My Viking witch from Colorado that reads my cards and holds my hand when I fall apart messaged me at the beginning of 2020 and said,
“Buckle up buttercup the retrogrades this year are overlapping and intense”.
It isn’t like I didn’t believe her, I did, but how could anything go wrong?
I had met the love of my life, I had a grand plan, I had moved away from perdition, I was writing a book, I had a cute little attic space to hold me and my things when I wasn’t visiting here or there, I found a great place to work where I was 2 weeks on 2 weeks off, so I could travel, how amazing is that? The future was laid out before me so beautifully.
It was a leap year, weren’t leap years good?
Well, 2016, but nothing could be quite so bad as that with losing Bowie, and the clowns, and the gorilla, and Prince and the election and and and 2012 wasn’t great either. Still dating the potato and struggling. 2008 I was still stuck in my marriage, okay, leap years are bad, historically they just are. I know this.
But this one felt different. Didn’t it?
My optimism is an idiot of epic proportions. Just clueless really.
But I had good reason at the beginning of the year to think things were going to be…good.
I saw my man in January and again in February, the price of plane tickets dropped dramatically in March, so I got to go to Arizona and then go see him again for 5 days.
I had been sequestered on an island of ‘not quite right’ working every day for 2 years, never really going anywhere but work and home then work and back home. Dating dudes but not really dating, trying to get sober but never really staying that way. Living the same day over and over for 2 years and pretending it was a life.
I escaped, albeit on a whim, with some good luck and help from a dear friend.
It was time for me to fly, right?
I knew about the virus, my roommate owns a business in China, we’d been following the news since December, but I had lived through SARS in Toronto, much ado about very little, surely this would be that. Zika, MERS, Ebola, this is just how the world is now right? Tiny little outbreaks far away and the world spins madly on.
That didn’t happen this time. But we persevered, this is what we do. This is what I do.
Destroy the middle it’s a waste of time, from the perfect start to the finish line. Youth, Daughter
In the middle I kept getting sicker and sicker and not knowing why. My man and I split briefly after a disaster trip to see him in June (mid retrograde, what was I thinking). Then quickly reconciled. I went back to perdition for 80 days. Collected the rest of my things, fixed my car and made peace with the past and then I drove home in immeasurable pain. I left just in time for my work here to shut down, I could have turned around and gone back but I didn’t, and I am wondering if I made the right decision.
Then I came here just to have all of that fall apart again.
As it stands, when I looked at the previous trips on and off the island, the 3 days in the car, it never hurt like that before. Pulling over every few hours, crying so hard I’d puke. I went to the doctor, and a month later I was diagnosed with Lyme disease, then undiagnosed and they finally found the rupture in my implant that I knew was there. And a not so metaphorical hardening of my heart which is now also metaphorical.
I see clearly that needed to go back, and I needed to leave, and I needed that push to go to the doctor and get this figured out.
Just like I needed to leave in January and be in the safe space of my attic as the world got weird.
My life was getting stolen by the silicone migrating around my body, but because of lockdown I didn’t even realize. Almost a full year lost to sickness, my own and this virus.
But I kept living and trying.
And now we are 25 days to the end.
I thought I was going to get a cosmic do-over. My optimism somehow made it through the worst of all this.
Until now.
All the things I wanted to do at the beginning of 2020, the life I saw for myself not gone, just delayed.
Right?
Universe says no. Tarot cards say no. Eclipses say no. What was the point of surviving all those retrogrades and all this chaos just to get to the end and have that taken away too?
I suppose I will just have to keep going to find out.
My optimism has taken a back seat to stubbornness.
If I don’t know where to go, I’ll get there ~ Reality Bites
That life I thought was just delayed ain’t happening either. Creeping deadlines come and gone, replaced with other (more urgent) deadlines. Surgery, eviction. My hetero life partner in crime tucked into a very good relationship 1000 miles away from where we were going to live. And I am happy for her, I am.
My relationship has dissolved into nothing. My son turned the key on his very first apartment of his very own. He has a union job, and he is happy. I am officially unencumbered, and I am truly alone. I am still adjusting.
25 days to the end. Sitting on my girlfriend’s couch while the rest of the household sleeps off a drunken night at a cowboy bar, drinking mediocre coffee in my bestie’s boyfriend’s sweatpants. Not ideal, but not the worst either. He said I could keep the pants.
I don’t really believe the universe adheres to the Gregorian calendar, but as someone on this earth and stubbornly clinging to this mortal coil, I kinda gotta.
I supposed I should be grateful to be entering the new year free of attachments and obligations.
And I truly am grateful for all the things I have, the things I have lost and the things I have learned.
This was a year of rest and recovery; I have more rest and recovery waiting on the other side of surgery. I will start feeling human again approximately a calendar year from when the world shut down.
And, yes, there are a lot of unknowns.
Where will I live. Where will I work. Will my tits be better or worse. Am I really going to start feeling better after surgery or is this just the one head of the Hydra and two more monsters will grow in it’s stead. What if I do feel better and I am still not capable of accomplishing anything. Then what.
So many then what’s, where’s and what if’s and so few answers.
I think I am going to cocoon for the next little while. I have no ‘have to’s’ until my consultation and subsequent surgery.
I remember one new years when I was hold up at my girlfriend Anna’s house, with intermittent Wi Fi, mid break up with ex hubby. Her house was so full of cat hair and despair. I’d bet money it was a leap year. I cried so hard I puked for 3 days and in between I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and decided to keep living. I know the plural of apocalypse, I have survived many.
That was about my lowest point on this earth.
If I made it through that, this coming one on the ocean should be a cakewalk.
I’ll sit quietly through the eclipse and the great conjunction on the solstice. Welcome 2021 down at the ocean just letting everything go to make room for the new.
I have built myself up from nothing before and I know I can do it again.