When July started, I saw enough people talk about us being midway through 2020 that I ended up researching it; surely that couldn’t be right, could it? February is so short that we must be a week off or so, surely, before we catch up again? Surely we can’t actually be halfway through the year?
Much of that disbelief came from, simply, the feeling that we couldn’t be half done with the year just yet. (More cynically and dramatically, that the year wasn’t half finished with us yet, perhaps, but, it’s been that kind of a year.) 2020 has been existentially difficult, a year that’s assailed us in ways that I’m not sure I could have really seen coming in any way beyond jokingly imagining worst case scenarios that could never, really, come true; a year that looked at my End Of 2019 wish that, coming off a year that saw my divorce and attempts to rebuild my finances in the wake of that, maybe the next 12 months would be just a little bit easier and laughed maniacally. Oh, if only I knew what was in store. If only.
Time has flattened, or folded, since quarantine went into effect. March was seventy years long, but April seemed to go by in a blink. Even just writing that feels like a surreal thing, though, a reminder that we’ve been in quarantine for longer this year than not — everything shut down mid-March, and since then we’ve had fully April, May and June living almost entirely inside our homes while our jobs go away and, judging by the infection rates in the US, nothing actually really gets better. Is this just the way things are going to be, now? Surely not, and yet…
(A brief aside; something rumored for the President’s July 4 speech and thankfully missing was an announcement that, basically, we’d all just have to learn to accept this as the new ongoing reality going forward. Even the idea of saying that felt so callous, so cruel to me.)
So I looked into it, like I said, and it turns out that July 2 is the actual midway point of the year — the 183rd day, with 182 behind it and 182 ahead. Still earlier than I thought, but still; we’re firmly in the second half of 2020 now. May it be kinder than the first.