3rd and B

I don't see enough people, I know. I don't go out when I should and spend sunny weekend days inside scrubbing tile and drowning in melody. But people exhaust me, they drain what little heartbeat I have, so that none is left over for the typewriter in my writing nook and I want to give it every last drop of blood in me, how do you explain that to a brunch crowd? You paint yourself as the other again. After 35 years of fighting it perhaps the time has come to call the elephant by its rightful name and bring it along.

We sit on the wood floor of her empty apartment, Good Friday in Loisaida and the Hispanic Catholics march around the block wailing. We drink housewarming wine with the windows open and consider possibility. She says "but the house and the job and the family would have been easy. What you're doing is hard," and I don't understand what she means. The only thing that ever mattered was New York, and it makes every step along the way easier than any that keep me away. She looks at her leaning walls and smiles. My heart is light at the reminder.


...but when they ask you how you are, you say fine, because there aren't words enough for how good they really are.

You failed at every
single
thing you ever hoped for
and dreamed of
except this
one
thing.

And it makes all the difference.