Blood moons

Last month, I started to write a blog post, but didn’t finish it. It was going to open on a cemetery in Salem, Virginia, where I went to college. This cemetery is built on a steep hill and has a near-panoramic view of purple mountains. The gravestones are crooked and the grass looks natural but not unkempt. My friend and I once tried to smoke a hookah there, but the wind kept blowing out the coal, which I thought was the ghosts urging us to be more respectful. I buried my dark blue Betta fish there with a spoon. I wrote a poem about the cemetery when I was a freshman, and my mom still says it’s her favorite. The first time Robby and I took a walk together, I brought him there and said it was my favorite place. 

The blog post would then jump several months ahead to the night when Robby and I—now dating—woke up at 2am and went to the cemetery to watch the lunar eclipse. We set a blanket down on the crooked path and wondered at how the moon looked so close. It was a dull, red fist of clay perched a few hundred feet above us. Robby wore his favorite white hoodie, and I wore the Patagonia pullover that belonged to my dad in the 80’s. We leaned against each other in the cold.

I was falling in love with this man, or maybe I was already in love with him at that point. I wanted to spend every second with him. He was brilliant and kind. His eyes, which looked brown at first glance, had gold, green, and blue inside. However, despite my happiness—or, as I’d discover years later, because of my happiness—my brain had started to search for an escape hatch. Robby was the first person I ever truly dated. For that reason, I hadn’t pictured anything particularly serious when we got together, but here we were, several months in, staring at a moon ripe enough to be picked.

In blogging about this experience, the plan was to link this viewing of a lunar eclipse to the one Robby and I had in March of this year, when we slept at the beach in our van and woke up to stare at the red moon hanging just above the dunes. That post would write itself: two big moons, eleven years between them, Robby and I still finding wonder in this life together. 

However, what links these two eclipses in my mind is not their ravishing, understated beauty or how Robby’s shoulder felt solid and warm as I leaned against it in 2014 and then in 2025, but a feeling of profound anxiety. During both of these cosmic events, I was riddled with worries about the future. I feared that the moon, or God, or the universe, would tell me something I did not want to know. Specifically, I was worried that an entity outside of my control would give me a command to uproot my life and explode the relationship I loved, and I could either follow this unseen force or be damned to a life of languishing. (It’s worth noting that nothing about my life is languish-y, and frankly, never has been.)

Looking at the fear written down, it’s silly. I have control of my life; no entity is going to force me to give up a person I love. But the most cunning element of anxiety is that it makes itself look like truth. This condition (disorder? state of being? I’ve tried to stop calling it a “feeling”) has managed to temporarily convince me of some truly disturbing lies over the years—about family, friends, and myself—and it’s only been through sheer force of will and leaning on Robby and close friends that I’ve pushed through these seasons without making (too many) wildly destructive choices. At various stages, I’ve tried to drown out the intrusive thoughts and wicked spirals my brain cooks up by undereating, overeating, drinking in excess, and avoiding being alone.

I was twenty-six when I started to acknowledge that the level of anxiety I felt on a daily basis might not be a universal experience, and was perhaps something that I could try to understand and remedy. I went back to therapy a year ago so I could get to the bottom of it, and this past fall, I went through a massive spiral. (Had I not been in therapy, it would have been worse.) Robby, who served as an excellent sounding board and support system throughout that time, helped me realize that the way I was feeling wasn’t normal or sustainable. I started medication, not to make the spirals stop (though that would be great), but to buy myself a little time when I feel my brain start to catastrophize. I don’t have to follow that train of thought on instinct; I can choose to not take the ride.

I recently reflected with Robby about the searing highs and muddy lows I experience, and how they’ve leveled out a bit since I started taking Lexapro, but that it’s still exhausting to feel like my own brain can pull me under at any moment.

“You’re like a sine wave,” said Robby. I pictured an undulating line from a long-ago math class.

“If I’m a sine wave, what are you?” I said.

“I’m y=1.”

It’s fascinating to live with a person who has a low level of anxiety. Robby doesn’t stay awake at night replaying that thing he shouldn’t have said. He doesn’t dwell on negative interactions with strangers or edit and re-edit emails to ensure he doesn’t offend anyone. A lot of this, I think, comes from being socialized as a man—which, sorry, looks awesome—but much of it is simply his nature. While his steadiness means he doesn’t understand what I’m going through, it also means he’s a calm space to which I can retreat.

The low growl of panic I felt looking at the blood moon in early March lingered for weeks. While the anxiety has various targets it cycles through, this time it took aim at my marriage. My happiness with Robby—which usually feels peaceful and fun—took on an uneasiness, and any run-of-the-mill bickering felt stark and hopeless. At the end of the month, when I felt jumpy and frayed, I opened up to him about how I was feeling. I explained that he hadn’t done anything wrong, but that I couldn’t stop dissecting every one of our moments together as if giving them letter grades. 

Robby listened, brows furrowed, as I talked him through my trouble sleeping and my hesitance to talk to him about how I was feeling. I didn’t want him to spiral and think our marriage was in jeopardy; I knew this was just a particularly nasty thought pattern, the type that I’ve had experience with, and I needed his help to get out.

Robby, as ever, responded first with confusion and worry, and then, as he found his footing, started spitting some excellent advice. He talked about ways I can ground myself when I start to feel uneasy. (He specifically said that I should do training sessions with Thelma, which is both a great idea and something she needs.) He reassured me that I could always come to him. He finished it with, “Buddy, you’ve got to live your life.”

When I go through a season of feeling intense shame, or questioning my marriage, or wondering what the purpose of my life—all our lives—is, or picturing people I love being hit by cars, and trying to mentally train myself to jump in front of a car for someone else if I need to, or predicting what my regrets will be when I die, and concocting ways I can prevent those regrets before they happen, I try to remember that what I’m experiencing is exactly that: a season. I will come out the other side, as I always have. I have people in my life who can help me.

I wish my brain had cooperated last month and I could have written a happy blog post about the moon. That piece of writing exists in another timeline, one where I have a slightly calmer disposition. However, that post and this one end the same way: Over the next fifty years, there will be forty-one total lunar eclipses visible from the U.S. Forty-one red clay moons bouncing over cemeteries and sand dunes and broken-down cars, moons peering down at roofs and into windows where people are together or alone, moons hiding behind oak trees and growing airplane tails, who have no opinion on our fears or our joys or the little fragments of time we hold in our hands. They’re red, and they’re here. And no matter the contents of my life or my mind, I want to see them all. I want to greet them with the same warm shoulder beside me.