The Lost Year
My world has gotten so small.
In some sense, we all lost a year; but we didn’t all lose the same year.* The high school seniors didn’t lose the same year as the infants who know nothing of all the chaos. The empty-nesters didn’t lose the same year as the great-grandparents in the twilight of their lives. There are things in life that happen in rapidly-closing windows, and not all of us are in one of those windows.
I didn’t think I was. I’m in the smushy years of early adulthood. Pre-2020, this felt like the first time in my life where one year didn’t make a difference. Did I finish that work project this year or last? Who knows! Now every year is the same until I retire!
But I was wrong; I’ve been robbed of a year.
It turns out I am living in a closing window: my childless years. The few years my husband and I have set aside for the purpose of a childfree adult existence. I can’t bank them and redeem them later, and we can only push off our plans for so long before biology comes knocking. Sure, empty-nesting sounds like a lovely thing to look forward to; but from my vantage point it seems an entirely different brand of childfree adult existence, hemmed in by our future child’s mild early-adulthood disasters, retirement planning, and mysterious back pains that just won’t quit.
It’s a stain on my character that I feel so indignant; it’s petty and whiny. I look at the “good” and “bad” columns on the last 12 months, and it seems I’ve come out ahead —
Jobs: kept, from the comfort of our home
Health: mercifully maintained (though we could really use visits to the dentist)
House: purchased, worked on, and sufficient for all our needs
Husband: the best possible person to spend every waking moment with
Family: mostly unscathed (though increasingly distant)
So I sit, staring at a wall, telling myself over and over: Alyssa, there are people sick, dying, evicted, alone. But the drumbeat of my anxieties persists: I am running out of time.
Because the clock started after college.
Three years to his grad school: not wasted, but not fully taken advantage of. A unique little window of broke newlywed life that confers the privilege of “Oh, honey, do you remember when we — ?” at dinner parties a few years down the road. Window closed.
One year to getting settled in our new life: two jobs found, a house saved for, a mortgage acquired, emergency fund established, retirement accounts set up. Checkmarks all the way down, proud of our early-adulthood successes. Window closed.
Next up was 4-6 years of projects, hobbies, and traveling. Leisurely weekend brunches, accumulating airline miles, popping back into out hometown to say hi to our parents and be the cool aunt and uncle.
It was like packing for a trip and then getting stranded on the tarmac.
I was supposed to be somewhere, doing something. I was meant to bank another few precious memories, cross a few items off the bucket list, revel in the shrinking window of travel sans-stroller, date nights sans-babysitters. I was planning to build a friend group, explore my new home, plug into a few local volunteer organizations.
Instead, I lost a year, and my world shrank to a quarter of an acre in northern Alabama. My social circle is a line: me and him.
I never managed to be a productive-pandemic person. I spent the year trying to keep my head above the rising waters of my depression, wandering circles around our house. I didn’t learn a language or discover a talent (though I did start this blog and master roasting chicken, so at least there’s that). I doomscrolled through a spring of new pandemic information, then a summer of protests, then a fall of political mayhem; I put my phone down and sat quietly through the loneliest winter of my life. I failed at starting a garden, took a breather, tried again. We jumped my husband’s truck 5 times, because we kept losing track of time and forgetting to drive it around the block.
And I wonder, if when this is all over, I really will have lost a year. Whether from mundanity or depression, the last twelve months have been a blur. I normally have what I consider to be above-average autobiographical memory; but in long stretches of depression, I have just impressions of my life alongside things I know factually to be true. I’m missing several months of 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015, and 2017. In the place of clear memories I have journal entries, old Tumblr posts, and photos proving that I was, in fact, living my life.
I wonder if when the dust settles, I won’t fully remember 2020. Maybe that would be okay.
*I am putting aside for a moment the reality that some people did not lose a year because they simply refused to participate in the group-effort of ending a pandemic. I don’t have the energy for that rage today… or maybe ever.
