I went on a walk for recreation 17 days ago. Well, mostly for recreation. I still had my whistle and I walked north instead of south, where the businesses Trump put on Truth Social and called frauds are; but I had no plans, no time limit, I wasn't responding to a call for observers. I was just walking.
I had just been sick. Sinus infection, lots of gunk in my head making it hurt. I was good to walk, but as I got up to Lake and went west into the very edges of Uptown, I started feeling pressure behind my eyes. I'd been on antibiotics for a week, so my first thought was "wow, I'm so weak", then I thought "maybe this is just because I haven't taken any allergy medication", on and on - you can probably guess how this goes - until I'd circled all the way back, close to home, and I realized that the pressure behind my eyes was just normal emotional distress. I stopped to cry a bit.
Nothing precipitated this beyond seeing the city in the first early slouches of spring.
We were, and are, in the middle of some personal chaos: bereavement and job loss (both experienced by my wife, not me), the problems that stem from job loss. A new range that we'd bought all the way back in November and rescheduled the delivery for three times. The little details of life that feel both more and less stressful when set against the backdrop of a federal invasion. We were on vacation in February, a vacation that barely felt like one, where we walked around the neighborhood and spent lots of money locally with my voucher from work, and where I tried to sleep and tried not to be afraid and failed regularly at both. I get crazy in February even on a good year: the days lengthen so drastically that I find it mentally destabilizing, and I have a recurring calendar reminder set for Feb 15 to remind myself of this fact, because every single year I think maybe it won't be so bad and every single year I crash and burn for no reason other than The Days Are Getting Longer And I Am Trapped Inside Them.
It feels a little like the rest of life feels right now. Maybe it won't happen this time - why is life like this - ah, it's happening. One-two-three. Being out on a kayak when a storm rolls in a little too quick, being safe from a hurricane till the winds stall it and turn it right towards you, or, to pick an appropriately patriotic comparison, being 70 miles from home in Wisconsin when an ice storm hits and you realize you're out of de-icer. Which happened to us this winter, and was terrifying, though the terror feels like nothing whatsoever stacked up against every single fucking day in January. All of this is to say that I will recover, and my friends and family will too, but it's going to take a hell of a lot of work, and I expect some of that work will fail.
If you see a woman ugly crying by a light pole in Lyndale, tell me I should be editing at the sentence level a bit more.
