New

I wake shivering. The riser has gone cold overnight; angry notes for management to turn on more heat litter the mailboxes downstairs. Strange words float through the silent apartment, plans forming along timelines of foreseeable futures. There's a tickle in your spine where May lies, and you imagine the delicious gratification of running when it bids you. His smiles sound trite, suddenly. There's a ring now where there wasn't one before, he looks happy. Things that kept you up at night seem centuries away and buried underneath a thick layer of dust.

Sometimes when I'm returning to the city, it just scares me, she said, as the last washes of dusk lingered at the top of skyscrapers, and a deep dark black settled around its edges. We roared into Manhattan from above, the city spreading out ahead of us and me with that giggle that always swirls through me upon homecoming. How could this city ever be frightful, how could it ever wound upon re-entry? This city that cares for even the most lost and weary, simply by letting them hold on.

I hear your words, I know what they're trying to say. But they cannot touch me here. I am fine.