A change in time

The new year dawns, bringing with it ever present, ever oppressive, grey skies. Only once or twice are we granted mercy from days that dawn, almost unnoticeably, from black to lighter grey.

I had big ideas for this first month of the year. There was going to be music and dancing but this, as so many other plans, had to be cancelled, postponed, moved to an uncertain date in the future when such things are not only possible but also feel safe. I ask around how people manage or even plan for another year of uncertainty. A month at a time, they say. Small highlights dotted throughout the calendar. Connecting with people again seems to be the greatest desire. Though for some, the exhaustion goes deeper, can't simply be overcome by a little hope for a simple plan. For some, the potential to have hope crushed again is too great a burden on top of the weight they already carry.

"See I live in the moment
I live in the moment
It's just not this one"
The Howl and the Hum, Hall of Fame

"Searching for something that could bring us back to life
Waiting for something that could bring us back to life"
Frank Turner, The Resurrectionists

On one afternoon, I sit with my neighbour at the harbour near our house and we drink coffee. She asks how I am and I wonder if I will ever be able to answer a question as simple as that with a one-word answer again. Now it seems like I need a paragraph to even approximate how I am feeling. Not bad, not good, simply alive. Not feeling, not hurting, simply being. Moments of levity, laughter and connection are followed by hours, days, of not much. Nothing is wrong but nothing feels really right either. I am alive but I miss feeling, deeply feeling. I miss not being in the grey.

Last year, I broke ice with my hands and feet and waded into the water, hearing it move around me like ice stirred around a cocktail glass. My legs grew numb and I walked straight into sheets of ice, registering a numb pain which only later revealed itself to be a deep cut with a bruise blooming around it. Throughout one week in February, I accumulated so many injuries that my legs looked as though they'd been involved in a particularly strange knife fight. There was pain but there was pleasure. You haven't really experienced winter until you've stood in a lake, the sun filtering through mist around you, as you let chunks of ice skitter across the surface and hear your laughter echo through the morning silence. There is pain as you slowly lose the feeling in your fingers or as ice pierces your skin but you feel truly alive. Here is a day, you think, just as any other day, but for a brief wondrous moment, you're taking it all in, not simply letting the hours tick by on the clock. 

This year, constant drizzle numbs the senses, dulls colours and muffles sound.

"The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and short story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming."
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

So instead of nature, I venture into other worlds, testing the limits of what I thought I liked. I wander through dreams with Morpheus and Dr. D, I plunge out of windows in New York and jump through portals along the timeline. A friend wonders, laughing, if I needed an intervention but it seems that in this world, which I have ceased to understand, that comic book worlds are the natural path to take. I have held on to the belief that science fiction wasn't for me for far too long. Why? I don't know. Literary snobbery perhaps. But as I am slowly discovering, these worlds are far more complex, the narratives far more nuanced and intelligent and full of subtle humour than I have ever given them credit for. But I am willing to revise my opinion as I have come to understand that it is perhaps not a genre I enjoy but more a theme or themes. And that it is quite wrong to hold on to a belief about yourself that no longer feels true.

"Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore."
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

I also once believed that I had outgrown loneliness. So much of my life had been spent alone that I truly thought I could no longer feel lonely. But that belief was a lie. I hadn't so much grown out of the feeling of loneliness as taught myself that trusting other people, needing them, their help and their affection, was too dangerous and the risk of them leaving, the moment you needed them, too great. Only voicing that belief to a person I trusted and felt safe with showed me how wrong I'd been. Gently, they helped me understand that you can be both independent and need people. 

"Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she's aware of this now, while it's happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life."
Sally Rooney, Normal People

Towards the end of the month, the weather turns. Somewhere in the night, church bells ring and call the hours, clang, clang, clang. The wind picks up, drowns them out but occasionally the bells can still be heard. The night before a birthday is just like any other, it isn't even my achievement after all, being born. And yet, in a universe of countless possibilities, it seems so unlikely to be alive. Innumerable coincidences had to occur for me to be here and for me to be who I am. How incredibly unlikely, how magnificently wonderful.

Fireworks go off, surely the work of someone simply working off some anger, but even that, on this evening, feels so unlikely as to be magical.

Wind blows for days on end and I sit and watch bare branches sway. If you listen closely, you can hear wind approaching long before it's felt. On a day not too long ago, out walking on the Trotternish Peninsula, I hear the wind from far off in the distance, long before I can see the first grasses rustle or feel it on my face. To me, winds bring change, they mark something new approaching. I'm never happier than standing on a beach being blown about by salty gusts. Maybe I have watched "Chocolat" a few too many times. But as Neil Gaiman says, "stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. [...] if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind you rarely ever visit." I sometimes wonder if life is like that, too. If you can hear or feel changes off in the distance long before they actually happen.

On my birthday, on the way to a friend, the cold bites at my fingers, turning them red and raw, and snow begins to fall. A few flurries at first but then the flakes fall in earnest from the slate grey sky. A good sign, I think. Of what, I don't know. Just a sign that there is magic and joy to be found, even in the grey, even in the cold. A friend confirms this later, saying "it must be good luck I think". 

"Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything."
Sally Rooney, Normal People

Birthdays come with good wishes by people who care, written on paper or on screens. Good wishes to bolster and guide you in the months ahead. "This year," one writes, "I hope you find the place or person who brings you peace". And as I sit in my local park, listening to the drip, drip, drip of the rain, maybe I feel a little bit more peace. Maybe the grey and the drizzle aren't so bad after all and maybe the winds have brought a change. The light suddenly carries a glimmer of spring and it lingers longer, almost past 5 pm.

Then, suddenly, news comes in, rousing plans of seeing much missed people and places and I wonder if that's what hope feels like.