Write something. You know it will make you feel better. The way that listening to sad music and drinking too much might not - but who are you to say what might help? You make yourself feel bad all of the time. You're a fucking expert at that. You perfect a love language out of it. You get so good at talking to yourself - and every time you know just what you'll say, what anyone else might say back - even if that part of it is fiction. You're your own confidant now. You always know just the point where you'll start to cry. 

You'll go running but it's so cold. The temperature seems to drop while you're doing it and you have to go back in and get your stupid windbreaker, to keep your tall, weak body from shivering. Crows, crows, crows. You want to say something about the sky, the mountains, the gaps within the trees, but actually it has come to be the time of year where that sky looks like nothing so much as a fuzzy florescent light full of the mute bodies of desiccated insects, the plastic turning the color into that of slightly turned milk. You hate milk.

So: maybe you make a nice dinner. Maybe it is Thanksgiving week and you are thinking about a lot of things you might cook or do, the herbs to be picked, the way you will perfect the house with light, scent, flowers, and heat. You try to remember to be thankful - which is something that comes on with all the subtlety of an avalanche sometimes, and other times feels impossible. 

The silly wine-drinking holiday you normally host seems like a great hit this year, and that is something you think about feeling grateful for - the sudden, hot flush of brightly-dressed people in the otherwise dark, dusty space. The way that the year and pandemic has created a bright bubble around those community connections like that, the way we are knit together in more complicated, beautiful ways. 

Then it will all feel sick and silly and you'll get unaccountably angry. Some of them have perfectly good reasons to suspect your year has not been perfect. Some of them have the particular details. Some of them have let you down in unspeakable ways. You can imagine just what they would say, or might have said. You can't talk to any of them, not really, or maybe you wouldn't want to, or maybe you did and it all felt like too much of a burden. You feel lonely.

Well, are you tired? Are you depressed? Was this a good exercise, or do you just feel raw and pathetic?