Year end

The year swims in my head as much as it floats. I can barely hold it in my memory as it sloshes in and out of sight. The effort to remember, to hold moments of time still requires an effort I am barely able to maintain.

This more than anything else tells me it has been a difficult year. I do not recall difficult period of my life well. Entire years are swallowed by the depth of my mind and summed up in a few dispassionate statements. I am grateful for this ability in the long term but right now I am left hollow. What happened to me in 2023?

I have been asking this question incessantly for over a month. I ebb away from it as much as I swell toward it. At the surface, fizzing with happiness are memories of my time in Bannau Brycheiniog. I visited Y Mynydd Du multiple times, each day spent in its cradle full of warmth and life. It is undeniable that I have been happy there, happy in a simple uncomplicated way that still sings within me. But what of the rest of the year?

I remember visiting the north Devon coast, hiking with my brother and hours playing Mario Kart, meeting up with friends and laughing, painting a bicycle, falling in love with Northumberland. I know these things to be true but I do not know how to place them in time very well. They could have happened a month ago or ten months ago. Time slips out of my grasp, sleek and oily. It is difficult to recall the aforementioned events with any depths. As soon as I dive below the surface, I am pulled by fast currents into an abyss I do not want to visit. I wriggle away from it and refuse to pay it any attention because there lays the flip side of the year.

I remember mourning and crying at the loss of community, lying in pain as my body refused to heal from covid or descended into its own unrelated deregulation. Doctors fumbled for an answer, each negative result resetting a feedback loop of a month to try for something new. Everything seemed to fall apart, asking to be examined, considered, pondered, changed. I toiled to let go and adapt to this new version of my world, of myself. I let go of my previous online presence, I relinquished wild camping, I stopped using my phone, I sought out new forms of connection, I learned to be content with a cup of tea sipped in the garden.

And still I am not writing the truth. I want to show and not tell but all I can do is clumsily tell. How do you write about breaking when you are still drowning?

I can't write of my pain and stress because last week they triggered two panic attacks. I can't show healing because last week I sobbed, all tears and snot and saliva until my mind was left numb.

I remember last year and how much I cried then too. Only last year it was all release, love, and happiness. I tell myself that this is step two. I couldn't expect to let go without fumbling and stumbling. Could I?

I do not know.

This could be a fallacy of my endless need to write myself, to seek out patterns and happy endings, but there are no happy endings, not this year. This is okay. Life is not as neat as I'd like it to be, neither do story end and start with the Gregorian calendar. I may still be drowning but it does not mean I'm going to stop attempting to swim. Maybe one day 2023 will find its own meaning. One day I'll be able to look back on it without the fear and anger that still clings to me.

Follow up here.