The Collapse CCXVI: Year's End +1

 31 December 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

The calendar that I keep hanging on the wall reliably informs me on this wintry evening that this is the last day of the year.

We are far beyond the main 12 pages of the original year this calendar was issued for, reduced to the smaller section at the end where 12 months are condensed down into a 3 x 4 grid. After this, there is one additional 3 x 4 grid – and then tempus incognitus.

To say this feels as if it one year compressed into five would be an understatement, given all that has transpired in the previous 12 months. Were I to still have access to the such things, I suspect that every event that tended to show up on “Likely to create stress” would be written in bold letters over the year.

It shocks me, Lucilius, that it has only been a mere 6 months six I was married, a little less than that since I marched to McAdams, and a little less than that for seeing wheat in the North. And a mere 3 months since the trial.

All of that, while managing the tasks of staying alive and keeping a community more or less together.

Pompeia Paulina asked me earlier today – as it is the last day of the old year –how I felt about the past 12 months.

I did not know how to answer, I responded. On the one hand – surely there were a great many things to celebrate, not the least of which was our marriage (even I can be taught) and the fact that we – not just us, but Young Xerxes and Statiera and almost the entire community – had survived as well.

Was I hopeful for the future, she wondered?

I had no answer for you, I responded.

How do we measure hope, Lucilius? There is no metric I am aware of, no plumb line I can drop. I can no more measure hope than I can measure love or anger, except by the outputs that it generates.

By that measurement, I have both reasons to hope – a community more or less hanging together, allies on at least one side of us, others in the Near Abroad – and reasons to despair – the knowledge that next year will likely be more difficult than this and the very real belief that we are really and truly on our own.

I confessed these thoughts to her. She sat in the waning evening light with the low orange from the burning branches illuminating her face. Maybe balancing the two, she suggested, is enough for right now. After all, given that we had anything to celebrate the year should be considered a victory.

The wisdom of my wife, my dear Lucilius, eclipses anything else I could say.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca

(Author’s note: if some of the above incidents seem remote to the reader, they may very well feel that way. The year 20XX+1 was started almost 5 years ago in 2020. Apparently I am nothing if not slow about updates.)