Yours To Keep

(Honey, it's harder now that it's over)

Another hangover rattles in your evaporating skin: every move is a challenge to equilibrium, and you spend hours counting seconds until it passes. The weekend is over in the blink of an eye and you think of those words she wrote, that a day is long but a year is short. Your life is almost over, but those damn seconds took forever, until you could stand up without puking. Walk past the Rockefeller Christmas tree with brunch drinks in your veins and smile at Midtown in winter sun--it's so god damned pretty, when it tries.

I cleaned the desk today, with its piles and piles of typewritten pages, an extra stack beneath the books, too. There was a manifesto in its folds, full of typos and ink smudges, of course, but with words so overwhelming I forgot I had remembered to feel them once.

Winter is coming, it is dark and long and terrifying, and life is moving so quickly it will be over soon and I haven't even become anything yet. But I walk these streets in great long strides, with my feet firmly planted on the island, back straight and eyes clear, and nothing has ever made me feel more real than this.

I thought you should know that.

All is not lost,
that does not know its way
(so long as it is moving,
at all)