I've never been this far up the river and I don't want to go

I liked my birthday this year. I was born around 10:30 in the morning, and at that time this year, I was curling my awkward, tall body into a cave behind a waterfall, washing my face and hands in the ice cold water. I hope my whole year is like that: pressed to mossy rocks, my hands full of black loam and cold creek water. I don't know if I'm doing any good at all, but I'm going to keep trying. Be thankful and optimistic.

My horoscope for the week was, "Try not to jump to conclusions. Try to simply look."

My mom took this picture of me on a hike over the holiday, and I like it because I look very brave.

I wasn't a catch, I wasn't a keeper

I got up this morning and went downstairs. I was hopping-cold, wearing my dad's old college football t-shirt. It's too big in a way that slips off my shoulders, but it has his number on it, 86, the same number as the year I was born, which I like and think is lucky. It also has that sort of buttery soft feeling of shirts from 30-odd years ago, which makes it very nice to sleep in. I like to say hey to Sven first thing, who prances and slaps his paws in greeting in a way that Travis swears he learned from his own excited-to-see-you bounce. I got a cup of coffee. I looked at my card (the Hierophant: follow the rules) and checked the news and if I had any messages, of which, of course, I had none of either.

I dressed in an old flower skirt with a cardigan that would get too hot later, even though it's almost the winter solstice, and the boots I bought to wear the Chris's wedding. They are scraped up at the toe now because I drag my feet some and also like to wear them camping and use them to kick the ever-loving shit out of firewood.

On my way to work, I didn't want to listen to my stories, so I listened to crap Norwegian postrock I liked in grad school and thought about the light, whether it's changed as winter has deepened, or if I've just gotten used to the low quality of it. It wasn't a bad-looking morning, all told, very pink and rosy and misty the way a mountain dawn should be. I thought about my year and where I was this time last year, preparing for my excellent nose dive, and what was different or where I was. Beluga day is coming up, and I've been wondering what I'll even say. Last year I talked about what's leftover when everything's changed or gone away, what develops in your identity in the space, but I think the one true thing I said was that the only important thing is other people. I still think that.

My breath smoked so prettily when I walked into work and I smacked the small window of my badge picture against a series of access doors. I go in the IT way, because there's never anybody in those halls. I used to avoid them because my boss used them, but now he's gone, like most everybody, and I like the quiet. There's a big staircase on the far side and it's heated really well, so it's good to warm up in before going up onto my icy third floor.

*

I actually worked pretty hard today, of which a representative moment was not when my program operational manager came by to wish me well/pump me for information about the new job I'm taking and if it's one of our competitors, and I was in the middle of writing a really perfect scene that involved a lot of dialogue in italics, so you know that the characters definitely care a lot about what they are saying. I know I am garbage at writing fiction, but I love it, and will not stop, even when I should be writing some things I'm actually good at and selling them.

A friend messaged me to talk about a mutual friend who hasn't got the time of day for her, and what she should do. I felt badly, but thought her ideas to hassle him into it were misplaced; you can't trick somebody into wanting to talk to you if they don't. But everyone seems to be having a little bit of a hard time this month, in all corners of my life. I want to have hard time, too, but there's not really time or space for me as well. It's a hard time of year. Tomorrow will be 13 degrees colder than today and a little bit darker, but I guess not for much longer.


*

My spotify "top played songs of 2017" was pretty illuminating. The 2-10 spots were occupied solely by my running playlist, which felt good, since I listen to spotify every day otherwise, and it meant I ran a lot. But the top spot was Carin at the Liquor Store, naturally.

I listened to said running list tonight during my 5 miles. There was just a little light left, maybe for half a mile, and I didn't see of my deer at all. You always see them rushing around at full moon, but I think in the new moon they prefer to stand in big groups, lurk in my running paths and startle me.

hold me for the pops and clicks

Hiking today, it started sleeting. It's been a long time since I've heard the sound of sleet in the deep woods: the precise, tiny, musical sound of it striking the brown bed of oak leaves underfoot. It was beautiful in a very December way. I gathered up boughs of hemlock, pine, spruce, rhododendron and running cedar to make my mantles and wreath.

You think of the winter woods as silent, but they are louder now it seems than any other time of year, everything echoing and crunching and magnified. A few fridays ago, I went out and though I've been alone in this national forest literally hundreds of times over the years, I grew suddenly and strangely afraid, hearing rustles and breakings I could not match to sight of a grouse or deer, while the dog wheeled in wide circles around me, responding to my unexpected fear and broadcasting his own. I made myself stay out there another hour just to quit it, going deeper into the hemlocks and lying down on a mossy log until the bizarre wish for flight settled in me, and the sounds felt familiar again. I think it was that the days of the wind we had early in the month knocked all the leaves down for good, and the sound changes when the limbs are truly empty.

I miss my garden. I'm fixing a savory lamb pie for dinner and I was just thinking how nice it would be to have a little chopped kale in it, but the first snow killed everything except my resilient and frost-burned broccoli. I haven't cooked since Wednesday, and I'd missed it. There are few things I find more enjoyable than listening to a record, drinking a little glass of wine, and cooking.

It's my birthday Friday. I hate my dumb birthday. I don't know when that happened, or if it just always was like that. It seems brattish to complain about, especially after I had a very nice weekend. I just wish the week would go easy on me, if I could be wishing for things. 

who will love you? who will fight? who will fall far behind?

But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone in the bitter watches of the night

So I'll be honest, I did the counting: I've literally cried for 1/3rd of the last 24 hours and I would characterize my mental state as "crisis." But I understand the paths I'm walking intimately, and the distinctively-familiar loneliness of them. I don't know why I thought this year, these weeks would be different. But now I've medicated myself into a flat affect, if only because for once in my life, I actually have some pretty important shit to do. I don't want to go into it with puffy eyes. 

just say and I will go

Instead of the bullet point style I have been using so often, I thought about writing this post in a perfect chronological order, from the first moment of this full moon Gemini day, at 12:01 am when I was standing in my parent's garage, drinking miller lite with best Joe and talking about purpose on the cold concrete floor, to now, to the angle of the sun just past midday and the fog on the mountains, to 7:45 in the evening, writing this, a little tired or cynical, listening to El Vy and feeling such strange change. I would have to talk about the way that the path of the trees looked in the unconquerable moonlight, the cold, or about how later the woods resigned and deepened, turning gold and indigo the way they are this time of year: so gorgeous and all going so utterly and completely unremarked-on.

I don't know anything, but I feel bare and true in this season. I only am what I am.

I'll be the one in the lobby in the green come-and-fuck-me shirt

December, 2017: Back on My Bullshit just in Time for Mercury Retrograde*

*compulsively dreaming about arrowheads, moon cycle hangings, low key anxiety about everything that matters to me