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I heard a rumour.

I heard it while I was turning on the TV yesterday to stream an episode of The Durrells, my latest lockdown binge. Before I could click on ABC iView, the news flashed on and I heard the anchor mention that we could still be in lockdown through Christmas.

My insides collapsed, imagining all the life that should be happening between now and then: dinners, Halloween, birthdays, the ballet, Phantom of the Opera at the Opera House, school, the Friendsgiving I was hoping to make an annual event, a holiday on the west coast. Now it’s all cancelled, up in the air, or waiting to be cancelled. This was not supposed to happen–we were nearly back to normal here.

Tomorrow (I’m writing this on Wednesday) I’ll be celebrating my birthday with a rescheduled mammogram, getting my boobs pancaked in a machine. It’s unlikely we’ll get to do the camping trip Little Brother envisions for his birthday. This all sucks, and there are only so many ways to write about it before I just want to give up and lose myself in Netflix.

To avoid this turning into a “Count Your Blessings” post (ugh), let me share that Little Brother, and now by extension The Kid, has gotten obsessed with a 12+ game on his iPad that involves animatronics coming to life and jump-scaring people. It’s awful and I hate it but when I tell you he loves it…I mean, it makes him come to life. He and TK are connecting all the plushies (stuffed animals, if you’re American) associated with the game and they play it with The Husband every night.

“Do you like how it makes you a bit scared?” I asked him, and he grinned and said yes. I can relate. There is a deliciousness to the kind of scary that knows there is distance between us and the cause of our fear. That we are ultimately safe. There is fun in thrills. For my part, I began listening to a podcast about hauntings over the weekend and I’ve been watching a Spanish TV show about ghosts on a cruise ship, just to mix up the wholesomeness of The Durrells.

Beyond the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, one-day-at-a-time kind of existence in which we’re enmeshed right now, though, the world itself is scary enough. We live in a country in which each death is mentioned on the news, which in a way is comforting (that there aren’t so many they’re all just lumped together), but in another way hits closer to home in the details. We have the promise of spring around the corner with little of the hope usually attached to it. We are all, in one way or another, at the ends of our ropes and ourselves. This form of living is not sustainable. It doesn’t even feel like life.

But. Today while running, I saw an acquaintance across the wharf and we waved, and that did feel like life. And, later, I sat on the deck and, with Kevin the Dog, watched the boys play basketball, and that felt like life too. Tomorrow I’ll eat cake and drink my favourite champagne, and this weekend we’ll do a virtual escape room with friends and if that’s what passes for a birthday celebration these days, then I trust there will be life in it too. I’m learning new things about my kids and myself and the world (book list forthcoming if I feel like it).

I never thought the road home–the story of my life–would take me to New York. Through autism and depression and anxiety, through a faith de- and reconstructed, through Atlanta and away from the family I grew up with to my own family of four in Sydney. Through a worldwide pandemic and repeated lockdowns. But that’s what forty-four years have been made of so far.

Forty-four. Now that’s scary. But also? It feels like life. Funny how those two things often show up together.