Two days exist: working and non-working.
Also, contrary to all instinct, working days during the plague are a great privilege. Try not to forget that.
Non-working days are spent forgetting the (privileged) working ones. They don’t include keeping up with the news, because that’s another kind of work. Netflix helps.
Days run together. The shortest of the year is cause for celebration.
Conjoined-twin-stars hang in the sky, which are actually Saturn and Jupiter lined up for your viewing pleasure. What more could you want? Sleep, maybe.
After dinner and conjoined-twin-star-spotting and before steaming hot bath, I do a little yin yoga because it’s wise to remember that you have a body and to move it occasionally. The trees outside my window are still barely visible, like curtains drawn on a stage front-lit by the candle on my floor. After all, night and waning light are upon us, and when something behind me pushes open the door, it’s arguable that I’m the one on stage and not whatever lies between the trees.
Cat saunters in. What’s going on here?
She sniffs, sips from her pint of water, wants to know why my arm’s arched over my head and hand’s not petting her. I fold myself on the floor like origami.
“You see the candle, right?” Cat’s poking her nose in my face. I crane my neck to see — oh MOTHER OF GOD she’s lit her tail on fire –
In that instant before a scream can escape my throat, before my hands can reach her tail, she sees said hands lurching for her and, faster than either of them, darts under the bed.
Perhaps it’s odd on a winter’s night — the winter-iest of all — in a plague year of political upheaval and the usual inhumanity to spot any sort of magic at all. Or maybe that’s why I’m here, to assure you of what I saw, which wasn’t so very unlike magic, which was much like a puff of smoke: because cat’s sheer speed blew out the flame in her very long hair.
Not the candle, of course: that was still flickering, bemused, looking not at all guilty. Yawning, even. When I lifted up the mattress to make sure she wasn’t smoldering, she looked up at me sweetly, her curiosity piqued. What’s got into you?
Do you ever wonder what dangers you’ve unwittingly dodged? What broken glass your foot failed to catch or lurking psychopath you somehow evaded, what small miracle steered you safely home? After I lifted up the mattress and cat lumbered off to a safe corner, giving crazy me a wide berth, I wonder if she even noticed the burnt hair smell in the air or the flecks of ash in her tail.
While the far-more-transmissible Covid 2.0 hits hospitals stateside — or Covid 5.0 or however many strains there are now — and men in the halls of power always ignore every climate disaster, you might decline to look ahead. You might not care to stare much at this new year, which will inevitably include forest-fire season and hurricane season, however long those now last, however much of the year they’ve taken over.
Maybe it’s just plain antiquated and out-to-lunch to celebrate a new year. Surely the best we can hope for, whether we know it or not, is dodging a bullet. Let’s assume we have, just because, whether we’re in the audience or not, we’re still here, onstage or not.
When the old year is rolled up and thrown out, because we all agreed that something new would start on Friday, you might celebrate what’s right here and now, a precious present, if you’re lucky enough to have one: all shiny and wrapped with a bow, though it might be hungover or maybe asleep. With all its frustrations and repetition, its working days and non, I can’t say I want to let it go. Cat is snoozing now, claws tightening and whiskers twitching as she murders something in her sleep. I suppose it’s a kind of peace.