It’s like a new form of weather, this atmosphere of everyone waiting for this wretched year to end. Although conditions won’t be much different on the first of January, we wait and hope nonetheless. Even though time is just a concept and clocks only measure other clocks, the promise of a new year is heavy: the logic of a new day stretched out, blown up to worldwide scale, a collective need for a fresh start.
Last night I dreamt that god appeared on the internet, issuing demands and revealing answers before stunned eyes in lonely rooms and rapt faces on street corners. I experienced the type of revelation that only appears in dreams, some urgent message or a new way of connecting the dots that I almost grasped. But now I can only remember angry colors pulsing beneath pixellated text. Perhaps it was a subconscious reminder to stop looking at my phone. Now there’s a resolution: keep it switched off until noon or maybe April.
The other day I found a sentence I’d scrawled in my notebook that I cannot place. A sense of vertigo comes, a slight internal slippage whenever I recognize my handwriting but not the words or their intention. I keep staring at it: Here comes an old man in a three-piece suit the color of sand, and he’s telling children not to grow up, it’s a goddamned trap, and he leaves everyone shaken in his wake. I don’t remember if this was a fragment of a dream, an idea for a story, or something I witnessed, maybe in New Orleans.
It’s snowing tonight in Ohio, and I cheered when I saw the first flakes falling through the streetlights. I’ve been watching it for an hour with my breath fogging the glass, and I’m grateful there’s still wonder there.
