2020: It has been a year

Not to be a dick about it but 2020 was alright for me, which is to say no great sorrow marked me, not that I did not constantly dream up alternate realities in which we were all more whole, the air cleaner and sunlight everywhere abundant.

That time goes through each of us in distinct patterns is at once mysterious, predictable, and wounding. A year doesn’t age us the same. Droughts leave us differently parched. Some people drown in the rain. Others float in it.

Perhaps it would be easier if all our sorrow and all our joys, all our despair and all our hopes, all our sins and all of our points of grace were alike. We might not labor to understand or be understood. We would be perfectly translatable to one another.

But everything points to our variousness. Our sorrows are distinct even when collective, borne differently even when shared.

I do not know what sorrows this year has let sprout in your backyard, can only imagine the tight grip of despair. I cannot offer you understanding. But I offer you, in no order, with no attempt to exhaust, some of the slices of joy/wonder/ease that have helped me live through this year, so that what has moved me may stir you.

1

Suibhne is wounded, and confesses — a poem by Seán Hewitt

There was a time when I thought
the sound of a dove cooing and flitting
over a pond was sweeter than the voices

of friends. There was a time when
I preferred the blackbird and the boom
of a stag belling in a storm. I used to think

that the chanting of the mountain-grouse
at dawn had more music than your voice,
but things are different now. Still,

it would be hard to say I wouldn’t rather
live above the bright lake, and eat watercress
in the wood, and be away from sorrow.

2

A Quote By Leigh Peele

You will be defined by what you have the courage to aim at being

3

A Conversation Between Nikki Giovanni & James Baldwin

4

Cómo Me Quieres — a song by Khruangbin

5

This letter from Samuel Beckett to a Grieving Friend

My very dear Alan — I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is no ease for the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds. Ever Sam.”