Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

An Emporia, VA sunset.   In the run of things, 2024 was one of the hardest years of my life.  It began with a friend dying unexpectedly, and it ended with a new heart wound that I'm still processing.  It's been dark around here these days.  It's been dark for ages, actually.     My Dad's cancer was confirmed before Thanksgiving, the Wednesday the week before, to be precise.  In a phone call, as he was driving home (and stopping to see my Mom), I called him, and he told me.  He'd barely found out himself.  Then . . . Then, I made a phone call to an old friend of mine.  Little did I know that act would undo me.  Back in 2020, shortly after my sister passed, I was told that when it came to the heartbreaking, bad news, we called each other . . . no more texting things like "my sister has cancer" and "my sister died." It made sense; she insisted that we call from now on.  In all these years of being separated by ocean and ...

  These days folks are reflecting on the changes we've embraced from the pandemic.  The losses of life and reality and the things we don't need in our lives are abounding.  Aside from the obvious things of more time and less stress, friendships are certainly at the center of this discourse.  I, like so many others, am no different.  What shatters me is how things woke--for lack of something better--and how the endless exhaustion caused within and after has left me.  As I wake in a reawakening world, and I set my feet back into patterns of semi-regularly, I'm left with new losses that can't be memorialized or precisely quantified.   I didn't hide the fact that ten months ago my sister passed, that eleven months ago a good friend died, or that family and friends died from age, life, or COVID-19.  I thought someone was dead, and I learned that he was merely playing dead for me and living his life happy along the way.  He doesn't understand ...