Wallowing in the Soft Year, 2024

I recently discovered the term “soft year.” Soft life, soft months, it is the act of shirking the day-to-day woes in an attempt to create a more leisurely, joyful existence for oneself. I’ve thought a great deal about the soft year. This was my thirtieth trip around the sun—hold the applause—one that I initially dreaded. Those gray hairs start showing in your beard and you inherently start adopting traits that remind you of your parents, like becoming easily annoyed in a coffee line or intaking too much news and having grumbling opinions about things. The more I’ve sat with the notion of a soft year the more I believe it is not merely the rejection of unpleasantness in hopes to create a cocoon for yourself, but merely that there are years where you must be soft with yourself.

It's so easy to get lost in the celebration of the lives that we see from a screen. The celebration of those who rise at 5 to run five miles and have already done a multi-step skincare routine and a green juice before you’ve fumbled your sleep mask off your eyes. Sometimes the act of pushing that sleep mask off and making it to the edge of the bed to sigh and pray for a shred of strength to touch the floor is enough. It is a softness to oneself to not get too down when you haven’t done your jumping jacks, but you did make a fresh pot of coffee and made it out the front door on time.

Thirty was a year I dreaded, and as it wraps up in a strange but acceptable package, the successes are trivial ones. Firstly, I made it to the finish line. Here in North Carolina, we were recently visited by an unsuspected wrist-twist of God. Hurricane Helene swept through our mountains as if she were ripping and crawling her way out of our valleys in a panic or desperation. In her wake was a devastation that these hills have not seen in recent history. Homes, people, livelihoods, swept away like the rolling up of a tablecloth after a raucous party. Your neighbors are suddenly knee deep in muck as they try to make sense of their lives and what it is to be alive now when so many didn’t survive. So, surviving…here’s to that crucial success, and we pray for those who didn’t, and those who are surviving and grappling with this uncertain aftermath.

I’ve tried to think of a singular story that would sum up this year and the lessons I’ve learned; as I said, the successes were trivial. There’s no story that stands alone that speaks to any sort of wrinkle on the brain that is more profound than any other I’ve had. What I’ve learned, I suppose, is that it is ok to wallow in a soft year. A year that at its end resembles a well-read copy of The Wind in the Willows. It was a year of sweeping one’s trenches; making a burrow for oneself in a world that is reckless and ugly. The story of this year is dancing under neon signs and loving the love that you have for your girlfriends in cowboy boots and expensive beers as you ring in a new decade. It’s a year of watching life-long friends become mothers…suddenly you’re at a bar and you’re not hoisting her onto the counter to dance, but she’s hoisting her toddler to your face and asking if she’s had a poop? And wilder still, you just oblige it. Cradling a cocktail, you just sniff and say, “Nah, she’s good,” and you smile that sometimes life doesn’t have to break stride.

It was a year that felt somewhat serious at the cadence of sighs when you walked daily through the door and there was no masculine greeting of “How was your day?” He doesn’t meet you with a glass of wine as you shrug out of your coat and it’s a mangled mass of sherpa and keys and loafers by the front door as you massage your wrists and wonder if you’ll ever hear that greeting again outside of your own mind. You walk to the kitchen and you make your own wine and sigh again into the quiet. You read…a fucking lot and its only because you can’t take much more screen time—Mom has just come to the realization that it might give me cancer or an educational relapse of some sort and inquires occasionally on if my screen time is up or down.

Thirty, for me, has been like, my god I am young….I mean, you look at the span of a proper well-lived life (my grandmother is turning 100 this coming year) and you’re like….I have to do this AGAIN, again, and again for what, seventy more years if the bloodline holds true or the world doesn’t eat itself from within? And at the same time...it feels like I’m out of time. That I started too late. That traversing cities and falling in love every other night in the dim light of a cupboard bar was a lesser life. I wonder so often if I should have found a good, plain, corn-fed boy in town that was out or had a toe out of the closet and maybe we should or could have settled down. We could have made soaps, or essential oils, or he’d be a football coach and I’d get my toenails painted my old high-school colors and scream in the stands on a Friday night. You come back from the cities and those steamy little cupboard romances, and all the local gays have been scooped up and are now opening up their relationships and you’re like, good for them but…fuck I should have started a soap company.

But you don’t, and in your heart you don’t want that and you never did, but you feel like you should. You want love, but you don’t want to settle for it again. I can count my great loves on one hand and in some way I settled for each and every one of them. Because it was easy, because they crossed my path at the right time, because they loved me too much, and I loved them too little but it was comfortable at the time. Then as you sit there alone with your self-poured wine, you can’t help but think that you were the problem the whole time. You should have been softer, more willing to settle into something that didn’t feel quite right at the time, but if you watered it enough it would, at some point, resemble a garden.

No…there is no good story from 2024 in the life and times of M.C. Finch that should be put to print as some sort of Aesop fable. Maybe a printed copy of my medical records that have a neon label of warning about an indulgence of pinot grigio and its tendency to melt into late night calls and texts to those that are better suited to the past. The one whose brown eyes you mourn. As I walk away from thirty, I have learned that the soft year is the lesson. There are years allotted for you to sink your heels into the rug and become set in your ways….and with that I’ll end this with the horrible poem I wrote but love and hope that you will too…that if you’ve had a soft year, I pray you feel at peace with it as well.

I am comfortable and set in my ways

Too old to be young

And too young to be old,

Yet I know that I enjoy

Crisp Pinot Grigio in chambray shirts

That I could survive on it and saltines

From the corner store alone

I have done it before

I have a proclivity for love ideal

I have fallen in love a million times over

With the spark in the eyes

Of a million boys

Pictured a life with a million boys in an instant

I’m set in my ways

And the ways I must have held a long time ago

That crisp Pinto Grig and Sunday baths

Pablo Neruda and Paul Anka

How many rooms have I danced in?

Is my favorite glass in this life

Reminiscent of the last?

Will my love in this life be a mirror

Of him from before

I’m set in my ways.

And I hope that when ash becomes ash

And dust becomes dust

I’m set in them still.

Chambray

Pinot Grigio

Paul Anka

And You.