Similar but Different

new year, worse me

Much of my life has taken on a strange form. Time rid of all linearity. Daybreak bleeding like ink into the evenings, into a murked and black infinitum without edge. Some mornings, when I first rise, I am briefly disoriented by the scene beyond the threshold, which still feels foreign to me. The score of children’s laughter from the swing set and the voices of old men speaking Polish and smoking cigarettes outside the deli drifting into my bedroom like music from a faraway place.

Autumn came to a quiet close, its latch clicking shut with only the faintest sound. No farewell or fanfare. Thirty arriving as a lesson and a caution: the aches after fitful sleep and dreadful hangovers, a stubborn knot in the shoulder. The lacework of veins above the knee beginning to weave a plaintive motif. My body evolving in ways only I notice because I’ve spent the better half of this life scrutinizing its every inch.

I do not remember the date on the calendar when the branches outside the window undressed themselves. Winter in full tilt. A friend says it takes four or five months for things to start feeling real again. To catch up to the breakneck pace of this town and find your feet still touching the ground.

Christmastime—which I had long been looking forward to, having finally settled back into the matter of weather and puffer coats—snuck up without warning, though I watched the store displays become outfitted in regalia of garland and lights. Had heard the jingles playing over the market radio and walked past the bounties of wreaths and Fraser fir. The holiday comes and goes, and I go with it, upstate to the northernmost reaches of Appalachia, where the skies are long and gray. An elderly couple sits across the aisle from me, talking the whole way and calling each other baby.

So much of my life has taken on a strange form, I thought as the bus groaned past Kaaterskill Creek. It has changed overnight, by design, and still, without warning. Cameron sings, “Today, I met who I’m gonna be from now on.” And I listen, again and again, as we weave through the Catskills.

Lately, I’ve been reckoning with my desires shifting. It began in September, when I interviewed for a position at the Times, which I did not get. For months, this mild devastation has nagged at me, and I am horrified to find what I am willing to do to myself in the face of grief. There is no world in which I’ll be able to divorce myself from the movies entirely, and no world in which I would wish to—but I watch my dreams change like my body and the seasons, with subtle horror and creeping haste, and begin to register the odd familiarity—meeting it, at first, in disbelief and, then, a sorry acceptance.

Snow begins to fall heavy on Kingston and doesn’t stop. It follows us back to Manhattan and continues through the night, laying the city to rest in a blanket of ivory. A new year on its way just as I’ve started to get a grip on the last one. Trudging back to the apartment with luggage in the drift, I can’t help but notice the flurries erasing my footsteps as they hit the ground.

---