I love the Winter Solstice. Few celebrations fill me with as much as quiet hope, as much unvarnished joy as the longest night of the year. Sure, it is a day paupered of light but it is also the moment when the sun begins its return. Every day after, we get another minute, and then another, until we’re again in a golden dream of summer and everything feels possible.
(I love the Summer Solstice with equal passion although with greater melancholy. The longest day of the year also marks the slow death of the light, but those are musings for another time.)
As I write this, Big Orange is sprawled beside me, purring so hard that she’s practically quivering. Yesterday was her birthday, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how she came to me in the dead of winter. I remember opening the carrier for the first time and her scrambling under the bed and how, when I sat myself on the floor, she came out to crawl onto my lap, screaming about how she’d been removed from everything familiar. I loved her immediately and completely.
The fact I won’t have her my entire life feels like a blasphemy, like the worst joke ever written, like proof that if the gods exist, they’re cruel motherfuckers. I struggled with that. I still do. If a devil came and said I could split my lifespan with my babies, I’d do so in a heartbeat. (Ace Tilton Ratcliff’s Dog Years is a story I return to time and time again when that preparatory grief swells up in me.)
But no devil is going to come with such a bargain. One day, I will lose her, lose her sister and, given my family’s proclivity for long lives, too many of the people I care for. My heart will shatter over and over again because all love is paid for with grief.
Not yet, though.
Right now, my girls are here. Right now, the people I love are present. One day, we will all be dust and memory, but not yet. Every year, the winter solstice reminds me of such. In the face of endless dark, there is always a road back to the light. I might not get forever with those I love, but I have today. I have every day of so many years to come. Weeks and months of time together. I just have to remember not to take them for granted, to count them like I count every minute of sunlight we’re given in the days following the solstice.
***
Let’s see.
What else happened while I was gone?
I’m moving to Queens imminently, which I’m looking forward to. I’m eager to have actual space again and room for cat furniture. The tiny sublet I’m currently occupying has been wonderful, but I have two Maine Coons and I think we’re all tired of me screaming that the top of the toaster oven is not an appropriate perch.
I also recently read Ai Jiang’s beautifully written debut novella Linghun, which tells the story of a town where the grief-sick go in hope that their dead will come home. Of what it is like to live in the shadow of the dead. Of how paralytic grief can be, how isolating. And how we are irreparably altered by sorrow. (It brushes too against the idea that we can be dead before our time, made into ghosts by those who will abuse our rusts.) It’s a complicated, delicate book with a heavy ending that sits in my throat still.
If you haven’t done so already, I also highly recommend that you pre-order C.S.E Cooney’s spectacular The Twice-Drowned Saint, which is also centered around another strange town, this one lorded over by ravenous angels. Our protagonist is Ish, who runs Gelethel’s only cinema (which can only show the same gauntlet of movies because the angels cannot conjecture any changes in their perfect town). For years, she has hid an incredible secret: Ish, you see, is Alizar the Eleven-Eyed’s secret saint.
I have a lot more to say about the book, but I will do so when it’s closer to release. Right now, all you need to know is that Cooney’s prose is incandescent and that everything she writes is filled with such heart, such wisdom, there’s really no reason to even think before you buy her books. Just get them. They’re fabulous.
As always, to finish, a cat photo. I hope y’all are doing well.
Oh, gosh, Cass! This is so lovely, and SO LOVING.
Also, re: the hope-dawning Winter Solstice, and the melancholy Summer Solstice, I HEAR YOU!
Also, yes, that panic of pre-pregrieving… “White-Queening,” Delia once calls it. I do a lot. Not just for the big griefs, either.