What do I do?

The world is burning, the world won't stop spinning, the bills are still coming, life is still passing.

(Scottish gorse. Love, no matter the season in Victorian flower language.)

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What do I do? What do we do?

Do I have anything new to say? Surely not. It has all been said before. Nothing about this is new.

There is no right way for me to write this letter, or for you to get groceries, or tuck your kids in, or book a plane ticket to Minneapolis, or hug your mother, or cry in the shower, or get down on one knee, or name a puppy. There is no right way to laugh. There is no right way to let the juice of an apple run down your chin.

And yet, I write and you read and we are still here.

For now, we are still here.

We are still naming puppies and telling stories and chasing love—the way we must! If the world were fair, it would stop spinning while the unbridled cruelty infected everything with a heart. We could stop and focus everything on getting to the part when they lose. But for most of us, the world is still spinning even if it is screeching to a halt for bloody knee’d folks in unmarked vans and the victims of cowards—for everyone who loves someone they cannot find.

It will never be fair and it will never make sense.

So, instead of trying to offer you something radical and brilliant and wise, I think I will go on with my life with the windows wide open because I am still here spinning, and I will hope that you might take from me something helpful. A significant part of my job is to twist all the good out of the sour fruit of my life and add the sugar–to prove something big or magical or honest can be done when things feel impossible.

So, I will try.

Know I hold it all in the middle of my chest, too. Know that I do not wake up or fall asleep or do anything in between without the (rage/fear/grief/exhaustion/energy/sadness/fire/disbelief/belief/need/guilt) rattling my ribs, too. But this is my job, and I am still working in all of my unconventional ways that I built so little hopes could find their homes in the lives of the folks watching along when hope is in short supply. Certainly, hope is in short supply.

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Soon after you’ve received this, I expect you will receive a second visit from me telling you the truth of the last four years and the state of me in the wake of their defining event.

My best friends left me. It is not a secret. Of everything I have ever spoken about openly, friendship breakups have evoked an echo of the most primal and howling recognition. Seldom spoken of, nearly universal. Mine blew my life apart.

Good things grew from the wreckage.

Even so, four years without them, and I am still a ghost of who I was when they loved me. (empty/hollow/tired/small/confused/unsure/flinching/afraid/bereft/invisible)

So, I’ve decided it’s time just one more time.

I’m going to force myself into it. I’m going to choose to fill my days with living. (vibrancy/chance/want/feast/fear/risk/leaps/falls/color/light/touch/trying/endless/full/free)

I am scared to do so, but if I get very lucky, everything that comes next might bring the best parts of me back to life.

(All the while, I will be alongside you, watching with the feeling in my chest rattling my ribs. All the while, I will do what I can.)

I am back in Scotland where it began—where I ran when everything ended—and I think a chapter is closing.

But I am writing another.

(If it adds to the good, I hope you’ll read along.)

Write soon,

Devrie

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Don’t forget to participate in the General Strike on Friday, January 30th if you can!

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