My last day of the year
Today is the last day of my 39th year. Tomorrow I turn 39, which feels wrong, because didn’t I just do 39? But no, I did 38. When I was an infant, they counted in months, and then all of a sudden I was 1, because I had been around for a year. As of early tomorrow morning, I’ve been around for 39 years. I’ll be starting on my 40th.
I haven’t felt comfortable celebrating my birthday publicly since the October 7 attacks. The social internet has always had an element of chat roulette—sometimes it shows you a friend with a new book, sometimes it shows you a cute animal, sometimes it shows you someone crowdfunding for help to make rent, sometimes it shows you a Ukrainian man pleading for his life the instant before a Russian soldier shoots him into a ditch.
Since the October 7 everyone thinks about when you say “October 7” (fun fact: it’s also Putin’s birthday!), the human suffering component on the social internet has been dialed up to a solid 11. It’s all just a breath away, as near as the back of my sleeve. And I dunno man, it just feels a little fucked up to post about my birthday when one scroll away there’s someone begging for money or food or medicine or refuge.
Anyway, I did it: I lived through another solar year. There’s a lot of good to say about 38, and also enough bad for 5 years, I think. Maybe 10.
But as I write this I’m sitting on the couch in a house I bought, that I share with someone I love, while my horrible puppy barks her fool head off in another room and the Aries moon rises full over the empty windswept hills. We have power and water and food in the fridge. We have health insurance. There’s autumn in the air; my favorite season, and one that falls with a heavier hand at 4,200 feet than I ever felt at sea level. The morning sun is warm, but in the evening the breeze picks up and slides little icy lines along my jaw, nestles them behind my earlobes. Mary Oliver’s geese slide in jagged Vs across the sky. I imagine ways to pack more cubes of frozen stew and leftovers into my freezer. I pray for safety and wisdom and the liberation of all sentient beings.
The wild world turns and I’m glad to be on it.