L.L. Wohlwend

Editor’s note:
I wrote this a month ago but didn’t post.

December 2019
At the end of this year, since Vinny died, I can say there have been days I cried piteously, days I cried embarrassingly, days that I cried quietly, or days where I barely cried at all. But I cannot say I’ve had more than one or two days without tears. I’ve cried because I’ve missed him. I’ve cried because his death got tangled up in emotions about people in my life who are no longer around. And I’ve cried because the very last moments of his euthanasia did not go well (something I hid in other posts, other comments). When I say that this haunts me, I mean that it really fucking haunts me, in the terrible way only hauntings from beloveds can; in the night, in the shower, in the waking hours before dawn, I see him again, I see what happened, and there I am in the horror of that moment.

And well. I don’t wish to think on it any more.

At the end of this year, I feel like I’ve come up to the edge of something hard and precipitant. I can touch its hollow back, hear its long, low echo as I knock about the panels. It charges the room with electricity, and my hair, long enough, stands blown back. But I cannot for the life of me see this hard-edged thing. There has been a change. Yes. And I know my life is at a crossroads. But where do I go? To the north? To the sea? Do I try for a house? A new job? Do I write when I feel it gets me nowhere?

I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

So I take a walk. I contemplate. I think on matters of impermanence, of repeating moments. The walks in the fall leaves crunching, as they were when I was a kid on my way home from school. We are here for such a brief blip of time. Be happy, I tell myself. BE HAPPY. Is there no other answer for what one should be?

There must be. For I feel this line of thinking leads to a sort of quasi-Dorian Gray, forever pursuing my most debased emotions in the search for pleasure–a soul’s secrets etched on an old passport photo now hidden under my bucket of change.

Well, then purpose.

At the end of this year, I search for purpose. Let’s try that. Let’s go forward into the hollow echo with that.