Every goddamn year.

Aoife O'Riordan

Bloody hell. All day long, and it’s only now I’ve realised that it’s February 23rd.

It’s been a long time. This day always feels strange. Is there a time when you should stop pointing these things out every year? Or is it more right to keep on saying that it’s horrible, and it’s not okay?

But I had a wonderful day today. I have the day off. Woke up when I woke, lazy breakfast, worked on some derby stuff before taking the train into town for a haircut and a potter around some shops. I’m sitting in my favourite cafe with my favourite kind of tea, and life is bloody good right now.

I guess, when it’s someone your own age, then it doesn’t get better in the same way that these things normally eventually do, cause every thing you get to do is yet another something that they should have had. Every part of my life that I get to experience is yet another piece that you missed out on. I’ve been an adult for over a decade and I still feel like I’m just beginning to get the hang of it and find a bit of perspective.

It is the perspective that gets you though, isn’t it? You can tell someone that things change as many times as you like. It’s nothing on having memories of crying in the bath every morning for months followed by falling in love followed by losing your job followed by discovery and freedom and trapping yourself again and getting out again and breaking your heart a dozen times and winters that feel like they could never end and springs that feel like coming alive again. You can’t tell anyone that that’s real, that’s how it is, that there are ways through depression that feels impossible, and that even within it there are moments that are worth every goddamn bit of it.

But I wonder if I’ll ever stop fantasising, Christmas Carol-style, about showing you how goddamn long and interesting and changeable life can be.

I wrote this one years ago now. Too many goddamn years you’ll never have.

But.. at the very least, I guess I can say thank you for one thing. Thank you for being the reason that, no matter how bad things have ever gotten, what you chose is utterly unthinkable to me. It’s not much and it sure as fuck isn’t worth it and I’d really rather have understood that any other way. But it’s a real thing.

That’s all I’ve got.

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Every goddamn year.

About the author

Aoife is located in a small town in Ireland, and she won't let you forget it. She gets paid to teach, but will default to roller derby and social theory if given half a chance. She's quite likely (but not guaranteed) to be writing about: feminism, queerness, wheelyshoes, Ireland, what she cooked last week, or any combination of the above. She will tell you how to pronounce her name, but only if you ask very nicely.
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3 thoughts on “Every goddamn year.”

  2. Ronja Addams-Moring
    Reply
    2

    This year it was 31 years, and I actually did not notice February 23rd … or was it the 25th? I think it was the 23rd, but I’m no more sure. It’s simultaneously calming and unsettling to forget the exact date, which I remember used to feel like it had been stamped onto the inside of my skull forever.

    [TW: abusive childhood] I don’t miss my father. At all. He was big, violent and hella scary and I had been half expecting him to kill all of us since I was 12 or 14 — unless I figured out a way to kill him first. But I never managed, and in the end he chose only to take his own life. And yes, he is the reason that, no matter how bad things have ever gotten, what he chose is utterly unthinkable to me. How can something that set me free also feel so sordidly pointless?

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