come find me when the day is bronze and the sorrow is
full. i am building my poem in this here heart. all
of it is a working title.
– Tonya Ingram, excerpted from Until the Stars Collapse
Time is such an oddity. I think about it often, but think on it even more incessantly as my birthday nears each year. Why do we have years? Why is it the measurement we use to determine age, grade, legality, eligibility? As if it is a magical concept and tomorrow, when I turn 36, I will be different than I am today at 35. At this moment, in the present, I am everything I once was, everything I hold now, and everything that I will be someday. A work in progress? Perhaps. More like a constant renaming. A reshaping caused by stripping away and building up. Somehow the same and ever-changing. Always a working title.
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I was due to be born on December 21. Winter solstice; the darkest day of the year. I arrived on the 19th. Maybe that’s why winter and I have such a tempestuous relationship. As a child, I loved the season of dark, cold, wind—if y’all think Chicago is the windy city, visit Troutdale, Oregon in winter—and the ever-present, rarely-realized possibility of snow. There was something so cozy and comforting about the season of frost and chill. But as an adult? Winter has been really fucking difficult. It’s been too dark, too cold, too windy, and there has been too much snow. It has consistently been the season of loss, depression, and hopelessness. Marked by events that brought heartbreak, exile, and months that are so fuzzy, I can barely recall them. Each season is given three months to exist. This one has lasted for years.
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You know what’s total bullshit? The idea that we’re “supposed to” go through certain things in life. Yeah. Try telling that to survivors of abuse. Children surrounded by warfare. Families devastated by terminal illness. None of this was “meant to happen” to any of us. The notion that intense and sometimes unbearable suffering is part of some overarching plan for each of our lives is such an offensive belief. But this is what I was taught as a child. I don’t know what caused me to rethink this heinous idea, but I did. And thank God. I was not made for pain; none of us is.
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What place do I give pain in my life? What title? And is this the year that I am finally released from what feels like an eternal winter?
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Seasons are sneaky. We celebrate their change in an odd way. As if on this day, it is suddenly winter and somehow that is completely different from fall. No, that is not it at all. They are perpetually changing at a slow, measured pace. Kind of like people and birthdays. Maybe that’s my problem. I’ve been waiting for a sudden change of seasons. An immediate release from the grip of dormancy. Dear Amy, it doesn’t work that way. You have to move through the change to get to the next season. And no, you cannot go back to what has already been. You can only move forward.
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I have been so willing to take the working titles in my life and make them official. Trapping myself in my own sadness and circumstances. This is what happens when we take a name instead of allowing ourselves to be named. But a working title is temporary. It allows for flexibility. Freedom. To change. To move. To become.
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On the day I was born
all I once was, am
now, will be: working titles –
each a part of me