In Perpetuity

The rain moves on but the weight lingers. You are as lost as ever, more questions by the minute, unraveling into the April chill. The radiators in your apartment bang on, the heat reviving long after it thought its season would be over. 

You say your apartment, but the truth is you have no home of your own.  

This is one of the questions that circle your drain and threaten to pull you down with it. 

But, you remind yourself, you have come out of ashes before. You have risen from the drag and built worlds around you that swirled itself into curlicues of joy. You have brought into existence experiences that did not exist before you conjured them. 

The last few eons have been a setback, 
I'll grant you that. 

But for all the times you've been lost in the woods, 
the woods have never killed you. 

There is still a chance that
there are curlicues left to be 
lived.  

Rain Dance

You tumble into an abyss of your own making, it's so easy to stumble when you think things are going well. Perhaps it's just the rain. 

It's often just the rain. 

You know there was a time when you wanted something out of life but you feel old now, old before your time, like you've already moved on to a version of yourself that has nothing left to do. You used to look for novelty on the horizon, and now you seem mostly to be longing for silence. 

It's time to change, you just don't know how. 

The only way to find out where you're going
is to start moving 
at all. 

Trailer Park

It feels like Friday long before you open your eyes, a day for fancy and whims, not for following a rat race run. So you stumble through the to do list, spend more of the day staring out the window to the cool sunshine a petal-snowed breezes. Count minutes until happy hours, until it's time to cross the river and feel that part of you realign as it only does on the island. Like you're always holding your breath just a little until you return to it. Spring always held such hope, you revel in it. 

You should revel in it, you know. You should let your imagination run away with you and your whimsy get the better of every turn. It's April now, it's spring now, you survive a whole year just to live in this moment, and it's not lost on you. 

You ask so often from gifts from the Universe. 

Don't you see they're in front of you? 

Chapter One

You return to your manuscript in the mornings, the start of each day bathed in a gift. It's all you ever want to do, you find your thoughts wander to magic at any break in the grind. This is how you were meant to feel. 

There is still hope between your lines, still a morsel of what you thought you might be nestled in your spinal column. The street outside is warm, sunny, spring bathes the city in a sort of peace, you live your life in novelty. 

It's an illness, 
sure. 

But you're no longer so sure you're looking
for a cure.  

Visions, Everything

Every day tired, so tired, was spring not meant for bursts of energy and joy? You think perhaps the end of the world is getting you down, your poverty is getting you down, the never-ending struggle of it all. It's getting old, not you. Ants are taking over your kitchen counter, but you almost haven't the heart to stop them. We're all just doing the best that we can. 

Rain returns to the Northeast, like April can't make up its mind and wasn't that always the way? April was made for torment, the hightest highs and the instant takedowns. Summer lies ahead, you know it does, but you don't want to rush it. The sooner it starts, the sooner it's over, and right now it all lies ahead. 

You think you could be truly happy if you always knew there was something good on the horizon. 

Think you could make it if only someone would promise you 
that somewhere along the line there would be

joy. 

Oh My Sweet

A foghorn rings out in the night, says Even though you cannot see me, I am here. You think it's a worthwhile sentiment. Children who've never known a life without you circle past your arms, there was a time when your days were filled with children's laughter and now instead you have carpal tunnel tired eyes from days full of screens. Surely we were meant for other things.

The weather turns, you pull winter coats and thick tights back out of the storage boxes. April is fickle, the present is fickle, all you have is these grains of sand in your hand, everything else is fleeting and can be taken from you. You used to think you had stories to tell, what are you doing with your time? Everything else can be taken from you. 

Let this be the thing you can 
give.  

Memorial Sloane Kettering

Drop me at the ER entrance, you tell the driver, impatient on the Upper East Side. You don't love a hospital, but you don't fear it so much, anymore. We've been here before. You like to think you've gotten better at some things in life. 

When your grandmother forgot your name and couldn't go outside anymore, did you not walk her down the hospital corridors looking at paintings and pretending you were at an art gallery? She asked you to stop at a window, said the light is so special here up north, and you nodded even though you were nowhere near the polar village where she grew up. It really is, you said, and then she called you by your mother's name. 

I overstayed visiting hours and walked out of her room wrung dry. The corridor was quiet, dark after hours. The nurses kept a dinner tray for me, told me to sit down and eat a bit before I left. Told me there was no rush. Hospitals are sterile mazes of inexplicable events, but there's a warmth in the walls, a suspension of reality that carries you through. I keep my fingers crossed some of that air will come to 67th street. The year lies long ahead, but the cherry trees are in blossom and the evenings are mild. He returns to bed, takes heavy breaths into the future, you learn a little more about yourself each time the world around you shudders. 

There's no telling what else
lies ahead.