There was a time in this life when I was heartily convinced that January was the cruelest of months. Incidentally, this notion was carried with me primarily across the dusty domain of Southern California, where the cruelest measure January is capable of enacting is a well-meaning rain storm.  

I am officially changing my January stance.  August now appears the cruelest month. While it has not delivered up its famously oppressive cocktail of heat and humidity (yet), it has brought to me a bout of sadness that strikes me heavily at least once daily.  Sometimes it is the standard wave of nausea and sometimes it is the tossing and turning all night and sometimes it is both.  Or something else entirely. Being a person well versed in the sadness, it isn’t anything I have not dealt with and even embraced many times in the past.  I think I just don’t want it right now.  Come winter will I be healthy and whole yet confined to the artificially heated interior?

August is also the month preceding that of my birth, allowing me plenty of time to obsess about all of the things I have done and done wrong over the course of what was meant to be my golden year.  Hindsight, I hope I will raise a glass to you.  Once I put some footsteps between now and the now to come, maybe I will view this as an amazing time.  Lately I think about all the vegetables I left in the refrigerator of the apartment in Brooklyn, wondering whether Dom threw them in the trash shortly after my hasty departure or if they might still be in there, rotting away.