January 2020: Checklist for Today
Wake up.
Drink coffee, even if it is the warmed up coffee left over from last night’s dinner party. It’s still good, especially on the couch in the sunshine next to your beloved.
Tell the cats that they are good cats, blinking in the light, sitting on the living room floor.
Meditate.
Call your mother, who you have called once a day for the last 100 days. Listen to her to measure the weight of sadness in her voice, even on a day that could be called okay.
Like the pictures. Send fireworks on your little phone.
Put the kettle on for tea and think about Maine, the vacation you took with Emily a few summers back and found a Le Creuset outlet store on the way home, where you came to find this bright yellow tea kettle.
Go to your desk. Be a good steward of your gifts.
Bundle up to take a walk around lunchtime, to see which coffeeshops are open, to be in the outside world on this new day of a new year.
Clear the empty cans of seltzer from the countertops and next to the sink, the bright colors clinking in the recycling bin.
Frame the sound of your friends’ laughter ringing out in your small living room as the year, the bad year, wound down, smaller and smaller, but not to be forgotten.
Take a shower. Brush your teeth. Think about the light through the dirty window in your bathroom, the one so high up that all you see is bare tree branches, the tops of buildings, through the frosted glass.
Hold the potential of a new year in your palms, without pressure, without fear.
Stretch out on the hardwood floor because years are passing and you are getting older, the kind of old you can feel in your knees when the click for every step you take up a staircase.
Get out the box of wedding invitations you’ve been saving for today, find the best pens in the apartment, spread out at the kitchen table with Emily and the stamps and the addresses and write out the names of your family and friends, the fraction of them, because in quantifying a community you come to find that there are hundreds of people who you love who love you back. Marvel at it. Kiss the envelopes shut.
Watch Vera on the couch under the fuzzy blanket that you got for Christmas, something you’d never buy yourself, white with Christmas colored mittens on it, but you can’t seem to pack it away, not yet. Try to guess the killer, snapping your fingers and pointing when the conclusion says you were right. This is how you will make it through the winter.
Read. You talk constantly of the books you need to sort through, the books you could get rid of, the piles and stacks that have multiplied throughout the years. But I need them, you say, because at any moment, you could.
Make the bed. You want to be the kind of person who makes the bed each morning, but instead you make it right before you get in, turning down the covers and snuggling into your favorite place. Know that this night will come, because this day will end, and the year will continue. 100 days. How has it been 100 days since your mother first told you? Shove the days back. Burn the calendar. Stop the clocks.
You can’t.
Remember your younger self. Try to count the different New Years you’ve spent with Emily (a friend’s party, a dinner in Greenpoint, a meditation in Park Slope) and with your youth (chasing, drinking, disappointment, bursts of color). Hold space for her. Keep your writing time sacred. Trust the story.