Januarys

Beach in January. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed Under CC0 4.0 . Every December day that I’m in Maine I swim in the ocean and my husband tells me I’m insane. The temperature keeps dropping. I get two respiratory infections, a twenty-four-hour stomach thing. Why? he says to me. Mom , the children say. They have only recently transitioned me to Mom from Mommy, and every time they say it my breath catches. Their dad’s Cuban and I’ve tried to convince them to transition me to Mami. It’s Spanish! I say. You’re white, Mom, they say. You know, Mom, our younger kid says, beating yourself up isn’t a hobby. I’m preparing, I tell them. For what? they say. For January. The first January we live in Maine, the twenty-second month of the pandemic: we’re all so tired and almost everyone I know in New York is sick. My job has gone remote and I get up each morning to work when it’s still dark. I turn on the small space heater in my office and wrap a big blanket around myself, sit with my computer on my lap. Evening comes, and I text my friend five minutes before I teach at seven. I’ve been at my desk for fourteen hours but can’t think of a single thing I’ve done. What if I hate teaching now? I say. Babe, my friend texts back, it’s January. You hate everything. The Januarys in high school are all track—all the early Januarys are in Florida and the monotony of those sunny, plastic, clear and cloudless days comes to feel like it’s assaulting me. I run four events at least. The two-mile is the longest, and the last race of the day. Late nights on the bus, the too-big jacket and sweatpants, crumbled rubber on bare thighs while I sit and stretch with my Discman, bile in my throat at the start; everybody cheers when I win, no one after talks to me. The first January in New York, alone, on Tenth Street between C and D, I’m twenty-one. I call in sick to […]

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