The Honest Courtesan

On this day two years ago, I wrote:  “I’ve gradually come to the realization that I’m happier now than I’ve ever been for any extended period in my entire life…but having a realistic view of the world requires accepting that it and everything it contains is impermanent.”  Then almost a year ago, the truth of that was slammed home when I lost my best friend to cancer, and just like that the only extended period of happiness I’ve ever enjoyed in this Vale of Tears was snatched from me, never to return.  I’m not saying I’m constantly miserable now, nor that I was prior to my retirement in 2021, but previous periods of happiness were both shorter and far more conditional than that four-year stretch of peace and content.  My readers needn’t worry about me; pain and melancholy have been familiar features of my life for almost as long as I can remember, and decades of experience have taught me the alchemy of turning that darkness into beauty.  In the past year I’ve written more fiction than I have in any year since 2016, including my first novella (which looks like it will turn into my first major series of tales).  This is not in spite of the darkness but because of it; ever since I was a child, the monsters have been the constant attendants of my Muse of Fiction, and it seems foolish to expect that it will be any different in the time I have left.  Creative writing is, in a sense, a form of exorcism, draining off the energy of my inner demons to drive the mills of my art.  The process, however, is never so efficient as to completely dry out that black wellspring, and though I don’t cry for Grace every day any more, in any given week the tearful days still outnumber the drier ones.  As a friend told me soon after she died, the waves of grief never stop coming, they just get farther apart.  And as I’ve said many times in the last year; it’s not that I feel any sense that she died too young or too soon, or that her death was somehow unfair; it’s just that I miss a beloved friend who was a constant presence in my life for twenty-seven years, and whose departure has left a very large hole.