Lately I've Been Running on Faith

Faith doesn't play fair.

This July will be one year since the worst year of my life began.

I lost my soul dog. I lost my job of fifteen years. I lost my stepmother. I lost two friendships I had mistaken for permanent. My uncle, my mother’s last living brother, has been deteriorating in body and mind, and this week he had what must have been his sixth fall. He’s in the hospital now, then likely back to rehab, where every visit seems to cost him a little more cognitive function. Getting old is no fun, which is a polite way of saying it’s fucking brutal.

After Zee died, I rescued a dog who had a severe injury that just happened to be quiet the month we adopted her. Three surgeries, $15,000, and one amputated hind leg later, Ariel is doing well. Thank God for that, because I’m not sure my nervous system could have handled a different ending.

We also got a dog from a breeder who was supposed to be “the best trained dog we ever owned,” and the joke was absolutely on us. Ten thousand dollars later, we can’t walk her on a leash without her trying to kill every other dog within a two-mile radius. So yes, technically I have two dogs. Emotionally, I have one miracle and one lawsuit with fur.

After losing my stepmother, my eighty-six-year-old father was suddenly alone. He didn’t want to come back to New Jersey after twenty-five years in South Florida, and honestly, can you blame him? The weather here sucks ass. But my sister and I have been more involved in his life than we have ever been in all our years of being alive.

He has very little patience and basically no technical savvy at all. He didn’t know how to use the dishwasher. He didn’t know how to do laundry. There is grief, and then there is explaining the delicate cycle to an eighty-six-year-old man who already thinks the world is personally attacking him.

Meanwhile, I started a new job. One month in, I needed time off for my stepmother’s death. Since then, I’ve been sick more in the past six months than I was in the last six years. Colds, exhaustion, and now a weird throat infection that feels like my body filing a formal complaint. Apparently I also had mono — EBV — and didn’t even know it, which may explain my unquenchable desire to sleep twelve hours a day.

I’m blaming public transportation, because someone has to take the fall, and the Port Authority has had it coming.

At least I have sick time. At least I have a job. But I don’t feel like I’m showing up the way I should. Honestly, if I worked for me, I might question my work ethic.

And now, as we conclude the year from hell, next up is my stepmother’s burial in Maine this weekend, because the ground is finally thawed. Eight hours in a car with my dad, my stepsister, and my husband, which will be a test of patience, blood pressure, and possibly federal law. Then an Airbnb with the whole family, which sounds less like a peaceful memorial weekend and more like a really bad dare.

Today I heard the song, Running on Faith.

I used to think faith was an optimistic word. Like keeping the faith. Like, I’m going to keep believing, keep rolling down the highway, and eventually I’ll get to wherever the hell I’m supposed to be. Because I have faith. Even if the engine light is on, the windshield is cracked, and I’m almost out of gas, faith says, keep going.

Except faith doesn’t play fair. Faith is an annoying word that keeps telling you to suck it the fuck up when you are already fully sucked up.

Somewhere on the highway, a tire blows out. You realize you let AAA lapse by accident. You’re stranded in the middle of nowhere with no signal, no plan, and no proof anyone is coming. Just you, running on faith.

That’s what I hear in that song. Not optimism. Not certainty. Not some glossy version of survival where the sun breaks through the clouds right on cue. I hear someone tired. Someone who has reached the edge of logic and found nothing there but one more day.

That’s the part that gets me. Because sometimes you are not running on hope. Hope is too clean. Too bright. Too confident. Hope acts like it knows something. Faith is different. Faith is what you use when you know absolutely nothing.

So when I say I’ve been running on faith, I don’t mean I’ve been floating around believing everything happens for a reason. I mean I am tired. I mean I am still moving. I mean there are days when I look at the wreckage of the last year and think, Fine. One more mile.

Not because I know where I’m going.

Because what the fuck else can I do?

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No pressure, truly. I’m grateful you’re here either way.