It’s either a great or a terrible time to be in the aftermath of an online writer breakup: great in the sense that there’s never been a better cautionary tale about the pitfalls of oversharing, terrible in the exact same sense. I went back up to Cleveland recently and everything was the same except for the things that weren’t. I’m used to going back to New York and finding a completely different city; my New York is long gone and never was and always will be. Cleveland is pretty much as it ever was—cold, snowy, and somehow less frigid-feeling than Cincinnati, though the latter is a good 250 miles further south. Things move at a different pace out here.

It’s the time of year when people who truck in emails and salaries all wait for each other to form a silent consensus that nobody is going to do anything for the rest of the year. When I was married, I always worked through the holidays; Dylan is Jewish, so we didn’t do Christmas until the last year we were together, when a week beforehand he said it might be nice to have a tree one year. A day or two later, on my way back from taking care of my partner’s cat (long story: he was commuting from the top of Ohio to the bottom every week for work), I stopped by the grocery store a few blocks away from our house and bought one of three remaining little blue spruces.

I put the cheapest possible string of lights at CVS on my credit card and walked the whole thing back to our house while Dylan was upstairs writing, got it set up in the living room, and folded a dozen origami ornaments because CVS overcharges, even for the cheapest ones, and the lights had pretty much cleaned me out. I turned off the lights and waited for him to come downstairs. A year earlier we had doubled our rent to move from an apartment to a house. In hindsight, was that stupid or sweet? What about the tree? What about the ornaments? What about all the other ways I tried to be more demonstrative, more effusive, to make up for the ways in which I am not, the times I wasn’t congratulatory enough, the many ways in which we were speaking completely different languages? Thinking about it, I get angry; I get sad; I get completely matter-of-fact, transported into the someday soon when this will be just one more thing that happened: “It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away.”

Anyway, I always felt like I got brownie points at work for being available during the holidays, and it’s a tough habit to break. Things get quiet regardless. This morning I was stretching and the rhythm of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29” floated through my head, a poem I read in full for the first time because Succession’s season finales are all titled after it for unknown reasons, as Helena Fitzgerald of griefbacon pointed out a few years ago. This Sunday will be the longest night. What else have I been up to lately? Mostly work, as everyone else has realized how much they have to get done before they can slink off for the year. A few dates, notable enough that I don’t feel like I should tell those stories for a few years yet: too fresh and recognizable, both very funny to everyone who’s heard them. Self-discovery, as usual (not a brag; it’s well past the point of absurdity). I ordered prescription sunglasses that the USPS is shipping back and forth between Indianapolis and Cincinnati for some reason; someday I hope to actually receive them. Yesterday the cat bit me four times in the morning, because he was prodigiously evil, but he didn’t break the skin, because he is magnanimous and kindly. Would you believe this was meant to be a newsletter about writing?

I can sense I’m about to start saying things like, “It’s easy to wander off down the corridors of memory and get lost,” which feels about half a micrometer away from a torturous metaphor about bamboo and is thus my cue to wrap things up, but we can do it the Midwestern way. Drink some water; have a snack; are you keeping warm? Do you want to borrow my gloves? Let me walk you to your car. Let’s talk for half an hour before you actually get in. Take some leftovers so I don’t have to find room in the fridge. No, I insist. Drive safe; let’s do this again soon!