Two days late

 My brain is a mess of holes now. I can't remember stuff, even anniversaries I once marked. (This is a thing to bring up at counseling today: could I somehow have damaged my brain, could I have some kind of organic illness, or is this just happening to lots of people?)

Like: my blogiversary was the 26th or so of January, and I just forgot it. (been writing this thing 19 years now. Not that I've been very interesting of late).

And I forgot the February 2 tradition (for St. Brigid, or for Candlemass, or for the groundhog) of posting a poem. I thought of it a couple days before the day and never picked out a poem. 

I tried to come up with a good one, something full of wisdom and joy, but this is what keeps coming back to mind. Entirely possible I've shared it before, but whatever:

One Art

Elizabeth Bishop - 1911-1979

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

Yes. These past couple years have been years of loss. And while (What I assume is the point of the poem), I have not lost the love of my life, I have lost a lot: some of the comfort circulating in the world I had built up; some of the trust and love of my fellow human, hard-won after the childhood/teenager hood I had with my peers. I've lost the easy ability to go out into the world and do things (we all have, unless we are taking far fewer precautions than I am). I've lost numerous friends (to death, to moving away and moving on with their lives). I've lost a few loved ones. I've lost shops I liked to buy from. And I expect to lose more, is the hell of it. I wonder if that's when you truly begin to grow old: when you realize you will be facing far more goodbyes than hellos from now on. 

I am not good at losing. I don't like losing things; I tend to treasure the things I have and want to take care of them. I am really not good at losing people; they tend to crop up in my memory and it hurts all over again. I don't like losing places, either: I will probably never go back to where I grew up, or go back to where my grandmothers (either one) lived. I may, for that matter, never go back to Illinois because WHO KNOWS?

And yes,, as Bishop says, it is not to be treated as a disaster. But I find it hard, in my currently-restricted reality, not to let those things weigh painfully on me.