A week passes. I cannot recall my last words, only dimly remembering the easy flow of sentences through my fingers to the page. In the interim, winter has overtaken the Delta. Fog rolls through the fields, hovering low, clinging to the thick branches of the dormant trees.
I pull off the bridge and descend to Front Street in the mist. I glance to the east, shocked at the sight of a cold sun folded into the greyness of the morning sky. Idling by the curb, I raise my phone to capture the haunting vision. I hear but cannot see a flock of geese rising, their voices calling to one another as they head into a day of foraging in the flooded farmlands. As the sound fades, I shift into drive and continue on my own path to work.
In another week, I will mark the end of my sixth year in California. Six years since I started west with the last flotsam of my Midwest life crammed into the back of my car. I no longer clearly recall what I expected my life to become. But not this; surely, not quite this.
Like the sun in its damp veil, I find some small comfort in the awkward unexpected contours of these days. In truth a sort of loneliness has found its way into the dusty corner of my tiny house. I treat it like an unexpected, lingering house guest. I let it have the run of the place, with the unspoken understanding that eventually, it will have to leave. In the meantime, we settle into a kind of reluctant harmony, but only until I find a way to banish this specter from my home.
It’s the thirteenth day of the one-hundred and twentieth month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.
