January
Something about January — it’s the month that knows it’s a beginning, and isn’t embarrassed about it.
January || New Year || Alex || Change
January had a quality I hadn’t experienced in previous Januarys, which was the quality of a beginning that was actually a beginning rather than a continuation of what came before. Previous Januarys had been the same year continuing, just colder. This January was different in the cellular way — I moved through it differently, noticed different things, had a different relationship to my own presence in a room. I still had the notebooks. I still had the debate frameworks and the argument structures and the organized intelligence that was genuinely and not defensively who I was. But the index cards were different. The third card was different. It said, now, simply: Tell the truth. The rest takes care of itself. I had written this on New Year’s Day and had, so far, found it accurate.
I went to coffee with Jamie on a Saturday in the second week of January. Not the library, not a practice session — an actual deliberate coffee at a place that Jamie chose, in the northeast part of the city where neither of us usually went, a small place with exposed brick and plants hanging from the ceiling and a barista who recognized Jamie and asked about their mom. We sat at a corner table and talked for three hours without mentioning debate once, which was the first time we had been together for a significant period without debate being at the center. We talked about everything else — about music, about books (we had both read the same three things, which required significant discussion), about Portland and what we each loved about it and what we found difficult, about Dean at Reed and what college might look like, about Priya and Zara who were now definitely something, about Abuela Elena and what she had told me, which I shared the parts of that were shareable. Jamie listened with the full attention. “Catalina,” they said, softly, when I’d finished the relevant parts. “The woman in the photograph.” “Yes,” I said. “Your grandmother has been carrying that love her whole life,” Jamie said. “As grief and as memory.” “Yes,” I said. “And she’s telling you not to do the same,” they said. “Not to love something in secret until it becomes grief.” “Yes,” I said. Jamie looked at me. The plants hung above us. The barista made something for someone and the machine was loud for a moment and then quiet again. “For the record,” Jamie said carefully. “What’s happening here — between us — I’m not going anywhere. I’m not — this isn’t something you need to manage or worry about ruining. I just want you to know that. Whatever pace you need.” I looked at them. At the face that had become, over four months of Tuesdays and Thursdays and this one Saturday, the most familiar face in my life outside my family. “I know,” I said. “Thank you.” “You don’t have to thank me,” they said. “I know,” I said. “I want to anyway.” They smiled. We stayed until the coffee place closed in the late afternoon, and walked out into the January cold, and stood on the sidewalk for a moment before heading in our separate directions. “Same time next Saturday?” Jamie said. “Yes,” I said. They turned north. I turned south. I walked home in the cold with the specific feeling of someone who is beginning something good — not the dramatic beginning of movies, not the lightning-bolt beginning, but the better kind. The kind that felt like morning light arriving gradually, then completely, in a room you have been in the dark of for a long time.