Every Ending Is a Lie. Middles Doubly So.
To face a future full of shadows, upon this New Year's Eve
Note: This is cross-posted from my Patreon, under a paywall here because it is under a paywall there. One must play fair. But at the end of the year, I wanted to share it, and what hope it has at the bottom of its particular well, with everyone who has helped me to live and support my family through these very rude and cruel times. Happy New Year. Thank you. The road is long. We will keep walking.
It is the hush at the close of the year.
It always feels hushed to me, even if it's full of noise. The Northern Hemisphere in me, I suppose. There is always some flavor of excess dark, some flavor of excess cold, some sense of putting things away for the long white road of January. Even though New Year's Day is meant to be all new beginnings, December 31st has always felt like an ending to me.
I don't know too terribly many people mourning the end of 2024. It's been a strange, sour time. But as I've thought so often lately, maybe that's because I'm in my 40s, also a strange and sour (and sweet, yes) time when things start to wobble, even for those who did pretty well with the first act or two. Family starts to die, friendships and marriages fray and tear and shred, children and houses are either a constant responsibility or a swiftly-retreating option. Your health starts to whine, if it doesn’t scream. If not your health, at least your strength. If alcohol or its assorted dirtbag friends are going to be a problem, they often start becoming one in the late 30s and early 40s. Careers stall more often than they take off or wither suddenly on the vine. We 40s folk are acutely aware of politics; if we weren't before, because we're now at the stage of life where we need to think about the future, and if we were aware before, the effects of the politics of our youth come home to roost in middle age.
And if the world outside our hearts starts to go seriously corkscrewed around the same time these very normal crumblings tumble through our personal lives, it all gets jumbled up together into a ball of discontent without beginning or end.
There's a reason Dane's Inferno begins: Midway through the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood, the good and right road lost to me...
