Summer SAD

Carnival for One

Most people have holidays. I have a season. Nobody said it out loud, but the body knows the date the way it knows a name day, and by the time the lindens went over it was running without me.

Fifteen summers, maybe more.

I stopped counting, because counting is a form of hope. This year the carnival did not start. I want to write down what took its place.

The first thing was the light. Nobody warns you that light can be a lamp turned on you in a small room, that it can lean in and ask questions. By ten there is no shade in it to put your face.

Sleep goes first, then appetite, then patience - always that order, the exact reverse of December.

In December I got heavy. In July I get thin and loud inside. My heart keeps a tempo nobody set. A man can be on fire in a room where nothing is burning.

And this year I learned it has a name.

Summer-pattern seasonal affective disorder. Zero point five seven percent of people. Fewer than six in a thousand.

The winter kind takes five in a hundred and gets lamps, sympathy, a small industry of glowing boxes. Mine gets a footnote. There is a strange mercy in being told you are rare instead of difficult.

I had been carrying it as a character defect.

It turned out to be weather, and I had spent my whole life apologizing for the weather.

The street, meanwhile, is glad, and it is not a small gladness. It is a contract. Somebody asks why I did not come, and no answer exists that is not an insult or a diagnosis.

So this year I did not answer.

At eleven I closed the blinds and let them lay their measured stripes across the floor, and sat down inside those stripes like a man sitting inside sheet music. I put the needle down and let its own weight do the first second of the work - the sound of something allowed to fall with nobody catching it - and in a darkened room a piano is louder than a crowd. Rachmaninoff, mostly. A man told after one catastrophic night that he was finished, who wrote nothing for three years, then wrote the concerto the world knows and gave it to the doctor who sat with him in the dark.

It opens with chords everyone hears as bells, and from outside a church nobody can tell whether bells mean an ending or a beginning.

And then the dead came back. In fifteen years of noise I never once heard my mother's voice. Not once.

Noise does not let them in - there is no room in it. But in a dark room at two in the afternoon, with a record turning, she said my name the way she said it when I was small and had not yet done anything wrong. I sat there and let her.

She has been gone a long time, and this was the first July I could bear to have her in the room.

I had not been protecting myself from grief. I had been keeping her out. All that noise. All those years.

And she had been standing at the door the whole time.

I wrote. I have my own time - a sentence I could not have said in any other July.

Six weeks a year I am unfit for the party, and in exchange I get the only silence I ever get. I have not made peace with it. In August I will still stand at the window and hate the sun for something it did not do.

But there is a difference now.

It is small. It is everything. The season no longer starts the carnival. It does not start the pouring.

It does not start the taking of myself apart, patiently, on schedule, the way I had it down to a craft.

It does not start the hatred with my own face on it. It does not start the drowning of everything I feel until there is nothing left to feel with. It does not start the howling.

It does not start the running from silence. I do not run from the silence now. I sit down in it.

The silence was never the enemy.

It was the room where the rest of me had waited, for decades, with the light on, for a man who kept saying he would come tomorrow. Nobody claps for a list like that. No applause for the glass not poured, for the night not ruined, for the words not said at four in the morning to a face in the mirror I could not look at.

The best thing I have done with my life has no witnesses, no photographs, no anniversary. If you are reading this with your own blinds down, inside a gladness you cannot join - I will not tell you it passes. I will tell you something smaller and truer.

It can stop starting things.

And you do not have to sit in that dark alone; Rachmaninoff had his doctor. You are not difficult. Let the quiet in, and you may find out who has been waiting at your door. The season no longer starts anything, because I no longer finish what it starts.

It only passes.

And when it has gone, I am still here. Built in silence, at home, held in my own arms. Tender toward my own thoughts, which for forty years I spoke to the way a bad father speaks to a child.

Forgiving myself - two words that cost me everything I had. There was an afternoon in the stripes when I cried and could not have told you why. It was not the old crying, the kind that wants something.

It was the kind that puts something down.

Fitting together the puzzle of my own life on a table where I finally have room. Glad to be alive, a phrase I did not use before this year. Reading thousands of pages, because a man who has stopped running must put his hands somewhere. Writing my own book.

Letting go of forcing myself on people who have forgotten me - not freedom yet, it still bleeds when the weather changes.

I have stopped knocking. I have not stopped leaving the light on. The light is not a demand.

It costs nothing to keep burning, and it says the one thing I am still allowed to say: this door was never locked from my side. This morning I opened the blinds an inch before I meant to. The light came in and lay across the floor and did not ask me anything.

It was only light.

It was only morning. It was only July. And I stood in it a while, in my own house, in my own silence, in my own life, and let it fall on me the way the needle falls on the record - all its weight, no hand, nothing catching it, nothing needing to. It was the first July of my life.

I am not young.

It was still the first.

Maybe the life of the party was never the lion the horoscope promised, only a man sitting with his back to the door so he would not hear someone calling his name…