Reright

You have to tread yourself into the same wheels you've attempted to lodge yourself in for decades. If it is the thing you want most, why is it hard? Is it supposed to be hard? You shoehorn your way into a day of it, try to sink in when the clothes don't fit, try to remember what it is to do something for sheer enjoyment, try to remember what it is to enjoy something. Your chest feels calloused, like anything alive in there is ensconced in eons of cement. Surely there was a time when sparks coursed through your veins? Where are they now?

Where are you?

The madness must be in there somewhere, still, the colors and fireworks and ridiculous dances that lead nowhere but to joy. They must be there. 

If they are not,
it seems,
neither are
you.

And Again

“Sit with the discomfort,” the note says, and you immediately have fifteen reasons why it’s wrong. Later, in the safety of your own silence, you have only reasons for why it’s right. You feel January sink its claws in you, drain the light from your eyes and hang cement around your ankles. I run every screen and sound I can to keep it at bay. Sit with the discomfort, my ass. 

I know what it feels like to be eaten alive. 

What lamb sits gently and lets the lion feast?

Fieldstone Lane

We sit glued to house listings, generations of movers looking for dopamine hits in pictures of sunny kitchens, of grassy porches. We calculate pros and cons of someone else's life, pass judgment around the table like a parlor game. The same blood runs through our veins, it is how we make order in the world. She writes from the Lower East to say I'll meet you at Penn Station, that's true friendship, and you know in your bones there is no way you'd rather return to the city. (Your father asks you, as he does every time, if it has to be New York, and you've stopped giving him nuance. All you have left to say is yes.)

Nothing and everything changes all at once, in every minute. There are rules to this game you have yet to figure out. The mountains lie quiet, snow-capped, stoic around you. A flight prepares itself in the other valley. You grab the loose ends scattered around you, 

wonder if this is the year you teach yourself how to tie knots.

Corn Dogs and Dog Days

A year of play, she says from across the country, and you let your neurons run with it. You played for much too long as a child, you were meant to have left it behind ages ago. but you refused, you couldn't help yourself, your mind was a mile a minute with imagination. 

A year of play, she writes inside your eyelids, across the whiteboard of your grey matter, into the oxygen you keep trying hard to breathe. What would happen if you let yourself, just for a little while, be free? 

The year is long but the life is short. Or was it the other way?

You throw out the clocks. 

You were never on time, anyway.

Move

The moving truck expands into the universe, grows by the cubic foot into an unwieldy caravan across the desert. Nothing goes according to plan, but since that's what you expected, it suits your plan nicely. You didn't know you would start the year in communion with the long-haul drivers of the right lane, but we are not always masters of our fate, and sometimes it is best to roll with the punches you've been dealt. 

As the palm trees of southern California give way to sprawling deserts and climbing canyons, a peace begins to settle in your foot on the gas, your elbow in the window. The truck hems and haws through the mountain pass, but makes it to the top, rewarded with its blankets of stars, its slow roll into the valley village. 

What do you want your year to look like? What do you want your world to look like? 

We can't control everything. You do not build the mountain. 

You only try to make it across.

2025

A new year begins as they so often do, in red-eyed delirium, in the slight aftertaste of nothing new under the sun, these celebrations always leaving you wanting so you thought you had stopped looking. Morning is heavier still, dragging last night’s lipstick past the early morning yogis of Fort Greene and landing world-weary on your Red Hook front step. 

There seems to be little to look forward to this year. The country falls apart under the watchful eyes of those frothing at the mouth to be first to set it aflame. You grow older but seemingly no wiser, you are tired. 

A podcast host speaks of play, of how the very essence of humanity is that which our modern supposed civilization has cast aside in favor of rationality and capitalist productivity. You mourn the passing. 

Wonder if there’s a way back. 

Cycle

It feels like it did before, you hear yourself repeat along the lining of your skull, a soft grating, a loud whisper longing to be heard. The same straining against restraints of your own acceptance, the same placid concession to mediocrity. Eight years later, are you in the same hamster wheel that caught you before. Complacency makes for easy prey.  

You look back to your piles of words and see the pattern repeated in their melodies. A year of few words leads to the bottom rock from which you push off toward the surface, enough indifference to creativity will eventually itch inside you until you've no choice but to scratch it till you bleed. 

I said I'd give up everything for this, and I did. 

But what point is losing it all,
if you don't come around to collect your reward, too?

A new year arrives. A bottom rock approaches. You see it now, don't look away. 

Don't flinch until it propels you to your next, great breath.