So Good

When at last I wake, I see the sunlight streaming at the edges of the sharply pulled blinds. I know it is out there. I awake sober, alone, my every muscle pains me merely because it is conscious, normally my Sundays are so numb in hangover. But I know, it is out there.

I drink coffee out of the giant tea mug; I have to heat the milk beforehand or the sheer amount makes everything cold in seconds. Across the street, my neighbor begins to smoke on the balcony again; he has been absent all through the dark months, the door has perpetually been closed. I bury myself in my head phones, play the soundtrack of when the city was young, when every street was unmapped but the sun refused to stop shining. How we walked down the hill, past the street where I would once live, in the soft summer night to the bar I would once call home, how we rekindled old friendship and I had a hand to hold in the new town, in the new life, where I found myself so impossibly lost.

People are impermanent, circumstance. Even cities crumble and leave you by the wayside, the music can let you down merely by being human, and you are tempted to believe the only thing that is always with you is yourself, but you are wrong. Because year after year, despite wars and tragedy, through storms and despair, the seasons will pass, one after another, and never fail to return.

If I make it through this winter, if I survive the darkness and the cold and the wraiths that guard my door, if only I keep my head over the freezing water's edge and let the days pass, at last the sun will return, at last the season will pass and spring may burst into my sleeping shell once more. If only I remember how to breathe, if I inhale and exhale in the right order and don't ask any of the difficult questions while the days are still dark, spring will return, the word will return, I will return. Just a little more time, my dear, and again we can abandon merely surviving. Again we can live.