Leaves Turned

Bright March sun after days of gloom is like a shot of adrenaline to your system, even as the winds from the sea run icy cold. You lap it up like you've been starving a lifetime, and perhaps you have. It's a simple joy, every year, and in an age where both simple and joy are hard to come by, it's fine to just take it. 

You know there'll come a time, soon, soon, when all you will want is to run. You know what May will grab you like a whirlwind and dance you into dawn, but in this brief moment, in this threshold month of March, you deliberate, question yourself. Is it possible the answer to do exactly the opposite of what you've done all these decades? Is it possible you could have everything you dreamed of if you only stayed put? 

The thing is, May will come, as it always does. 

And you'll never get the answer.  

Mondays

It rains and rains, but the air is warm, the bar is warmer still. Something about a living room outside your house, something about a place you've earned by building yourself into its foundation. Good things take time, this was always the way. You're too impatient, you're too unchained, you refuse to be relied upon but then here you are, longing for someone to rely on, looking for a soft place to land. You cannot have both. 

Twenty years you've given this city and you still act like you're still considering your options. Twenty years it's been the love of your life and you still panic at the idea of putting down your furniture. It's not an attractive feature, you know it. How shiny it looks from the outside. But how flighty up close, they retract their hands to keep from burning at your flame. 

I just thought we could build the roots in motion. 
Thought time could be what happened while you
were living.  

Re:cur

The F train is waiting as you run down the stairs, a late night blessing from the city, don't think I don't see it. We had rambled down University like we were 23 again, but slipped into the old world hotel bar like we weren't. It's easy to be grateful for life when you are reminded of its finitude, easy to rejoice in friendships when they sit across from you. She uses carefully selected words from his medical charts, carefully sidestepping prognoses and lifespan and emphasizing breakthrough technologies, and you both let her because it is the right thing to do. 

By morning, the city is cold again. March weather, you repeat to yourself like a mantra, eyes peeled to the bright green buds braving the temperatures. They're coming. It's coming. You feel a bit like the grasshopper, spending your summers singing and pretending one day there won't be a winter. 

But one day winter will come for you. 
And when it does, you won't have anything but a song to keep you warm.  

Starur

I'd rather we didn't have those sunny days first, tricking us into believing it was spring, she says, as the heavy snowflakes smatter against the ground. The air is freezing, but you are unperturbed. You know March requires seven starur, seven winter storms after the starlings arrive, seven heartbreaks before you've earned the breath in your lungs again. 

I know it requires making it to April 1st,  to really be on the safe side. 

I'm looking at house sits in the English countryside for June, looking at Stockholm rentals for July and warm West Coast cliffs for August. I'm looking at cramped Manhattan nooks for fall and sweet spring evenings for May. 

I know there was a time when I wanted 
to die
when I couldn't imagine living day in
and day out
of this existence, and I said to myself
like I could will it to be true 
it is the illness speaking

and the thing is
it was.

Spire

The day after whirlwinds are so simple in their clarity, so light in their stillness. There's nothing earth-shattering to their insight, they just wait by the foot of your bed, unassuming. You wake with air in your lungs, as if you'd found a part of yourself you'd forgotten. You've felt joy before, you remember it now, it wasn't always a struggle to feel purpose. How New York can feel easy, obvious, how with the right spark plug it doesn't have to be so much work. 

You don't know how to make the right concoction, how to align the stars so the magic happens. But it's good to be reminded that they can make it happen all on their own. 

All you have to do is stick around long enough
to let them.  

Re:vive

In an instant, it’s like no time has passed. Like none of the months and years and silences existed. You talk a mile a minute, threads of conversations juggled like balls of yarn between us. Running to the restaurant just as it closes, sweet talking the server into letting us order, we don’t need menus, I pile dollar bills into a mountain of tip in gratitude. When we leave, it starts to rain, but we are unfazed, New York looks out for us. New York always looked out for us, it sensed the electricity, knew all it had to do was feed it. We stumble into port authority, this cesspool of city grit and even that looks like an amusement park, a place created just for our whims. 

I knew that fateful day that it wasn’t the end, knew that there was something worth holding onto despite the weight in my chest. Told myself not to throw the baby out with the bath water and I was right. 

Sometimes the reminders come just when we need them. 

Saved

The Monday bartender greets you with her typical mix of disdain and appreciation, a relationship years in the making that forever teeters between the familiar and the tentative, you take careful steps toward etching yourself into the hardwood floor. Do you remember that bar on 23rd street, those late nights on sawdust floors, those last ritual Budweiser bottles, a whole life wrapped around its quiet existence? I have nothing but gratitude for it now, you know, but I can't go back there without you, can't build another existence from its ashes. New York turns a page with every new life you live and there's no rewind button, the streets look different each time you walk them and isn't that what your impatient heart wanted all along? Careful what you wish for, echoes across your brow but you made this bed, no one else. 

I sleep better than I thought I could. 

Tossing and turning but I wake,
rested.