The Month Your Body Dreads

The heating came on for the first time on the Tuesday, and the house smelled of dust burning off the radiators.

The second thing was the light. Somewhere in the last two weeks the afternoon started going amber at four instead of six, and the kitchen fills with it in a way she has always liked and does not like now.

She has slept badly for eleven nights. Not awake, exactly. Surfacing every hour, checking the room, going back under, and waking at six with her jaw aching.

On the Thursday she was rude to a man in a hardware store about paint samples, heard herself doing it, and could not stop the tone in the middle of the sentence.

On the Saturday she stood in the kitchen at twenty to six with the kettle boiled and could not remember what she had come in for. She stood there long enough for it to click off and go quiet.

She has assumed it is work. Or the clocks. Or the thing with her sister. None of the items on that list are big enough to hold what she is feeling, so she has concluded, privately, that she is being ridiculous.

Then on the Sunday evening she goes to write a dentist appointment on the calendar by the back door, the one with the school terms printed down the side, and she looks at the square she is about to write in.

And it lands.

Not a memory. Nothing so orderly. Just a drop through the floor of her stomach and a heat in her face, and she puts the pen down and stands very still with one hand flat on the calendar.

It is nearly the date.

Three weeks. Her body has been counting for three weeks. It started around the first cold morning and it has counted ever since, patiently, without telling her, and it got all the way to the door before her mind caught up.

That is you, with your hand flat on a wall calendar.

Maybe your month is March. Maybe it is the two weeks before a birthday, or the run of days before a holiday when everybody else is buying groceries. Maybe you never worked out the date and only know that something in you goes thin at a certain time of year, and every year you explain it away with something smaller.

Hear this first, because it is the thing you have been refusing yourself. You are not being ridiculous. You are not making it up, you are not doing this on purpose, and this is not a failure of faith. A body that starts counting down before the mind catches up is not a body that lacks trust. It is a body that once did a job so hard it was never told the job had ended.

And I am not going to ask what the date is. You do not have to tell me, you do not have to name it in your own head, and nothing here needs you to go back there and look. We are staying in the room you are in.

You are safe here.

Somebody has been keeping the count

There is a book in the Old Testament that opens on a ruined field.

Not a metaphor at first. Real insects, wave after wave, stripping a whole country bare in a season: the vines gone, the fig trees peeled white, nothing standing. Joel says the fields mourn, and that the seed is rotten under the clods. He is writing to people who walked out one morning into a year that had been eaten.

And in the middle of it, God says this.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.Joel 2:25

Read it slowly, because the striking thing is not the promise. It is the accounting.

He does not say the loss was nothing. He does not say it was a season and everybody has one. He does not tell them the crop was smaller than they remember. He counts it, in years and not incidents, and He names the waves separately, four of them, as though each stage of the stripping deserved its own word.

That last clause about the army belongs to one nation's long story with God, and I will not lift it off Joel's page and lay it on yours. What is yours here is the counting, and the restoring.

Somebody has been keeping the count of what was taken from you. It was never you, and it never had to be. You have not been carrying a private ledger that nobody else could read: His word says the years were counted by the One who does the restoring, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in a hallway in October rather than sounding like a nice line.

And look at what is being restored. Not the incident. The years. God's arithmetic here is bigger than the event: He is counting the harvests that did not happen afterward, the seasons that went thin, the ordinary living that got eaten downstream of the thing itself. Which means the eleven bad nights you have just had are not extra. They are not you being dramatic. They are on the list of what was taken, in the handwriting of God, and He put them there Himself.

He does not put a date on the restoring, and neither will I. Joel never says by spring. He says God does it, in His own way and His own hour, and anybody who hands you a timeline is handing you something God did not give. What Joel does say plainly is who holds the account, and it is not you.

So the counting can stop being your job. You are not the archivist of your own worst year. That work is His, His word says so, and His Spirit is not waiting for you to be further along before He does it.

One more thing, said warmly and out loud. If a doctor or a therapist is walking through this with you, that is good and ordinary help and there is nothing unspiritual in it. God is not embarrassed by the person who helps you sleep in October. And if nobody is walking through it with you and you would like somebody to, that is a good thing to go and find.