Ascension

My mind repeats itself like a broken record, filled with nothing but sunshine and blossoms, and I haven't the heart to lift the needle and make it move on. For a few short days, the world is reborn, and the summer air swirls through me until I am unable to speak of anything else. I saw you in the park one morning, nearly close enough to touch. I told the children the names of flowers, we touched the soft, soft leaves, and it could have just been a trick of the lights.

I'm lying on the couch panicking over my life and what's to become of it, she writes and how I know the feeling. But Brooklyn sat on a chair in my apartment this week and it reminded me I have a home, I have a place that is mine to return to, I have a purpose that I never fulfilled but which still awaits. Those long winter months, those dead branches and impenetrable sludge, they do their damndest to make you forget, to make you lose your foothold. But if you wake up panting on the shoreline, and it turns out to be May, then it means you survived. It means you are not lost at sea. And you have not forgotten.

I look at the devastation that is my apartment, my mind, my heart, my life. It's just a matter of beginning somewhere, of sorting through the rubble, and not finishing till you're done.