The Last of the Long Decembers

I have been suffering from an insufficiency of wist lately. I haven’t been entirely without wist, but I’ve been far closer to wist-empty than wistful. That has been to both of our detriments. I apologize for that.

At this point, I just run a certain way. Cars that have been around as long as I have require a steady supply of fluids to function, and apparently, so do I. Whereas old cars run on a long list of liquids - gas, oil, coolants, antifreeze - I run on a far simpler combo of mainly coffee, water, and wist.

I require a certain amount of wist.

You see the problem now, right?

“Sans wist, no voy.”

(That’s French for “Without wist” and Spanish for “I don’t go.” I never took French and can’t remember the Spanish word for ‘without’. Say that to someone in the Southern Pyrenees though and they will get the point, so work with me here.)

“Without wist, I don’t go.”

That usually isn’t an issue. Usually, even when I’m not wist-ful, I’m at least at half a tank.

Not lately. I’ve been uncomfortably low, and I’m not used to the shortage.

Now, before going on, I should probably clarify the key term here…

Merriam-Webster defines ‘wistful’ as meaning one of two things.

The Oxford Dictionary’s definition isn’t all that far off.

Wistful (adjective): having a vague feeling of yearning, longing, melancholy; pensive.

It is such a good word and it is so very apt for me.

I am typically somewhat wistful. Not, epic, Victorian-wistful. Not the kind that finds you at the window of your weathered Gloucester home staring out at the turbulent churn of water black as banker’s ink, forlorn at having wagered your heart on a man whose only love was the sea...’ Not that level of pained pining. Something more subtle. A softer, low-grade wistful which operates as undercurrent in the true meaning of the word: a pulling beneath the surface forces at work above it.

Like most adults, I spend the majority of my time attending to things… running around, jumping from task to task and then running off to the next. In that employment, I don’t feel the undercurrent. I’m too busy buzzing about on the surface to feel the undercurrent. The second the freneticism calms and I’m both alone and quiet of mind, I feel it…

The wistfulness…

It isn’t depression or sadness per se. It has a vague melancholy to it, but in a not-altogether-bad way. There is a bittersweetness to it. It feels like the sensation you’re left with after reading a book that was both beautiful and hurt.

It is an opening of emotional aperture. When I was young, I think that was literally what it was: an opening back up after having stopped down the lens to let in only as much light as was necessary. A relaxing of pupils after constriction. And I think that is why there has always been a tinge of melancholy to it. It began as the exhale after hypervigilance… The lowering of one’s defenses, the letting down of one’s guard… The Wizard of Oz may have just gone to color, but, man, that last scene in black and white had been fraught. Give me a minute before we yellow-brick-road. I just need a minute to breathe.

And that is exactly what it is, what it feels like. A time of coming back into my full self, emotionally open to the very everything.

As a writer this past year, I’ve leaned into that little element of design or programming.

When I have my son, I run around from pillar to post never far from the surface currents. When I drop him off, I first drive off somewhere to settle into a calmer state. I go someplace. Usually out in the country somewhere. Someplace slower. Winding roads, open fields, a rhythm in movement, and then breathing, and then thought. My respiration slows down, and so does my heartbeat… and then I am open to symphony and timpani, cello and violin. It is a sliding back of the cover over a piano keyboard. The music can be polyphonic again, and now I can hear even the grace notes.

It is a settling back into me so practiced and patterned, so organic, I rely on it now. I count on it. It is the starting ritual to my writing. I breathe deep, open up, feel… and then, write.

Lately, that hasn’t been working as well. I haven’t known what to make of that. For as long as I can remember, my little routine of slipping away, settling, and then opening up to feeling… more… has just been my way. It’s just how I do things. It’s how I always have.

Lately though, my little drives out to the country have just been… pleasant drives in the country. Fuck. Well, that just doesn’t do me any fucking good. Who goes for pleasant drives just for the pleasantness? I’m not carting my ass all the way out to Warren County just for the sweeping vistas over the Delaware River Valley from some pristine mountaintop reservoir. No, I am making that drive to settle back into Mike of the Deep Feelings, Purveyor of Wist.

It is January 4^th. I didn’t write an overwrought reflection on the past year. December just passed and I didn’t write a thing about my annual tradition of listening to Counting Crows’ “A Long December” as a yardstick for where I am in the tunnel and how very far I still have to go. My little writing career, such as it is, celebrated its first birthday two months ago and I wrote of it only at the tail end of something mostly lighthearted.

All of that is so unlike me. I am freaking MADE for moments of reflection, sentimentality, reminiscence, vague longing... I am fucking wistful. That is practically my whole damn thing. Wist. I mine it by the cartload.

Lately, nope, almost none.

A week or two into December, the aforementioned personal talisman of long suffering, the song “A Long December” came on the radio on its own. I hadn’t gone looking for it. It just came up on some Spotify playlist as I was driving. I was taken aback for a second, and not because it came on but because I hadn’t even thought to play it and we were already halfway through LONG DECEMBER SEASON.

The smell of hospitals and the feeling its all a lot of oysters and no pearls. Driving up to Hillside Manor sometime after 2 am to talk about the year. One more day up in the canyons; one more night in Hollywood. I fucking appointment-grieved to that song for a decade-plus, and this year, I forgot to play it altogether until it randomly came on.

And when it did, it barely moved my wist-o-meter. No joke, even when the most gutting line struck, the needle barely twitched; and I looked side-eyed at the radio like “Uh, so that’s different.”

I have just had an equanimity both in the hectic stretches when I have my son and in the windows when I don’t. My little drives out to the country haven’t settled me into some state noticeable for its difference. As a result, I haven’t had the feeling that used to come with each Grand Reopening of Feelmart’s Wist Emporium.

I haven’t known what to do with that… or without it, really.

I am used to the vague melancholy that comes with the settling, and I am used to the full panoply of other feelings that come with it too. The latter are so deep and rich, I love them, the access to them, the opportunity to spend time marinating in them… The former - the faint, tugging shadow of a sadness, a longing – always hurt a little, but in retrospect. It was a trailing negative stimuli which heralded the arrival of a positive one.

There is a thing in psychology where stimuli can come to have an affect opposite their nature. A treat followed routinely by an electric shock at some unpredictable interval ceases to be a treat. An electric shock followed by a period without any shocks becomes a positive stimuli because, for a time, the mice needn’t worry. The shock is a door to freedom, even if only briefly.

My little running undercurrent of ennui is a bad embraced as a good.

It is a “well, that sucked… but now I can breathe again.”

One of the things that people who have lived without having ever endured periods of prolonged, deep, deep stress probably don’t fully understand is just how hard it is to breathe when you’re used to holding your breath.

It is hard.

It isn’t just a matter of being able to now; it is a matter of being conditioned to not. Holding your breath was learned. It can’t simply be unlearned. It has to be allowed to extinguish… and, man, that takes time.

A year ago, I wrote a whole long piece called “The Toothache”. It was about the toxic rewiring caused by hardship. I seldom think about things I’ve written after I’ve written them. But I have thought about these two lines a lot.

“I have a toothache. But mostly, I have a brain that is wired to prefer it to the consequences of fixing it.”

They were so very accurate; they were such a head-nod for people who understood.

Having actual physical pain but preferring it to the anxiety that would come from spending money to fix it.

That is where I was a year ago.

In July, I wrote a piece called “The Other Side of the Tunnel” about my pending trip to California with my son and what it meant to me. I said the trip would be “Leave a stone, take a stone” for me. Left would be the imagined one I had held onto while going through hard things; taken would be one I found on the other side.

A month later, my son and I went to California, and, true to my word, I came home with a stone I found on the other side. It was the lone rock I could find in a hurried search as the sun set and the tide rose. It wasn’t so much that I chose that rock; it was the only rock there for me to choose. It was smooth and black. It looked like it didn’t belong. Still, I saw no others and the waves were nearing the stairs, so I pocketed it and hurried off.

After we got back, I found it while unpacking and looked at it closely for the first time. It is made of a weathered black basalt but almost invisible to the naked eye is a seam, crystalline and green. I tried to figure out what it was via Google but came up empty so took to asking geologists. The seam is olivine. Also known as peridot. My birthstone.

That trip with my son was symbolic to me as the closing of a ‘cycle of the phoenix’ long in coming. A burial and a rebirth. Left was a burden now shed. Taken was something taken from a beach symbolic of rising anew.

A stone.

And the one I picked - the only one I could find - just happened to be my birthstone.

Now, that is… something… isn’t it? So perfect, it strains the bounds of coincidence.

Sometimes we choose stones; sometimes the stones are chosen for us.

I carry that little rock in the pocket of a bag I travel with now. It makes me happy to find it again. That trip was less than six months ago. I have had my other-side stone for barely five. I’m getting used to carrying it. It takes time. It isn’t the one I’m used to clutching tight. That takes getting used to also.

A lot is different for me than it was a year ago.

I am not as wistful.

I’m breathing a little easier, a little deeper. I reflexively draw in my breath and then hold it less.

The summer, the fall, the whole year flew by.

December… it felt so short…

and I’m so used to the long ones.

This year was better than the last. I am so thankful for that.

If last year was a time in the tunnel for you though, first, I’m sorry.

I know what it is like when “it’s all a lot of oysters and no pearls”. I can’t tell you when you will step back out into the light, but you will. There is an other-side stone on a beach somewhere for you. Someday, you will pluck it from the sea and take it home, a chapter closed, a new one opened.

In the meantime, as the song goes, “there is reason to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last.” Hold onto that line if you have to… However many Decembers it takes, hold onto it. There is always light, no matter how long a walk it takes to reach it. Adjusting to the light will be work too. It’ll be worth it.

Happy belated New Year, good people.

May it be a good one for us all.