January / Complete

January contained Paris, Pluto, winter mornings, loud cleaning music and enough ordinary happiness to hold all of it without pretending the world is simple. #

January complete. I don’t know why the first month of a year always feels longer than the others, perhaps because December ends with such noise that January seems to begin in the echo. This one began with oliebollen and no resolutions, moved through a week when Paris made every screen feel heavier, then returned, because life returns, to work and coffee and photographs and Sunday mornings and the deeply important discovery that hardcore improves housekeeping. New Horizons is on its way toward Pluto. The Christmas lights finally came down, although I kept one little string because I refuse to live under tyranny. Amsterdam stayed cold. I stayed happy. Those sentences can exist beside the terrible ones. I used to think emotion needed consistency, as though being devastated by something in the news should prevent me laughing later at dinner, or being happy in my own life should make sadness elsewhere less sincere. It doesn’t work like that. A day can hold both. A month certainly can. Tonight is Saturday and the house is warm. Yuri is doing something in the kitchen. I can hear cupboard doors. I have music playing quietly and the January folder on the site is now full. Thirty-one days. No reinvention. No miraculous new self. Just another month of this life I like very much, with my boots by the door and a spacecraft moving toward Pluto whether I refresh the page or not.

Remember me, Eclipse.