours prior, I was kneeling in my old apartment, brushing dust and hair with my hands off the cheap vinyl flooring for the last time. The same flooring cut me, more than once. I loved that place with so much of my heart that I wasn’t ever mad, even when my finger throbbed as I stood alone in the room, with my hands held high in the air, applying pressure - pausing to watch the mountains and birds flying past my window, my neighbours in the far distance exercising on their balconies - and lightly tip toeing my way around the piles of dust into the light.
And there I was, 48 hours later. It was only beginning to sink in, like the slow closing of a cut finger, skin easing back into its whole shape in real time, that somehow, against all the tides carrying me in one direction, I had angled myself steeply against the bow towards a different one.
Since then, this year has felt like a steady closing of the wide gulfs I crossed, tectonic plates struggling to align beneath my feet. A year of meeting all the ramifications of these Major Life Changes, like a Monopoly game of consequences. For each Hard Decision you make, take 2 steps back and 3 months to process.
A few weeks ago, I hastily jotted down, “I am a silent small thing, biding my time. Attempting to be quiet and to write. To try to feel like I have something to say.”
This has been the unspoken mantra. Being quiet and small, observing my own life happening as I process the newness, avoiding placing myself in it altogether.
I’ve been “sheltering” as they say nowadays, the fear of another lockdown approaching as we watch the 5 o’clock news, deja vu of last winter’s announcement, another Gordian knot in my collapsible year that I’m afraid to cut into, afraid to be bold.
I’d been bold already. Wasn’t that enough? I was tired. Sheltering, synonym for hiding. Hiding behind a screen at work, hiding behind my mask whenever I’m outside. Hiding behind “just moved here” to avoid fully committing to any of my not-new-anymore life.
- Until last month, when something shifted. A new wind on the horizon. That after 11 months of hibernating, I felt ready. Between the dinner service and the second movie on the flight back, a silent promise emerged, splicing the roar of the engines - “This time, I’m going to try. I’m going to make a real effort.”
The slow creaky opening of a small inch of heart-space was all it took to unveil a new world within my old, tired one.
After my third visit in just as many days, the librarian starts recognizing me. “There’s a new book in for you,” she tells me with kind eyes. “It’s K. K.” she tells the volunteer next to her, then spelling my last name out. When I wave bye, her name resonates in the back of my throat - with the shock of calling out a new name aloud on the street, the first in a year.
When I meet K’s barber for the first time, I can’t help but exclaim, “You’re the world-famous Mario!” to which he responds with equal enthusiasm, “Yep, that’s me!” Sitting there, watching him work on K’s “#2, like usual?” I’m moved by how much they know about each other, from 20 minute haircuts spread sporadically over a year of the same hair, the same trimming down, full of soft conversations about each other’s lives. Having salvaged many of my lockdown haircut attempts, he reassures me, “I’ve been doing this for 35 years. It takes time.”
I return to physiotherapy and the osteopath from Barcelona holds my injured finger in warm hands, telling me to practice “letting the body know that the trauma is gone and that it is safe now. To try to move again, slowly. To heal.”
On the long walk back, past familiar shops with familiar faces and new names, new lives entering mine, I try - opening and closing my fingers, one hand encased in the other like a clamshell hug, remembering with gratitude all those other times I held my own hand, high above my head, heart open, and found my way forward.
Margin Notes
Hello dear friend,
How have you been? Well, I hope! In the long season since I’ve written anything, I’ve apparently gathered enough courage to throw in as many nautical references as I can. Please accept my deepest 10,000 miles below-the-sea apologies. Surprised Copy Editor K let this one through!
I wish I could say that I wrote this after having several big epiphanies in the last 2 months - that my “process” is disciplined and predictable. But what really happened was I stumbled upon this cover by Jo Stafford, of The Things We Did Last Summer, and started weeping. Not even crying, just embarrassingly silently tearing up alone in front of my computer while looking online for a Black Friday deal on a big sweater.
Feelings fell into place as I started listening to the song on repeat, and I feel moved and stunned having discovered the words to what I’m going through again, after all this time. Grateful for the space, as always, to share with you, and wishing you a restful and clarifying winding down of this “?!” kind of year.
Until next time, stay warm & take good care,
“K. K.” :’)
PS - No such luck on the big sweater. Leads welcome!
Photo by Nachelle Nocom on Unsplash
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