Your dad always said the anticipation was worse than the experience. Actually, he quoted Shakespeare, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.” You understood what he meant, but never could change yourself.

In this case, the beginning of the semester proved much less stressful than its potential. The build-up of planning, changes in plans, adjustment of plans, confusing schedules, anxiety about woker-than-thou students all smoothed as the small size of each class meeting, of each grading batch, became a reduced reality, not a quadrupled nightmare. As for the woker-than-thou students, once you began talking, you realized just how balls-to-the-wall, grown-up, been-there-done-that, forgot-more-than-they-have-yet-learned you actually are. Goddamn, that felt strong! Two weeks down.

On the first day back, too, you returned home to the Eminent Historian and his visiting daughter commemorating your year of sobriety. They had a small cake, a card, Elderflower and Rose Lemonade soft drinks, and a year chip on order. As the young folks say, you felt “seen.”

Still, everyday you feel yourself on a rollercoaster of emotion, especially of the last month. Partly you feel a cellular-level memory of Dad’s death, a pocket of pure grief, guilt, and regret. You feel, too, your mother slipping. You can’t go see her. You fear that you will turn on the television and see your brother among the militia, and you feel somehow responsible for that. You feel like a Puritan: inherently depraved, and you feel hopelessly sad. The changing seasons feels less a relief, as it always has, and more a sense of time passing too quickly. You feel as if you are trying to hold water.

You try to ride the depression, as if you would a roller coaster. You used to say “float in the feeling” to yourself, but riding it feels more appropriate these days. Riding is forward, right? Yet, you can’t really see much to hope for. You can’t really see a future. Next month seems like a possibility, next year a fantasy, beyond that? An impossibility. Or perhaps this year has been so horrible that you don’t want to think about a future for fear that it could be worse.

Now that the intensity of anticipating the semester has relented, you at least find your ability to find moments of appreciation here and there. The children next door putting out their Halloween decorations and creating imaginary friends from the blow up creatures, or the little girl having a picnic amid the witch and skeleton parts scattered about the Styrofoam headstones. The old-timey feeling of listening to a webcast of a play reading while spinning. The genuine sweetness of the Eminent Historian and his daughter, together and individually. A walk on the canal and forgetting everything but that for a minute. A puzzle.

The future makes you miserable. So does the past. Before, you have rejected hope as a false and painful god. Yet, you still had it. Now, you wonder. What is hope? A thing for younger people, you thing. How do you act without it when you aren’t ready to die?

You suppose you are finding out. For one, you aren’t getting drunk!