April 5th, 2019.

 

Every morning I make a silly little drawing and post it to my Instagram. I’m terrible at it (Can’t draw), but I like doing it. After I post them, I write the date in the bottom corner of the drawing in my sketchbook and today for some reason I wrote: 4-5-2019, which is not the correct date.

I have no idea why my brain did that.

4-5-2019 is of no particular significance (I don’t think), so I guess my internal clock is just a little off today.

But it did get me to thinking: Holy shit, it is 2021!

How the hell did that happen???

Just a minute ago it was 2016 and I’d just moved to Portland. And then the Former Guy got elected that November and we all fell into some sort of Darkest Timeline wormhole and then Covid hit and then a year somehow simultaneously disappeared while also aging all of us ten years.

And now it is 2021. 

We live in the future, I guess???

When I was growing up, I  used to read science fiction that was set in like 2015. They had lasers and stuff. We don’t even have jet packs.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that time is kind of merciless in it’s brutal and inevitable march forward. In a way, I guess that’s good. It means that 2020 is in our rear-view now. It means that a summer of vaccinations and hugs is on the horizon.

But it also means we completely lost an entire year. You know, I moved here to Monterey in October of 2019 and I’d only been here about 5 months when quarantine came down. It usually takes me about six months to settle into a new place, and I never really got to do that here. As Vaccine Summer approaches, I’ve started feeling this odd anxiety about life getting “back to normal” because in this case “back to normal” is going to mean “having only lived here 5 months” and so I will still have to do all the work of building a new life. So the relief of surviving Covid is going to immediately turn into the existential dread of having to build yet another new life from scratch. There is a part of my that likes that I’ve gotten to move around a lot, but the part of me that keeps getting older has come to the realization that every time I move, my life seems to get a little smaller and my circle of people is reduced. I really am worried that one day I’m going to look around and realize I don’t even have anyone to get a beer with. There is a part of me that is a little worried that when it is time to start doing hugs again, I simply won’t have anyone to hug.

This is not the future I used to read about and it certainly isn’t the one I imagined for myself. Though I guess I have to admit, at least we have reached the point in the pandemic where it is even reasonable to begin to really think about having a future that’s bigger than just our dumb little quarantine lives. That counts for something.

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