I talk about big apocalypses, but small ones are important too.
Leaving my ex and starting over? Brain surgery and the quality time I had to spend with my own mortality? Moving halfway across the country last year? Each of those was my world ending, my old self burning up. I have another little apocalypse planned before the new year: my wedding.
At least this time I'm looking forward to it, but it's hard to plan for something good while there's so much pain in the air. I'm not an empath in the new age sense of the word; I'm not psychic. I'm just a writer, and so when I hear about someone suffering, my first impulse is to put myself inside that feeling. Sometimes it gets to be too much, and I have to turn it off. Sometimes I want to turn it off, but my brain won't stop. But the world didn't stop when I was in pain, and I wouldn't have wanted it to.
I can't sit vigil tonight. I have to get up for work at 6am tomorrow. It's kind of a relief, because this year there's a whole lot of darkness, and not a lot of light to see us through. I suspect this is not the year you want to see the Hunt.
I lit a candle, but I'm all out of flamethrowers. I do my best, and I go on, and I tell myself that it's okay. That's how the world has always worked. We're like sharks; if we stop, we die. So I'll get married, because three weeks is totally enough time to plan a wedding, and because the idea of not spending the rest of my life with her hurts too.
To quote a movie I watched far too many times as a teenager, it can't rain all the time. Only the dead stay the same.
Tonight there's just one candle on my altar, waiting for the sunrise and the new cycle. Tomorrow I'll resume the regular devotionals. The long night passes, and we do whatever we can to find happiness. I've been pretty lucky, and pretty blessed, and I've also worked pretty hard to get here from where I was five years ago. I hope the next cycle shows us at our best.