The Sunday Letter, Part 5: Orbits
In the early summer of 2015, I rented a car and drove to the house of friends who lived north of Belleville, Ontario. Their house was about four hours away, and the first three hours (give or take) of the drive were always the worst: Hamilton to Ajax, four lanes of traffic, accidents and road work and all of those fun things. I made things exponentially worse by leaving on the Friday afternoon of a long weekend; what could on a good day be a four-hour drive (if you drove slightly above the speed limit and did not stop to pee) turned into a crawl along Lake Ontario.
The car that I had rented was a Fiat, which I had chosen because it was small and cute and fun to drive. The fun-to-drive-ness became markedly less so when I was stuck on the highway between transport trucks that felt so huge I could practically pass beneath the trailer bed; the fun-to-drive-ness disappeared completely when I reached Toronto and the gas light came on, telling me I had fifty kilometres left in the tank.
I was not a steady driver at that point in my life. I liked driving, but I hardly ever drove in the city. The thought of passing through multiple lanes of traffic to get to an exit and then find my way to a gas station almost made me have an anxiety attack right there in the car. At one point, while driving, I got stuck behind a car that had stalled in the middle of the highway for the better part of ten minutes; it was only once a car behind me wedged itself between two lanes and motioned me forward (bless you, wonderful stranger) that I found the courage to switch lanes. Switching lanes to get to the next exit, and from there find a gas station, felt impossible.
But it was either that or become the next person stuck in the middle of the highway, which was a disaster I was not prepared to face. So when signs for the exit for Avenue Road came up, I held my breath and made my way across the highway. I turned off that exit, found a side street, stopped the car, and looked up a gas station on my phone. Then I drove to that gas station, and filled up the car, and eventually I got back on the highway and made my way, long minutes later, to my friends’ place. It took me seven hours. I shook most of the way there.
Earlier this month, almost eight years to the day, I made the drive again. I was driving behind the wheel of a car that I owned and singing along to Trooper when I looked up, almost absentmindedly, and saw the exit for Avenue Road. It felt like looking at the ghost of myself—which, I suppose, it was.
Lately I’ve been thinking about tree time—about the ways that trees move so slowly and yet inexorably into the future. They burrow deep and stretch high and we spin around them, faster and faster every year. In the cemetery where Sitka and I go for our walks, there is a tree that was planted in honour of the coronation of King George, eighty-six years ago. It is beautiful and old and majestic now, and scattered all around it are the graves of so many thousands of people who burned bright and hot and gone in all those years that this tree was doing its same dance, every year, reaching up to the sky.
I think about tree time and I think about star time—about the way that our planet circles our star and the way that our star circles the Milky Way, and then about the way that the Milky Way itself, supposedly, is shooting outward from that burst of energy that started all of these shenanigans 13.8 billion years ago.
I think about orbits—about the way that grief is like orbiting a star, one where sometimes it can feel as though you are so far away from that first point of origin, only to then be brought face-to-face with it again when your orbit takes an unexpected, and yet entirely predictable, turn.
I think about how life is like this, too. How I drove past that exit sign for Avenue Road eight years after driving by it for the first time and all I could do was marvel at how much things had changed—at how vast a distance there seemed to be between the Amanda of then and the Amanda of now.
2015 was a difficult year. Probably, if I am honest, the most difficult year of my life. Losing Jess has and will always be its own unique kind of awful, but in 2015 I was mired in depression and heartbreak and couldn’t see a single way out.
It feels hard, saying this. I hesitate to talk about it. I struggle to find words for it, really. Being depressed was not harder than grief, except when it was. In grief there have been things for me to hold onto—love, memories, the knowledge that we had had the gift of each other in our lives, even if only temporarily.
But in the worst moments of depression there was nothing. In my worst moments of depression there was not even the conviction of love, the knowledge that anyone would miss me if I was no longer here. They’ll get over it, I remember saying to myself, and the distance between my self and the words felt like a galaxy. So far away as to be almost unimaginable. They’ll be sad for a little while, and then they’ll get over it. It won’t be that big of a deal.
During that long weekend at my friends’ place I remember lying awake one night in bed and hurting so much I thought I was dying. It did not seem possible, in that moment in time, to stay alive and hurt that much. Eventually I fell asleep, and the next morning the pain was still there but a little less so. It returned as I made the drive back down to Hamilton.
Circling the drain, another kind of orbit.
Sometimes when I think of orbits I also think of tree rings. They are not the same thing, of course, but they both measure time, and time is something that has a whole new meaning for me now in these years after loss. If you had told me, eight years ago, what lay in wait in the not-so-distant future, I think I would have snapped. I will not survive that, I might have said, and I might even have been right. I might not have survived that, then.
But the change that I spoke about five months ago (it’s been a minute, hasn’t it, my friends) was happening then, of course, and it continues to happen now. You don’t think you’ll be able to survive something until something happens and you do. You don’t realize you’ve put down roots until the storm comes and you don’t get knocked over. Every year that goes by another layer of life, another set of days where you’re adding to your trunk, making your base stronger even when you can’t see it.
I could not have imagined any of this back on that day in 2015, stuck and crawling along the eastbound 401. How the things that seem so huge to you in the moment do, with time and wind and other, larger griefs, soften into perspective. I could not see how the pain and the longing of those days would be mirrored in days that were to come, but also how the being with that pain and that longing would create new layers of strength, would give me an insight into my body and mind and heart that I wouldn’t have otherwise had. The other things that you pick up when you’re in orbit and you think you’re travelling away from grief, only to be brought spinning back to the centre of it all over again.
You were a sapling—you spin out into the universe and come back a giant oak.
Or maybe not a giant oak so much as…a slightly taller one, with a trunk you’ve grown to love and leaves you’re ready to let fall when the time comes.
I laughed when I drove by the Avenue Road exit earlier this month. Wow, I thought. Isn’t that amazing.
But the thing is—it wasn’t really amazing at all. Or maybe it was! It feels both magical and also mundane to me. I drove a car along a highway one year, and then a few years later, I did it again in a much healthier headspace. Voilà!
Not really magical, but also entirely magical. In the same way that trees are magical, and so are the stars. Because in those darkest of moments when I was lying in the guest room at my friends’ house, I did put something out in to the universe, some unspoken request.
Not this, please. I don’t know what else, but not this. And then I went back to my life, into being sad and giving up hope and trudging through each miserable day after the next. And not this slowly manifested into a life that ended up looking very different from the life I had wanted for myself in those summer days of 2015.
Spinning in orbit, growing layers as we go. I wanted a different life for myself then, and I didn’t know how to get it. I threw it out into the universe. Not this. I don’t want to be the anxious woman crawling down the highway forever, crying in the guest bed, lonely in a way that sits in the bones.
Not this. Not this. Not this.
At the time I thought I wanted a particular kind of life. I thought I was throwing that out into the world, manifesting that life in some way. But I wasn’t.
What I was doing: making my slow-tree way to understanding what I didn’t want to be, and in so doing, manifesting a life where I could be happy, even if only for moments at a time. A life that was mine. A life where the gravity that brought everything together was a gravity wholly of my own making.
Maybe even a life where future me could look back at the me of eight years ago and send thoughts and encouragement back through the universe, like light from distant stars. Like I have become the gravity that pulls me forward.
Hang on, my love. Hang on. We’re going to be okay.
Currently Reading: Real Life, by Sharon Salzberg
Currently Watching: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S2
Currently Eating: This Instagram Caponata, and also—from earlier in the week!—these Simple Cauliflower Tacos from Smitten Kitchen