2022 New Year’s Obit

…temporarily dissolved. After feeling surreal for so long, it is what naturally happens to a person, so it happened to her. It wasn’t a “there one minute, gone the next” kind of deal. No, she was there in the world and she changed things, things kept changing around her, and things changed in her until she was gone. Some who claim to be eye witness to the final dissolution say that the last feature to go was her nose, ironically, since she had still felt like her sense of smell was not fully recovered.

The cause of her unreality? Her marriage had ended, amicably and painfully. She was living alone for the first time in her life. She had experienced job losses and gains, settling into a “normal 9 to 5” that recently insisted on making changes with its profit from recent good fortune or mass illness, depending on who you asked.

While dissolving slowly into the world’s solvent and becoming a new form, certain parts of her self began clearly solidifying counter-intuitively. They were parts that had been there all along but that she had been unable to register.

It is a complicated process to dissolve oneself. And it is a process to be sincerely and respectfully mourned; however, no funeral was held. No wake. No ceremony.

There was a service announcement which read as follows:

To all beings, young and old: Please take multiple moments to consider your molecules. Parts of yourselves have been hidden, looked over, or denied. Please search for where you are dissolving. Note these pieces and parts. If you find that there are challenges to your solubility, please speak to a chemist or licensed therapist.

The dissolved’s family felt comfortable with the lack of fanfare because of what would happen next. For once there is a full dissolution, the person in question begins reconstituting. One by one. Piece by piece. The new solutions will be collected and named. The molecules and spaces between will form anew. And the individual will be reconstructed with the same parts mostly but with a new knowledge of all.

The temporarily dissolved had believed her hands would be the first to return. They were what massaged her aching muscles and rubbed the lotion into her dry skin. They cleaned her and massaged her scalp with the tips of their fingers. They washed the dishes and clothes and prepared food for her.

They also revealed a permanence of her life: scars from childhood experiments, black rectangles and squares faded, in the shape of a heart, and discomfort from it all, the good and the bad alike.

On New Year’s Eve, the day of her final dissolution, 667 persons from her state were reported to have left their forms permanently due to the ongoing pandemic.

While she knew they were no longer bothered by the weight of their molecules, she knew the ones they left behind would be more dissolved than the day before. Continuing or beginning the painful process of homeostasis or reconstitution anew.

In her way, she prayed for them.

Her parents, the eye witnesses to her final disappearance (of nose, they claim) continued to ring in the new year, knowing their daughter was still with them.

Her mother, feeling the creative spirit in the wee minutes of the new year, recited an original poem, catalogued here per the family’s wishes.

2022

start brand new

what are we gonna do?

Well put.

Now on to 2022.