It’s subtle, quiet at first, but then gets louder quickly. First of all, it’s hot in the plane, sitting on the LaGuardia tarmac in the July heat. Still at the gate, this plane has joined the other flights on your journey to and from the east coast in being 100% late. And to be clear: this is okay. It’s your first time getting on a plane since being vaccinated, and you’re headed back to Portland from the east coast visiting a friend group whom you’ve know for 20+ years. You’ve heard that flying, for the vaccinated, is very safe: the air circulation and filtration systems inside planes are unrivaled, but the real heroes are the flight attendants. They are not taking your bullshit, Karen. And you know the feeling; you work in retail, for a company that is pretty damn protective of its employees. You yourself have a great deal of leeway when it comes to insisting on customer compliance to mask wearing: wear ’em or get kicked out.

So the incident develops quietly: you hear tense voices, someone giving a huff of exasperation, and then a woman traveling by herself goes up the aisle of the seated passengers, somewhat self consciously, carrying her small dog carrier. She is almost in tears, looking for an alternate seat from where she was, and a crew member goes to intercept her and find out what happened. The crew member goes back to the rear of the plane, to where she was at. You hear a polite tone, then a not so polite response, then the plane sits for awhile longer.

The Marshall comes on, speaks in hushed tones to the crew member up front, looks down the aisle with a raised eyebrow. He goes down the aisle all the way to the back. His voice is strong and the clear, the responses not.

“Hey there, I’m XXXXX, I just wanted to chat with you for a minute about what happened.”

“Mumble mumble, mumble?”

“No, you’re not in trouble, I just wanted to talk to you about what you and the crew member just talked about.”

“Mumble? Mumble.”

“Oh actually, let’s go out on the jetway, we don’t want all these people to hear our conversation.”

“Mumble.”

The family of four gets up, laughing, not realizing what’s happening, although everyone seated around them does. The Marshall continues, conversationally, as if he’s recommending the latest episode of Ted Lasso.

“Oh! Why don’t you bring your luggage with you? You know, just in case.”

They happily comply, bringing their carry-ons up the aisle, two of them are eating and don’t stop eating all the way up the aisle, licking their fingers and smacking their mouths.

The plane door closes. The plane takes the fuck off. Your eyes grow wide as you realize you saw a brilliant deescalation and people get thrown off a plane without even realizing. You think of the conversation happening on that jetway as the family sees the plane backing away without them on it, as the Marshall tells them about the $30,000 fine they are about to receive. The flight crew are GODS here and you here BUT FOR THEIR BENEVOLENT GRACES. One comes by with your water you humble asked for and you genuflect to her, averting your eyes. She doesn’t think it’s funny.

You get back home, get back to work. Retail during a pandemic is as weird as ever. With mask mandates being slowly lifted, you had the choice to wear it or not. Most of your coworkers chose to keep wearing it, but as your job kept you mostly in the backstage area of the store you work at, you mostly didn’t wear it. But as the news slowly trickled in of Miss Delta Variant bumrushing the world stage, you wore it more and more until the 100% indoor mask mandate was reinstated again.

This is perfectly normal, you said as once again you boarded a plane, this time to San Antonio to see your family in late July. This is how your year goes, this story told a dozen times, but at least your family, your friends are vaccinated and safe. You flash back to last December, 2020, a holiday season spent at your retail job fraught with anti maskers shopping and a promised vaccine in sight but not here yet.

Then January sixth happens, Trump’s account is suspended (and you still find it weird that this happened this very year, time is slipping and sliding in often unbelievable ways), and you find this out at a shoot with your friend Cole. You look down at your phone, see the screenshots. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God. They finally did it. They suspended his account.” You go into high gear, because comedy is all about timing: you take your own screenshot of his suspended account, call your local Fred Meyer’s bakery department, and get things moving. The next day at work, on Saturday, your kind boss Marcie (of the difficult conversation you had just a couple months beforehand) lets you take a long lunch to pick up the cake, go home, take a quick photo with the cake using the self-timer, and then post it in your Lyft as you’re headed back to work.

The pic of you laughing and eating a piece of cake from the cake with a photo on it of Trump’s account suspension screenshot, goes instantly viral. The next day though, you hear that Milo Yiannapoulis, a far right commentator popular with the neo nazi neckbeard types (who has been banned from nearly every social media outlet), reposts your photo on Parler, a social media site that harbors such trash. Later that night, Parler is shut down, but the damage is done: you wake up that Monday morning to death threats and harassment from QAnon dipshits and their ilk. You sigh, report it to the FBI, get an alarm system, and continue with your life. This is another normal one, you think to yourself.

April comes, and with the promise of spring, you finally get vaccinated. With only mild side effects from the Pfizer vax, you feel the world open up a little bit again, plan the trip to your mom and sister, plan the trip to your dad. You fly out to New York to see your dear close friends for a little friend reunion, do a shoot with your muse Stephen Szczerba, and, incredibly, do a shoot with comedic inspiration Phoebe Robinson. You love the direction your art is taking, with you slowly including other people in the shots instead of being the sole model in them. Sure, it kind of ruins the inside joke of the commentary about people posting endless selfies on social media, but it’s another way your art has evolved in a direction you never expected.

Speaking of art, your friend Andrew invites you to join his art cohort, and share a large studio space together. You finally find one, subdivide it up, and move in. Having the space to stretch your legs finally reignites the flame to continue some of your favorite projects, including your weird little haunted dollhouse webseries.

You visit your mom and sister in late July, and each airport you fly through is a microcosm of how serious each city treats the pandemic: at PDX, everyone is masked and compliant, in Dallas it’s kind of a mixed bag, and in the Las Vegas airport it’s as if the pandemic never happened. But your mom is fine, and the favorite memory (momory?) you carry with you is where you’re both on her bed, watching Lifetime’s Christmas in July movie marathon and getting super invested in the plots.

In October, you visit your dad in Albuquerque, and visit the hot air Balloon Fiesta too, an annual tradition that obviously didn’t happen in 2020 (with the Balloon Fiesta on hold, they branded it the “Balloon Siesta”, har har). There’s something about visiting family, about seeing your friends, especially after a year, that reminds you that time marches forward but also is frozen. You see your dad, your mom and sister, your friends, and it’s like time has never passed.

Your cat is getting older too. You notice him getting a little lighter, but get alarmed when he starts eating a lot less. You take him in and the vet diagnoses him with hyperthyroidism; at that point he’s lost a third of his body weight! It’s treatable, however, and not uncommon in older cats.

It’s funny, you muse as you write this piece on the chilly November 2021 morning of your 48th birthday. You used to browse through your writing, your photos on social media, to remind yourself of how the year went. This year though, you stepped a bit away from how much you let people in, how much of yourself you give people in public. This year you took a bit of your privacy back, you wrote a lot less about what hits your heart. This year you wrote this from the memories of everyone you love who lives in you (even though you have the memory of a goldfish).

Each candle of the cake is a person in your life, they burn bright in your eyes, so bright you squint. The cake frosting bubbles and smokes and evaporates and the flames burn brighter and brighter, your eyes water but you’re not sure it’s from the light or from how happy you are. You are surrounded by light, as you burst into flames you are surrounded by so much love, you are happy, you are happy, you are happy.