Note 8

Twenty twenty-one was the worst year of my life. I’m sure others share a similar sentiment with this global pandemic that seems to have an infinite hold on us–I don’t believe we’ll ever live in a maskless world again. The obvious reasons made this year worse than shit, but I won’t bore you with those. Instead, I’ll tell you mine.

***

Anxiety

Is a bitch. A bald-headed one, a dirty one, a treacherous one, a silent one. Like most of the world, my anxiety had a blast this year. As I was holed up in an overpriced Ann Arbor apartment–which I should have never signed a lease for–with barely enough furniture to call it a home, She had the time of her life. She came whenever she wanted and left my brain in a foggy, panicky disarray. She made my chest clench up and my head hurt and my body ache. She loved to make me think I’d contracted a new strain of that virus that shall remain nameless everyday. And most important of all, she added a few more hours to my insomniac circadian rhythm. I guess 2am was too early for her to call it quits each night.

Love

I fell in love two months after I arrived in LA. No, I wasn’t filling a void. I was truly in love. A gorgeous, young woman with chocolate dimples and curly cues dangling from her hair to match. An artist, an Aquarius, an empath, an affirmer, a lover. I loved as deeply as I could until I couldn’t. I catered to her. She cared for me. I felt seen, heard, affirmed in a way I’d never experienced before. I fell in love. Yet, love is not like the movies. We are not a bunch of Zendayas and Tom Hollands rolling around–or Niecey Nashs and Jessica Betts; what a plot twist! It doesn’t always end with you being able to love the person you’re in love with. Life likes to get in the way of those things–maybe that’s more ubiquitous than the virus that shall remain nameless. A month in, I ended things because I could feel myself waning, my mind’s penchant for sulky winter sadness and repressed trauma, no longer able to stay hidden behind the fried synapses in my brain. It was the day after my birthday, a chilly night in Burbank. I said, I didn’t have the capacity to love her like she deserved; I needed time to deal with the spillage my synapses could no longer carry. I wailed. She balled. We loved.

Loss

I left in the heat of the night from my Michigan family home for my grandmother’s small two- bedroom apartment on Indianapolis’ northeast side. I flew to LA the next day to start a life I never asked for. I left my siblings–one broken, the other cracked–in puddles of tears as I pulled out the driveway at 2am. I left the ones who gave me life in a flash, in a haste that still shocks me today. I left them for peace and stability and care. I left to become wholly me; to stop existing in a conservative, Midwest environment where people said, “You’re going to Hell” with their eyes and through awful metaphors via their mouths. I left in search of the tawdry joy that’s often spoken of in the West. For the sun, the beach, the weed. Surely, one would help fill the striations that the circumstances of my life had created–were creating–within me. As soon as I got off the plane, I felt those striations start to tighten. But as time passed, they began to open again. Slowly, painfully. And I realized that no sun, no beach, no weed could completely excise them. The journey of my life would be learning how to envelope myself in the serotonin-creating moments and not the ones that turned minor striations into seismic faults.

Life

I have to work until I die. Or I have to make enough money so I can die unemployed. That sounds like a sadistic joke, like a rhetorical statement via a Tweet, like a reality of life. I don’t like verisimilitudes like that. It’s cruel, beyond unkind, evil if you will (does another word have a more negative connotation than evil?) But, it’s life. It’s the cards that have been dealt my way. The hand I’ve been given. The cross I must bear. To live. Wholly, freely, comfortably, lovely. I refuse to reside outside of those four adjectives. I will die unemployed, in a big house with a balcony and a pool, surrounded by the people I love…not working a 9-5 (or 9-infinity).

*Lifts glass*

To 2022:

You will usher me into the most wonderful years of my life. Thank you in advance for all your blessings. I promise to cherish them each day. To anxiety, love, loss, and life: Thank you for your lessons, for the up-hill battle, for the fight of my life. I knew I’d find a way to outlive you.

Peace, love, and hair grease

–Dierra Barlow