On October 8, 2022, I decided to measure my year from birthday to birthday. To commemorate, I started doing morning pages. I had a healthy streak going—one measured in months, not days or weeks—until life forced me onto the field of play.
A lot happens in a year.
I don’t know where to start.
That isn’t true. I know where I’d start, but instead of words coming out, I feel my throat catch and then, nothing. Silence and an indescribable weight pulls me into a slump. A physical slouch. An emotional lull.
This isn’t a softened gaze. It’s an escape from the noise in my heart and in my mind, an attempt to tune my senses back into the present only to be greeted with black and white warring on screen. There’s nothing to see here. No signal to be received.
Before cable TV, tuning into an “in between” channel would, in fact, tune you into “the afterglow of the Big Bang” (according to NASA).
The Brits call it “snow.” The German call it Ameisenkrieg—the “war of ants.” In Italy, it is sale e pepe (salt and pepper). In Argentine Spanish, lluvia (rain), in Japanese, suna-arashi (sand storm), and in Brazilian Portuguese, chiado (wheezing).
I call it “heartache.”
Here is what I can’t say aloud but can sometimes put on paper: My father has Stage 4 cancer, and no matter what happens next, this is part of our family’s Big Bang now. And we will forever live in its afterglow.