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The day after the storm always feels the same, always this first hesitant step blinking into the morning, navigating the remains of what's been. The sun is bright, the crosswalks a minefield. Your body sore in strange places from shoveling and shuffling, yet you feel brand new. Talk to strangers in the street, someone warns you about an icy spot, someone laughs about the joy of their dog in the snow drifts. You do not take this air for granted. A year ago you were trying to die; two years ago you were looking at giraffes on a mountain slope in Kenya. 

There is no way to predict your life before it happens. 

 

Blizzard

It's the first blizzard in ten years, the mayor says. You look back to remember but find that you'd escaped the city for unpronounceable upstate hamlets, remember how the floor creaked as you considered the distance between hearts. It feels like so many lifetimes ago. 

You wake up early, too early, the radiators heaving with responsibility, you have to open all the windows, turn on the fan, throw your covers aside. An old routine. Your windows are bright white, a wall of snow, you can't be mad about such a blissful reminder that we are only very small in the face of something very big. The snow rises as it falls, a delicate dance of giant flakes, accompanied by the soundtrack of shovels in the street. We are reduced to our physical bodies. Late last night, I trekked out into it, couldn't miss the chance at feeling myself dissolved into tha air. A perfect crunch under my feet, a stillness that only arrives with snow, the sudden droppping of masks between strangers. Like recharging a self that grew up in this, that's been too urbanized to seek it out but that knows deep down this is what made you. 

I cannot help but think it's time for the country again.  

Endure

For a moment, the sun breaks through. It stops you in the tracks of a gravel parking lot near the warehouses on the water, you close your eyes and let it beam in through your skin. Like you're nothing more than a machine, recharging. They say a snowstorm is on its way. Say it'll bury the city. You feel your battery draining. Say it's only February quietly in your head, hoping the mantra will ward off the evils. 

You're so close to sunshine, now, to spring and sprouts and life the kind that grows from within. Just hold out a little longer, just put one foot in front of the other. Soon, all will be well. 

All you have to do is be alive to see it.  

Precipitate

A day slips through your fingers, they feel useless at the end of your arms, you had so much to prove and instead proved nothing. The notion makes you shrink inside yourself, like plastic wrap under heat, you wrinkle and contort and end up unrecognizable to yourself. My head hurts. Outside the window, it rains all day, the heat is off and you feel a chill for the first time all winter. There's a gratitude in it if you will. 

(and you have to, you have to. What else can you do with useless days but fill them with gratitude, but allow yourself grace. It is only February, it is only this rain, tomorrow there will be sunshine anew and you can make up for what you broke here. The sun sets so much later each day now, have you noticed?

Tomorrow there will be sunshine. Come back to me then.) 

OtherWorldly

Promise to read a script, remembering how hard it is for you to focus on anything these days. Pages upon pages, I have to leave the phone in another room, have to set a timer, turn off anything distracting. Have to say you are allowed, repeat it into the atmosphere, there is nothing else you are meant to be doing but this. 

Emerge, later, as out of a cave, eyes blinking, blinded by the life that goes on around you. All you ever wanted to do was be swept up by the currents, by the imaginations, all you ever wanted was to live in Wonderland, weave your own ribbons of the ridiculous. Work beckons, a week beckons, you groan and strain to shapechange to fit its needs. This is not what you're meant to be doing. 

There's a dusting of snow on the land outside your window. Winter lingers, remains, reminds you it is still time to hibernate, to mull over the thoughts in your chest. 

There's time yet. But you might as well start now.  

And On

Struggle. An uneven wheel on a scraggly road. Everything turns rusty if you leave it long enough in the cold. You see no new mice, even though the edge of your vision constantly teems with ghosts, scurrying around the edges of your floorboards. You say your, but none of this belongs to you. You own nothing, nothing but a storage unit on the 5th floor of a Brooklyn behemoth, holding as it does any remaining trickles of your life, of who you've been. You live forever in tatters, in ephemera, like you hold cotton candy in your hands and wash it in the stream. 

It feels like a lot of waiting now, but it'll come together. You won't see the path until you've walked it. 

The only way out is 
through.  

Re:turns

February disappears in a whirlwind, how is it mid-month when you haven't even left January behind? You try to look at your to-do lists, see what can be salvaged. Returning to Brooklyn is a gift, a parking spot in front of the door, no sign of the mice in your abscence. By late morning, you spot one in the kitchen, like it waited for your return, for warmth, for life. You set another trap and hear it snap while you're in the next room. A tiny mouse hangs from the edge of the counter, held by a firm noose, it's such a definite end to such a small creature, you are humbled by it every time. 

The sun beams outside your window, but the East River is still thick with ice, and the country still lies in tatters, sometimes it's hard to hold all the truths of a life in your hands at once. 

But maybe that's what life is,
and maybe you have to do it 
without knowing how.