Hope

A new year is about to begin. An old one is about to end. A new year is about to begin. An old one is about to end. A new year is about to begin. An old one is about to end.
Writing helps me process.
I am processing.
Covid’s surging again. Covid’s surging again. Covid’s surging again.
Stating facts helps me process, too.

We humans, we like to hope, we like to hope because uncertainty breeds fear breeds immobility. Immobility—the last two years tell us—means the candle of the world melting under our feet, the searing wax leaving us stuck. Stuck means we do move forward, in days, in hours, in minutes, but we are glued to the page of our lives that reads lockdowns, night curfews, social distancing. It means the world hanging on a clothesline, taking a break from being itself. Break means a sickness that spreads faster than its fear. It means all of life’s perfect colours are frozen into rigid, unreachable pixels. Sickness means the map of the world getting replaced by a single line made not of territory but death toll, no land being spared.

Nightmarish déjà vu is taking me back to the beginning of this year and the near middle of the year before that. No endings though, endings always bring hope because they mean beginnings.
And beginnings are better because they have the past to learn from. We will say goodbye to an unhappy year and hope that the next one will be better. Goodbyes are sad, but it’s different when you are trying to bid farewell to sadness itself.

Emily Dickinson said about hope, “Yet never in extremity/it asked a crumb of me”. Her hope must have been so delicate, so light, after all, it is a “thing with feathers.” But, our hope, it is a thing with oceans,
it is a thing with the sky, it is a thing with the sun, it is a thing with the moon, it is a thing that gives life to all those that live in it, it is the earth itself. And so it asks a lot of us, it asks us to protect ourselves and others, it asks us to stay at home and be with our family, it asks us to persevere a little longer, it asks us to hold on to it, tightly, and never let go.

A new year is about to begin. An old one is about to end. A new year is about to begin. An old one is about to end. A new year is about to begin. An old one is about to end.

I am still processing.