The One Last Crack

It’s 3 p.m. on the Sunday of Day Light Savings, and the sky is as bright as ever.

Earlier this week, I woke up in the middle of the night with the stomach bug. I can’t remember the last time I had the stomach bug, and the experience served as a clear reminder of how horrible it feels.

I kept thinking about one of the nuns who I used to sit across from at Mass. Every time we’d get to the intersessions she’d say: “Let’s pray for the sick and the suffering.” It wasn’t until I was lying awake that night, my head propped up on three pillows, watching out my window as morning approached, that I realized the importance of her words. It can be so distracting and debilitating to have your body turn on you. She knew that. Her prayer would catch me in my pained yet temporary state, just as it had caught and will continue to catch everyone else. 

A few weeks ago, while I waited for the red line, with train after train flying by at capacity, I read this article on my phone. It’s about winter. In it, the Jessica Mesman Griffith talks about moving to South Bend, Ind. and then to Traverse City, Mich., cities with very different winter temperaments than the places she’d lived before. She did what many New Englanders have done in the past month: She tried to make the best of it with snowshoes, hot chocolate, and moisturizing cream. And yet, by the end, winter still had a way of ruining her.

She writes:

Now that I’m a hardened northerner, I know that winter isn’t a time to thrive. It’s a time to buy a light therapy box, take massive amounts of vitamin D and get on antidepressants… As my neighbor says, There’s no way out but through. And sometimes going through just isn’t pretty. Sometimes you crawl to the finish.
Sometimes, winter breaks us. And maybe that’s okay.
 

The morning after my stomach bug, I woke up and did not go to work. I fell back asleep for an hour and then gathered enough strength to walk to CVS, purchase three bottles of ginger ale and a box of saltines, and walk home. I spent the rest of the day helpless, sipping water from a green mug and watching reruns of Girls. After weeks of admiring snowflakes, befriending shoveling neighbors, and attempting to harness inner gratitude over early morning cups of coffee, I too had cracked. And maybe, as Griffith suggests, the cracking is okay. Maybe winter wants us to endure its sharp, brief pain. Maybe it's what we need to feel new again.