It’s been a few weeks since I’ve returned to this space. All I can really say is that I’ve been trying pretty hard to claw my way back here through the mostly awful days of February, to not much luck. I loved the consistency, the little ritual of my first few weeks writing this newsletter, but I kind of knew all along that that consistency wouldn’t last forever, or maybe very long at all depending on your perspective. I think it’s natural and expected to fall away from a routine that you’ve built for yourself, especially when it’s something that no one’s holding over your head or forcing you to sit down and do, especially when it’s something you set on top of a pile of other things you do have to do, especially when it’s a writing project and you’re prone to self-doubt on top of procrastination and well everything else.
I am not sure what kept me from writing in the end, but I do know that February felt long, protracted, strange. Pretty powder snow turned to plastic dirty ice pretty quickly, and there’s a harsh glistening white spread over the memory of the entire month. I faced a few personal rejections that compounded a general creep of time. And a few weeks ago, we lost our grandmother after a difficult few years.
I think maybe I don’t know what to say about that last thing. I feel strange and tentative about grief in the first place, I’m never particularly sure what to do with it. But the pandemic has made a loss like this ever stranger, ever more uncertain, and absolutely more difficult. I’m alright (don’t worry) but I feel a little...bewildered? It’s a feeling of, on top of everything over the last year, now we have this returning, familiar cruelty. And it’s somehow the same as it was before and completely new, although maybe that’s the way it is every time something like this happens.
