The Zombies

It’s the time of season for hustle and bustle. We crazily crash from back to school into Halloween. Just as we’re recovering from the sugar shock, we inhale dry turkey only to bitch about the cold, our upcoming debt, faking it with family, and dealing with ‘she’s so difficult to shop for’ to ‘my kids are so ungrateful’. We pray the passing year good riddance, noting how the upcoming year will be ‘our year’. We revisit the previous list of unmet resolutions - copy, paste, edit for the future.

Mother Nature’s season transition pairs with these types of holiday milestones, running parallel with my personal seasons. Sometimes it feels like groundhog day. As the months peel from the calendar, my life repeats a watered down version of the past year; never forgetting the year before that (or the year before that, or the year…). I’m not sure if this will continue forever or if one day I’ll be like my demented grandmother reliving decades prior; decades in which she remembers my name, decades in which my grandfather still breathed our air, decades in which things felt ‘normal’. And maybe I am her, because I do remember those times where I’m the matriarch in the family, but through thought I’m suddenly stricken with deep sadness. It hits with the element of surprise, taking my own breath, and I see so clearly, as if it was yesterday.

The ice on my kitchen window pierced my heart with such force that I was brought to tears. This isn’t supposed to happen, as least this early in the season. Thanksgiving hasn’t even happened, yet I’m already reliving the sadness of previous years, wishing I could fast forward the next two months - with the same speed in which I beg (sometimes, plead) for September to pass.

The ice, so loud, as I stood at the sink stifled by the deafening silence when I just want to gently drown in the sun of the promised land.