You know the ones I’m speaking of. The dying charge of a year’s battery, saving up for one last jolt come New Year’s Eve and Day. A suspended state over the course of an often unremarkable week.
For those who have taken the season of Advent to heart, the waiting and anticipation towards Christmas ends not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a deflating balloon clinging to its contents. What now? the limbo days force us to ask. And yet with a year like 2016, mired in politics, celebrity deaths, some old-fashioned Cold War tensions, heartbreak and crises in Syria, [feel free to add your grievances here], the limbo days seem more tense than ever. Come this new year, let’s not see how low we can go.
We each have our own version of limbo days. For students, the winter break may be wearing out and the itch to return to school flares up. For employees given the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day off, the absence of work’s usual routine leads to one last gasp of rest, relaxation, or vacation. For employees still working these days, mild envy wakes them up like a bitter cup of coffee, since they know that other sectors of the workforce do not make the trudge to the office as they do.
My limbo days have been odd this year. Odd in their uneventfulness, their boredom, their isolation. I am housesitting in South Bend, which means that as the rest of my family spends time at my in-laws, I’ve been here for the past several days. I drive to the house every day to check the mail, shovel the walk, run the taps to prevent frozen pipes, and make sure everything’s humming along nicely. That takes a whole thirty minutes or so. The rest of my days have been at my home, alone, trying to get work done while making sure I keep my sanity. With the kids out of the house, it’s eerily quiet here. I don’t hear my voice for hours at a time. Netflix is on, but not because I’m really watching: it’s to hear the voices of others. I’m waiting. I dwell in limbo.
Those words sound more depressing than they are: I relish the quiet, the rare occasions when I can plow through work and catch up on emails. But these limbo days are heavier this year than most; the monotony of it all more noticeable, more pressing.
I write this on New Year’s Eve, and I’ve made it through the limbo days. In less than an hour I am checking the house one last time before driving up to Michigan, back to the family, back to the bustle, into 2017. Another one bites the dust. I’m ready to get out for a bit. Escape is near. The gates are opening. I’m let through. I enter an unknown space, but at least I’m out of here.
Jacob Schepers (Calvin ’12) is the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (2014), a winner of the 2013 Outriders Poetry Project competition. His poetry has appeared in Verse, The Common, PANK, The Destroyer, and others. He lives in South Bend, IN, with his wife, Charis, and two sons, Liam and Oliver. He is both an MFA student and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame.
