Anni Horribiles

Why are the last few months of the year always the hardest? Why do hard years seem to beget even harder ones?

A snowy New Year’s Day in Lincoln Park, 2022

The holidays are hard in the same way all the hardest things are hard. It’s the lack of something everyone else has, or maybe just the fear that you lack something you suspect everyone else has. Everyone else is going home for Christmas. Everyone else has a comfortable, functional, familiar place to return to. Everyone else feels perfectly content and unafraid of the future, which allows them to enjoy the holiday season and feel fully at peace. Why does the most terrifying election in American history have to happen in November? It must be for the same reason major military offenses happen during the Super Bowl and ceasefires are called right before Black Friday. And I have to admit, the fanfare is working on me. It’s the first time in years I’ve cared this much about Christmas. I have to care about Christmas. I fear what might become of me if I wasn’t so preoccupied with caring about Christmas.

And it’s the memories, the people you’ve spent these days with in past years, including past versions of you. The added layer of the worst trauma of my life happening in the fall and winter makes it even harder. From Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay: “Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days.” It is a wound that is routinely pressed. The predictability of it does nothing to salve it.

I love Lincoln Park. I could never live there — too many straight white people always walking their dogs and pushing strollers — but lately I’ve taken up miles-long walks starting somewhere on Clark Street and ending on Michigan Avenue to bask in the luxury retail holiday extravagance. The first time I walked Clark Street was the end of 2021 going into 2022, the tailspin of that great emotional wreck of my life. So, naturally, I can’t stay away and it hurts when I arrive. I get off the bus, get a coffee at the same coffee shop he and I once went to (it’s become one of my favorites), thread myself through the neighborhood, the zoo, the park that once was a cemetery, hugging myself and looking all around. I walk like a ghost through her old house, believing this last day of her life is still somewhere in the middle, an accidental act of defiance which says, Hey, I still live here, it hasn’t happened yet.

On my most recent walk, I considered a word I’ve come to really loathe: limerence. It’s one of the many pop psychology buzzwords that make universal human experiences sound perverse and, most importantly, in need of correction. The way limerence is talked about on TikTok makes it seem as though nostalgia and grief belong in the DSM. Actually, I learned from an episode of Binchtopia that there is something called Prolonged Grief Disorder in the DSM — if a person suffers distressing symptoms of grief for longer than 12 months (ha), they have a diagnosable mental disorder.

And so, I walked past the hotel he and I stayed at on New Year’s Eve for the first time nearly three years later, because it took me that long to gain the courage to see that street again and in all that time, the morbid desire to revisit had never wavered. And as I stood outside and saw a few other couples walking by, pulling suitcases out of the trunk of an Uber, and I looked up at the blue door (Just like in Notting Hill. Was it always blue?), I considered why we are so obsessed with cutting our past out of ourselves for the sake of this so-called moving on. They say we obsess because it helps us avoid dealing with the present reality, and that it helps us keep people in our lives after they’re gone. And I don’t think my experience can accurately be described as obsessing, because to obsess feels so much like something you do, whereas something is being done to me. Or, the truth of the matter: something was done to me that will always remain done.