I gave thanks dutifully, but also sincerely
Years of American telly and movies taught me well. I know Thanksgiving inside out: the lies, the half-truths, the full on moral decadence of the American empire. And so I made tentative plans—this year, it would be close enough to my birthday that I could maybe scrape together some cash and fly out to Tulum for a week that would be my gift to myself. After a childhood and early adulthood in which fly-somewhere-else-and-relax "holidays" were a foreign concept, they have become one of the recent joys of my life. But I reckoned without the variables, namely the election, and how mentally and physically knackered I would be made by it. I was wiped out. I was gonna buy some food, and hole up with my main bae (aka Netflix), eat, idly go through Tinder making faces at all the options before swiping left anyway, browse some Black Friday deals, and just quietly ride out this week.
My friend S invited me to dinner on Thursday instead. I went along, bearing a non-traditional tupperware full of fried plantains (no empty hands in my mother's house!). S made seafood gumbo and rice and maque choux for the table, and a bunch of us ate and drank and chatted in his dining room, with music blaring, and cats sauntering between our legs beneath the table. We laughed a lot, and we railed about the election results and we talked about Michigan, and education, and money, and culture and films (romcoms, at my steering, but also Moonlight and Arrival and La La Land) and the greatness of baths, and then dessert happened, and we ate chocolate and plum cake and a mango tart and cheese, among other treats. Eventually, we realised one cat had gone for an unscheduled walk (no! bad cat!) and embarked on a search and then the fire department came with a big ladder and got him home. Ugh, sweet relief.
I came home, did a little reading and then quietly and sincerely gave thanks for my life, my friends, my family. I am grateful. In North Dakota, shit continues to go down. I am, you/we all are but a speck on this earth; there is nothing owed. But here I am, and I am loved, and I love. This is pure syrup, I know. But I still want to say it. I'm thankful, man.