Second Advent

Exactly four weeks from today, the first day of the next year will be drawing to a close. How is that even possible? It feels like only moments ago that two thousand and twenty-two was just arriving, filled with challenge/fueled by hope (and huge amounts of vitriol and 'Stop the Steal' banners) and here we are with the remnants of all of that tracked across the living room carpet like so much of so what.

You remember 2022 (I hate to speak of it in the past but what's done is done and I do not give a damn whose feelings are bruised). We can blame the economy for the politics of anger, though we know the reverse is just as easily as true. For my part, I'm exhausted, physically and emotionally. It's like I'm running through soup and sand, my feet never quite lifting from and clearing the ground, each stride a broken parody of what it once was with my arms pushing through spaces and places I can taste rather than feel. 

And the harder I try the farther behind I fall. I started out beside you but have spent the year watching you disappear before me, long strides taking you over the horizon and when I get to where you were, you're gone with no trace, no track, and no regret. Sic transit humanitas.

This was a year I had to concede the face in the mirror has aged more precipitously than previously and the man behind the face hasn't nearly as many springs left as he thought he had, and more on point has squandered, rather than saved, those moments of meaning he thought would come along again as easily as they did the first time. 

Like many, I blinked and lost sight of the truly important in the rush of the real as it became surreal and then unreal before disappearing by the dawn's early light. The year in which I had vowed to sort myself out has nearly run its course and the next one will be over even faster than this one, with less to show for it as the distance already traveled never equals the distance yet to go. 

The sense of adventure is replaced by dread as the days draw down and the year ends. The toast we'll make for much success in the new year assumes both will exist but accepts the implication that neither is promised. 
-bill kenny