MUSINGS | It’s the end of the year as we know it.

I’ve been trying to write about depth — a sort of metaphorical piece (you know I love those) about being in the deep, in the dark places. Trenches. Wars. Something about the end of the year, maybe, or about 2020 in general, or about the past four years. I don’t know. I’m having trouble getting it out.

The metaphor seems better formed in my mind — dark and beautiful — but when I try to release it, something goes wrong and it doesn’t read right. You’ll have to bear with me. It’s already 8:00 PM on NYE and I want this published before our time runs out. 

I keep thinking about this stupid story from high school. 

In the mid 1990s, a boy I liked wrote a comment in my yearbook that began, “There is not much beyond pseudo depth that one can write in a yearbook” and all of a sudden, I knew the word pseudo (and started using it, liberally). And I knew that it was better to be deep.

Let’s pause here for a moment, because I say boy, but this guy was 20 and I was 15, and I can’t remember why he was attending school with me at all, only that he had thick hair with a swoop in front, and that even though we weren’t friends exactly, we had three distinct, meandering conversations over the next few years, at times that felt strange and meaningful. One was after a fight with my actual boyfriend. I picked daintily at a bagel while he gave me what I thought was wise advice. Another was after the dress rehearsal for a play I was starring in that no one else seemed to care about. And then there was one last chat, late at night on a city street in a then-unfamiliar neighbourhood, outside of his grown-up apartment. I looked for the place again — a low-rise in the Annex — every time I was in the area for years afterwards, and for him on the surrounding streets, but never found either.

It sounds gross, but my reasons weren’t romantic. I wanted to run into him for the conversation.

Imagine talking to someone who makes you feel special. Like … a manic pixie dream girl (before such a moniker existed to make you feel shitty about it). Like an enchantress. And then stop judging me.

Anyway. I don’t want to belabour this. The world has Facebook now and the predictable end to the tale is that I’ve ultimately had to block him. Turns out that mediocre men prone to pontification might be charming when you’re fifteen, but are rarely so when you’re forty. You can’t go home again. 

I am an enchantress, though. A witch. Preferred variety: hag.

So is this it? The deepest part of the trench?

We are in the trenches now, aren’t we? The trenches of 2020. People keep talking about the end of this year as some sort of turning point. Midnight tonight is supposed to be the light at the end of this tunnel. (Erm, trench. I told you I was struggling.) But I’m pretty sure it’s the train. It’s the flaming red tail of a missile. 

Incoming. Take cover. I think we’d better stay down.

This year, my daughter (now five years old) showed a keen interest in all things oceanic, and in the deep sea in particular.

Children of this age pursue their interests, whatever those interests may be, with more rigor than most doctoral students, which is why I now know the names of so many dinosaurs (and prehistoric marine reptiles, and pterosaurs, all of which must be referred to distinctly and correctly), and why I have spent so much time lately thinking about the mesopelagic zone (colloquially, the twilight zone) — that popular bit of deep sea defined by light. 

The zone begins where just a single percent of our earth’s sun reaches, and ends down deeper, where there’s no sunlight at all. It is a liminal space, not unlike this dark and cursed year.

And here we are at the very end of it, but which way are we going next — up, or further down? And which way would be better?

Fifteen or so years ago, an episode of the teen-oriented television show Angel entitled “A Hole In the World” aired on The WB, and setting aside everything about whether or not this is embarrassing, and whether or not Joss Whedon is an aged garbage monster, I loved that episode, in part because it introduced The Deeper Well — a tunnel-shaped burial ground for “Old Ones” (ancient demon gods) that ran thousands of miles through the earth, from a cave beneath a tree in the Cotswolds, England, to its antipode point in New Zealand. 

“There’s a hole in the world. Feels like we ought to have known,” says one character. 

Does. It. Ever.

But back to the sea. 

People love the twilight zone, with its monsters and freaks. It captures the imagination because it is home to strange jellies and anglers, bristlemouths, and blobs, and my favourites, the giant and colossal squid, with eyes as big as sports balls, and horny beaks as a black as night. 

Inside a giant squid’s curved beak is a tongue-like organ called a radula, covered in rows of tiny, sharp teeth. The twilight zone is both familiar, and the stuff of nightmares.

Exactly like real life, in other words.

I am told squid beaks most closely resemble those of parrots, but to me they (unscientifically, emotionally) call to mind vultures, carrion birds, and I imagine those beaks picking away at the entrails of everything we’ve sunk this year, leaving ribbons of blood in the water. What a party it’s been.

Fun fact: No.

Regular fact: A group of feeding vultures is called a wake.

What was that I said earlier? Oh right.

I despise bright-siding, but I sort of like the deep. I think I’d rather be weighed down and cradled by the dark, with that heavy pressure all around me, than held aloft, exposed.

And maybe this is a tangent, but with that in mind, I bought a weighted blanket not long ago. Bought into the fad. It was supposed to solve all my problems. 

It’s … nice?  Sort of? I’m still waiting for the miracle. It has occurred to me that the blanket just isn’t heavy enough. Then again, if I try to make the bed, I notice that it’s so heavy, it makes my biceps ache. It strains the joints in my wrists. It’s so heavy, just thinking about having to fold it makes me tired, which may well be the point, but I don’t think it’s working quite as it should.

In the dark, there is room to hide, and there is also possibility.

After all, I think that’s why squid get so large. Deep-sea gigantism. Plenty of room to grow. Is that what this year has been? Maybe for some. Doesn’t that have a bit to do with why so many of you were baking all that pretentious artisanal bread and starting all those podcasts and writing all those obnoxiously dreamy and self-indulgent essays, and … oh. 

The truth is that no one really understands deep-sea gigantism. Even Wikipedia, notorious haven for the unsupported claim, says that we have merely “proposed explanations” for the phenomenon, from colder temperatures, and food scarcity to “reduced predation pressure.” As a metaphor for quarantining, at least, this really works, I’d say. Don’t pretend it doesn’t.

And some of us (not all of us — I’m looking at you, plague rats, with your haircuts and your stupid family gatherings and your needless travel and shopping) but some of us have been down here for a very long time now, in that zone that is so relatable because we are monsters too — grotesque and real, with our razor sharp tongues — and we need the room.

The mesopelagic isn’t the deepest part of the ocean, of course.

Not even close. Just below it is the bathypelagic or “midnight zone”, and beneath that is the abyssopelagic (abyss, as in bottomless), and after that, deeper still, is the hadopelagic, named after Hades, the underworld god. 

And while we may be close to midnight, we’re not there yet.

For one thing, it seems important to mention that in addition to the fact that the twilight zone does still get a tiny bit of natural sunlight, it is also teeming with life and host to most of our planet’s bioluminescent life forms. There are all sorts of jellyfish, shrimp, krill, marine worms, and fish down there, glowing away. Even giant squid, those behemoths, those leviathans, those titans, those gods, use bioluminescence. They are also like us, with cruel beaks, and greedy, enormous eyes, very much alive, and they quite literally make their own light.

Just like we do.

I think I am having trouble with these metaphors because they’re fundamentally confused.

We are fundamentally confused right now about what we want, and about this year, and about next year, and about everything. It is a confusing time. I set this post to publish just before midnight on December 31, 2020, so if you are reading this, the old year is gone, but everything is exactly the same, and likely will be for awhile. I’ve spent the last two months looking at memes and photos and meaningless online pith about putting 2020 in the rearview mirror, and I am deeply confused, because we’ve done it.

And yet.

Look. Things don’t always make sense. Sometimes, we use “weighed down” like it’s something undesirable — akin to a jail sentence. Nobody wants a ball and chain. Nobody wants to carry the anvil over the side of the cliff. And at the very same time, we’re all digging in, and making resolutions, and creating pressure, and seeking depth, and spending our money on weighted blankets and thunder shirts and “hug vests” and compression garments and voluminous gowns with pockets, give us all the pockets, because some of us want to fill them with stones as we walk toward the sea. 

Read more essays by Jen Selk here. They’re generally better than this one.