Sad

I stayed up all night watching a series called “One Day” on Netflix. I became suddenly overwhelmed earlier today. I haven’t felt this alone since the Covid shutdown. It’s not that I feel hopeless. I can still feel hope inside of me lodged somewhere behind my bellybutton but it refuses to come out and play. It’s standing stoically in my life like a member of a chorus who refuses to sing. It isn’t even mouthing the words. I’m alway really good at noticing joy and goodness but right now I am full of sad. Sad not sadness. It’s different. It’s heavier than sadness but also misty and less substantial. This makes no sense in real life but nonetheless here it is. It does makes sense the way things make sense in dreams — ridiculous but illogically logical. I’m worried about Medicaid no longer paying for my mother’s memory center facility. I’m worried about my Social Security checks stopping. I’m having difficulty seeing further than here and now, which feels as if I’ve been served a Zen existence I did not select from a dim sum menu. I know I’ll be okay. I also know I need to be sad for a time. My postmenopausal larger-than-before tummy is heroically standing in as the thing that is upsetting me the most, but of course it’s not that. It’s the cruelty that’s breaking my heart, both the blind cruelty and the wide-eyed version too. I will walk and cook and sing and write and dance and drink in stories from pages and screens to nourish my specks of hope. I will do my part to help others to hope and to resist. But just for now I will be sad because sad is where I am, and now more than ever truth is everything.

Cinse Bonino
2025