I’ve known I was going to write this post for a long time. I just didn’t know it would be like this.

I remember thinking that since everyone reading this has lived through this last year, I shouldn’t simply write a recap. Like, you were there, you know what happened. I just didn’t know how impossibly sad and tough and scary and intense this time was going to be.

I was going to write about how only person who experienced 2020 the way I did was me, and so I wanted to keep it personal. I want to focus on the ways living through this time has affected me, changed me, made me think.

But fuck, I didn’t see this one coming.

I wanted to write an intricate, beautiful piece about the highs and lows, the personal growth, the shock of how connected I felt to the world in a time of isolation.

I wanted to paint a picture of the frightened, panicked feeling, watching schools shift online, bread sell out completely at the grocery store.

I wanted to write something that captured the depths of the loneliness and depression and the helplessness, and the difficultly of building myself a mental health safety net in the middle of a pandemic.

I wanted to talk about the witches and the watchmen, and about the gunslingers, the characters in the books that kept me alive.

I wanted to talk about finding Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah and I wanted to write about quoting John Mullaney at my friends.

I wanted to write about my sister graduating from high school and about how there weren’t any concerts or musicals and there wasn’t really a ceremony but there was a tiny gathering of friends, in spite of everything, because that’s what she wanted, and I wanted to write about what it felt like to drop her off at school and how I cried all the way home. And then she was gone and the house was empty, but she a few months later she home.

I wanted to talk about how I wished I had lost my job more gracefully, and I wish I hadn’t sworn so much, because it didn’t do any good.

I wanted to write about becoming angry at the government, and at the same time becoming more patriotic than I’ve ever felt in my life, because of the millions of lives that were put in danger by corruption and prejudice and disfunction and incompetence and disregard for the value of a human life. Because I found that I cared about all of those lives and their housing and their water and their educations and their work and their business and their loved ones and their freedom to love their loved ones and their earth.

I wanted to talk about watching John Mullaney & the Sock Lunch Bunch and switching my major to philosophy on a whim.

I wanted to talk about what it felt like when some asshole spray-painted “GOD BLESS AMERICA” over the poetrait of Breonna Taylor, on the painting rock at Geneseo. And what it felt like when somebody re-painted black lives matter back over the top.

I wanted to talk about looking my race-based prejudice dead in the face and saying “I see you. I see that you are there. And there are things I can do to soften the damage that you might cause in this world, and my heart is big and strong and giving enough to help me to do those things.”

I wanted to write about the swimming pool, about building a campfire circle, about trespassing in the woods, about thinking I could be a homesteader with chickens and then deciding I didn’t want to be. I wanted to talk about listening to true crime or climate activism podcasts and slowly becoming an activist when the election drew closer and I wanted to talk about reloading that goddamned map for a week.

I wanted to write about watching Twin Peaks and the Queen’s Gambit, and making soap and cooking Ramen, and the place in the loft of the barn that is mine.

I wanted to talk about 2020.

But I’m having a hard time, writing this.

I’ve been crying all day. Driving back and forth to pick up my sister, drop off my books, listening to Different Radio and NPR and WXXI. I feel flattened. And I’m so tired. I’m crying right now and my belly hurts. I want to sleep for years.

I know there will be no “girls” night at Ari’s house and nobody will kiss when the ball drops and we won’t play games like we did when we called in this year and left the last one behind. So I wanted to send this year off somehow.

I wanted to write a piece that swooped and soured and carried you to high places and brought you down with a gentle thump but I don’t know if I can. I just have this. It’ll have to work. Like a half-baked charm.

Here is to better tomorrows.

I love you.