Sounds of Silence

I went west. I drove down the mountain into the snowy valley, and in the absolute stillness I slept a hundred hours of heavy sleep, waking to wander the impossibly large house in my father's PJs and breathe in the fresh country air. My limbs stretched out, my eyes opened, my muscles relaxed. Words fell from my conscious and my pen lay silent, unable to create a mere morsel of a tale. Minutes and hours were instead filled with the laughter of my oldest friends, the comforts of my family. Life in Utah is effortless, somehow, and I tried to soak it up without remembering the remorse of not being able to stay.

And still, standing on that platform at Howard Beach, waiting for the A train to take me back to the city. How comforting the sense of home. The sense of my body, my clothes, my steps, suddenly fitting again, suddenly allowed to be themselves without reservation, without a makeover.

New York is the place where I am, without a makeover.

I open the valve to the radiator; it smells of a hundred winters in the city already past. I wonder how many I have yet to see.