2022 ends
In the subway tunnels, yellow footprints remain from two years ago, pasted on the concrete six feet apart. Some have been scuffed, worn away, or half-removed. Whenever I find myself standing on one, I look down the tracks and realize that I am standing on all of them. The doors ding open and we all step into separate cars.
Memory works like this, in fractals and forked paths, so we must consult the calendar for solidity. The year’s long march of events and opinions.
The calendar. What would we find there? The invasion of Ukraine. The victories of Biden’s improbable presidency: the IRA, a strong midterms. The country’s rightward slouch: the Supreme Court throwing out precedent and consolidating power, rightwing pundits fomenting a trans panic. The ultra-rich buying superyachts in record numbers. The machines learning to speak better than us. The people, clutching blank pieces of paper, forbidden from doing so. The DEA seizing “enough deadly doses of fentanyl to kill every American.” The weather getting hotter and worse.
No wonder all anyone wanted to talk about this year was television. Better to talk of spoilers and satire than War in Europe or Dobbs or the Colorado River. Inevitably, though, all that serialized talk, expectant and detached, phatic and half-attentive, becomes a dominant mode for talking about anything at all. The new season? The bridge exploding? The police in the elementary school hallway? We haven’t seen it yet but we’ve heard about it. Our perspectives like plotlines. Full of holes.
It’s no one’s fault. The world is mostly something we watch. The bluejay screeching morning from the thin dead tree. The yellowed nights becoming yellow dawns.
Wanting to watch something else, I found myself revisiting the same places this year, often the next day, often retracing my steps, almost always alone. The same walks to sit in the same spots. In the same Park, over the same bridge, at the same bar. Though never quite the same, of course.
In February, I took two long, nearly identical walks through the Park, on Saturday and Sunday. It snowed on Saturday night, so the second walk was a shrouded notion of the first, re-dreamed in snow and silence. Much like my memories of this year and the last.
I sat on a tree stump in the snowy meadow. A white day with no yesterday. I closed my eyes in the cold. Oblivion, that silverblue wish.
I am still there, in the snow, in the Park. It is a chronicler’s madness. The year keeps beginning. Everything else ends.
ben tapeworm