Winter Solstice

It’s the shortest day of the year. And what a year it has been. 2020.

In my mind I am drawing on the power of Saturn being in Jupiter to write some brilliant piece of literature. Instead I’m lying in my bed half-watching a show I half-like feeling half-a-headache and writing this blog post. Half-writing.

Someone just hit me up. We were supposed to talk today about my speaking at his college. He and I worked together a few years back. Before he and I both left the school under duress. His duress very different than my own. I was unable to proctor my exams that year because I wound up in ICU. I collapsed upon recognizing that my husband of 27 years was not what he had appeared to me to be. That was just before the winter solstice, too. On the solstice that year, I remember feeling the light through the window. It was pink, but not warm.

If you are receptive, winter reveals truths that the other seasons secret away. Take a walk and see why winter is cold. It doesn’t guard your feelings. But winter should get more love than it does. Folks get excited about the snow because people love cover. We should appreciate more the time after the leaves have fallen, before the snow comes to hide shit.

When someone who knew me as a married person–who knew and loved my family–appears now, it’s hard for me to keep myself together. It took time for me to gather myself after I was released from the hospital. I went about sweeping up the petals of my life from dusty corners. I was everywhere. Under the bed by a rawhide bone the new puppy had lost track of. Behind the shelf stacked with textbooks I had taught from three jobs ago. Beside a thumbtack that had fallen off the cork board where our family used to post sketches and graduation announcements. Those pieces are hard to keep in one place once they have already been scattered.

His text today saying we would talk tomorrow, blew through me like wind through an open door. And I remembered things this old friend does not know. Things I dare not write now and cannot say. Still pieces of me fall off my tongue despite my desire to hold it all together. Twenty seven years. How many wilted memories.