Delivered

I tipped the waitress a small fortune, I couldn't help myself. The moment had been perfect, tucked away under the BQE with coffee that never ended, I had written all the truths of a life before the old ladies a table over had finished catching up on their gossip.

In Canarsie, a woman on the bench next to me sat eating what looked like jambalaya from a take out container, peeling crawfish with her bare fingers and spilling rice on the street. Out there, the elevated subway train feels like a rollercoaster, soaring through the sky and you can see all the way to Queens if you pay attention. In Greenpoint the streets are crooked but eventually lead to the water, and Manhattan spread out under grey skies in the late afternoon. Williamsburg writhes with its Disneyfication, do you remember when it was gritty and disheveled and you didn't walk south of Metropolitan? The sugar factory stands like an old, demented neighbor now that no one knows what to do with but let disintegrate before their eyes until at last they can say how sad, do you remember when? ah such is life. I climbed the Williamsburg Bridge; a bride walked out to the water just as I reached the top and the pier was a wave of formalwear rising and falling as she passed.

When you get to the middle of the bridge, if you look out into the distance, it feels just like flying. You're a million miles up and weightless, suspended between boroughs, in a place untouchable. The Statue of Liberty leans out behind the bridges, the lights on the Staten Island Ferry light up around sunset, the jumbled buildings vibrate in that hour when all things sort of wait. I walked back to my island, weaved through the grid, stopped to write more truths in the notebook and realize all the things I already knew, but how simple they look when at last you are ready to name them. Summer ends, twelve years end, so many things end, but here's the thing.

You scale that bridge,
and everything that lies on the other end
is only just beginning.

August 31, 2006

How many love letters can I write you, and never tire? How many days can I walk these streets and beam in gratitude over a dirty subway platform or a silent, grey building? Twelve years I’ve belonged to you and you only; twelve years I’ve fought my every demon if only to not lose my place in your arms, knowing it was the only chance I had to become the person I before had only dreamed I could be. I learned my name only because you whispered it to me, night after night in your mad soundscape I heard it, like no one had ever said it before, like I hadn’t existed before you knew me. I left you, time and time again I packed my bags and you remained, welcomed me back when I stood there at the airport, disheveled and breathing on the train like my lungs hadn’t worked the whole time I was away. 

My memory reels in stories, they are too many now to tell but I remember every one. Every street corner I’ve seen still holds the moment like a Polaroid in our album, the laughs and the tears all the same, every molecule of what makes me human was grown on your canvas and I don’t regret a thing. I stood in a foreign land one year and said I suppose the trouble is I wish you would be the home I carried with me always regardless the land under my feet, and I know I meant someone else then, New York, but I don’t anymore. You have grown around me like vines in the jungle, you have fastened your grit like dirt under my fingernails of which I’ll never be washed clean, I can go anywhere now, New York, because while I am not, without you, I also am not without you and there’s a difference there that cannot be overstated. I do not fear my homelessness, anymore, I do not fear anything. You loved my broken pieces until they were whole, let your magic wash over me, and now I am invincible. 

I can never repay what I owe you, but I can spend every day earning what you give me.

I can write you love letters 

until 

the very last word 

leaves my lips.

Heat Wave

Are you remembering to breathe? she says.
For the most part. Sometimes not.
I understand, she says.

The days go on, although sometimes it seems impossible. That each day should pass, that suddenly it's been a month or a year and the things that left you bleeding in the street be only memories and you're not even sure you were there for whatever came before. You don't want to spend your life just trying to stay alive, and yet how many days and months and years have you exhausted yourself just trying to breathe? Twelve years ago I arrived in New York City, Tonight Show marquee glittering in my eyes and the Queensboro Bridge like a hallucination; leaving it was the hardest thing I thought I would ever have to do, and yet a few years later did I not do it again? Somehow I am convinced by the inevitability of my own survival. The days go on, you endure.

Summer ages, begins to be forgotten even as the temperatures soar with the steam. Fall arrives, it's time to get serious, it's time to find those ducks and place them in some sort of row, no one cares if you breathe or not as long as you smile in pictures. I make lists, I try to look at myself in the mirror and see the person who came before the blood bath, but it is impossible. She is no longer here. I decorate my bullet points, pull out maps and trace my pulse along their stories. The days were not supposed to look like this, but they do. You've survived this far.

Soon it will be time for you to live.

Decisions

I stood in the ocean today and spoke with the Universe. It answered in waves, steady on my skin and unafraid. I thought maybe I can be too.

Summer draws to a close, a new season lining up on the horizon and changes in every direction. I keep my constants, hold them tight like a compass in my pocket, let everything else scatter. Do not talk yourself out of the Word, he said, and you align your plans with the guides in your stars. New York swelters and fumes with the last dying rattles of summer, but no matter. You know its true north, you know how your heart beats. It thrashes, too, but once it settles, oh how it remains.

Everything changes
and
Nothing changes
all at once.

The waves roll in.
The stars are there, even when you cannot see them.

September 12, 2016

Find that one thing
that is yours
and no one else's

Don't own it
like a greedy villain
will chain his prized possessions

but embrace it
hold it gently
like a child will hold
a wounded bird
believing it can be saved
with love

Encourage it quietly
on your own
Shield it
Grow it
around your spine
until you know not where you end
and it begins

Then the others can do
what they want

Now it is not only yours
But it is you
and cannot fall out of your grasp.

36

...And the demons rage, still, but they keep me company and sometimes we share a drink. It's a work in progress, too... Above all, I am hopeful for the year to come. 

Because what can I hope for you, but more of the same? I hope you continue to work on your growth, on learning from your mistakes, on finding the magic. I hope something big comes of this love affair and that you gain something from it, whatever it may be. I hope if the time comes to leave this apartment that you do, but I see now, finally, that it may not. I hope, as always, that you see something new, and learn something. I hope you stay curious, and open to Adventure, and say yes. I hope you forgive yourself when you cannot. 

We tend to want the same thing year after year, eh? Be free, be happy, never stop learning or growing, see something new but return to New York... it is where the Word dances in you. I'm so glad to see what you've done of your life and so excited to see what you've yet to do. Be mad. Be free. Be alive. In whatever form that takes. 

Happy Birthday. 

Mizpah

The hydrants are open
Cool breezes
blow

We begin the day in words. Your story climbs out from its hiding place, brushes the dust from its hair, wonders if the war is over. It's been a long summer in the fallout shelter. A year ago we sat in the black Nevada desert and let the Milky Way blow us away; I struggled with the words then but all we can do is try again. When all is said and done I like to think I learned something from the mistakes I made.

We ended the day in words, too. A familiar tingle lingered in my body, warm, sweet, like I had longed for it without knowing for ages. It felt like home.

Fall lies in the margins like an imagined monster, full of claws and Darkness, but it doesn't arrive alone. There's a silence around it, a quiet space and no one to interrupt you in it. If you sit really still, and listen really closely, a world will reveal itself to you that no one else knows, that no one else sees, and all you have to do is write the story that tells itself to you to know the purpose of your feet on this earth. The monsters will always be there, but if you are very, very brave, you will hold their hand and be rewarded with the stars.

Purpose

this is my final fit 

my 

final

bellyache 

She sits in the California sunshine and tells you no truths of the world, only truths of her own, and it is exactly what you wanted to hear. It reminds you this world is strange and wondrous and we don't know anything about what is to come. Another voice comes from the far north with a glimmer of hope around the edges. You exhale. Today I sat at the edge of the ocean and watched a pod of dolphins swim back and forth along the shoreline. There may have been a message in there for me; all I saw was joy. The water was clear, and calm, and the sun browned my pale shoulders, summer lingers in my limbs and I smiled despite myself. My chest was light and I couldn't explain it, but I didn't have to. There's a certain kind of light that hits the West Village in August, it reminds you of a lifetime in its embrace, it reminds you there is sunshine in the world yet and you have only to reach for it. By the time  I walked home, a full moon lit my way. Life is strange and wondrous. I want to always be in awe of it. 

Sometimes you need a reminder. Sometimes you need to sit in the silence of a full moon until it tells you so much of the things you were too tired to hear. Life is strange. But it is, in every day, magic. 

Karma

The heart heals and heals anew, I have comfort enough for a small army, you must understand I was born alone but fill my cup by carrying yours, this is the heart I was asked to own. It breaks and breaks but is not broken.

Start at the bottom. 

Don't stay there. 

Entropy for

You try to yell answers at yourself to fill a cup already obstructed by your own noise. 

The answers will not come until you have endured the silence of not knowing it all, until you have sat with the terror of falling free and not knowing what will catch you at the bottom, there is no room for what you seek until you have let go of the things you pretend to have found in its place. 

Let go. 
Let go. 

Make room for wisdom you could not predict. 

When you are ready,
it will come. 

of Tonight

I woke up before dawn, the apartment still, the street sleeping. I crossed the avenues at red lights because who was around to stop me. First avenue lay in a haze all the way to the upper east side, crooked high rises toppling over each other, and a careful orange sun rising against the warming bricks. The river was beautiful, the morning's runners in silent agreement to not disturb the peace, even the bums sat quiet. The soles of my feet reintroduced themselves to the asphalt, but there wasn't much needed saying. Such is love.

Later, despite the sweltering heat and oppressive humidity, I walked through the Lower East Side to reacquaint myself with the city, to fill my lungs with its sticky neediness, to remember again how my name sounds on its tongue. I stared at fire escapes, appreciated signs, looked everybody in the eye and tried to remember the secret, why this place could make things right. At Delancey, I made my way east, and without thinking began scaling the endless incline that is the Williamsburg Bridge.

There's an overpass at the middle of the bridge, where you can cross from the pedestrian south side to the bike lane on the north, where you can stand over the subway trains as they rattle the old steel on their way between the boroughs. There was a breeze up there, warm but refreshing, I could feel my lungs expand beyond themselves, everything was lighter. I turned around and looked at the view: to my left, other bridges glittered in the afternoon sunlight, the river park where I run, the Statue of Liberty in the distance, everything so small, like a dollhouse. To my right, the expanse of Manhattan stacked like little LEGO bricks in varied shades of brown and gray, the Empire State Building like an old friend, the Chrysler Building like a wink and a smile. I stared at it for ages, staring and staring like filling my belly with the sight, taking deep breaths to hear the melody of the city course through my blood stream. There it is, how simple. It is not perfect, nor always sweet, it does not dole out simple happiness or paint itself in clean cut colors to appease you. But it is real, it endures, when you fall it remains steadfast, when you feel you may float out to sea it will corral you and bring you back to earth. It will see you at your lowest moments, when you most wish you could look away it will look straight at you and not leave. A year ago I sat on a park bench on the other side of the River and watched Manhattan glitter and laugh; I said I love this town more than I knew I could love anything, and I have learned I could love a lot of things since then but the same still rings true. I walked down the bridge, replenished. I still stare strangers in the eyes, but I'm not looking for an answer.

I'm trying to give it away.

Broadway Lafayette

You land late, much later than planned and the last smoggy peaches fade out of the horizon as your plane crawls on the runway. It is late, so late when you leave the terminal and the car share is ten percent off but you drag your beat up suitcase to the subway regardless. You need the city to rub up against you, for the ragged ten p.m. crowd to hold you through quiet Queens, through downtown Brooklyn, you stand sweating on the platform waiting for a connection and recognize every single strangers face as home. New York my sweet heart, America you great unfinished symphony, I am tired and scared and as lost as I've ever been and here you are, waiting on a stuffy platform under the earth, painting me in your relentless grime to look like one of your own, the tall man with the short afro making eyes at me do you think he looks at me and recognizes me as home too, how do I tell him?

I stepped off at Broadway Lafayette street around midnight, Houston street quiet on a Thursday and all the tourists tucked safely in their beds. I rolled a cigarette and watched its smoke dance along the rabbled walls of the Bowery as my suitcase and I made our way home. Home. The plants in the window have died and I think one less thing to tether you, but the truth is nothing you own comes with chains. You are light as a feather, you are free to drag that god damned suitcase to the ends of the earth, because once you let a place make a home of itself to you, you will never truly leave. I'm sorry I veer off track sometimes, my sweet heart, but no matter.

I find my way back in the end.

DUB

We’re still awaiting your incoming aircraft, booms across the speakers. The line grows as your patience wanes, your food ran out ages ago and if you lived here you’d be home by now. It’s a different airline than you know, it’s a different hub and the makeup of the cabin doesn’t look the same as usual. Still, every airport vibrates to the same rhythm, still every ticket burns the same fire into your back pocket and you do not fret. You have no connections to miss: you are only going home.

A tan fades from your legs, slinking off in silence like you didn’t know it was fleeing. Like you didn’t know you set your foot not only on home ground but on a season of getting back to work, of putting your shoulder to the wheel and of making things right. Like I didn’t know how I spend my days is how I spend my life and it won’t look like this anymore. They claim the flight will board in five minutes but the hours pass, it begins to rain.

Take this last sulk through your lungs, breathe a deep sad breath and grate your weariness against your heart. I’m giving you these five minutes. Then dust yourself off and get the fuck back up again.

I’ll wait.

Extend

There’s a heat advisory for New York. You pack your bags and put on a thicker sweater, the air is lousy with fall, you’d take it as a sign but the universe doesn’t care enough even to toy with your emotions. An old lover writes from a nearby island, begging you to come over, it doesn’t mean anything you just always got along so well. You close your bags and go to bed. Tomorrow there’s a bus to an airplane to a whole other life (yours), you long for it so your heart aches and mostly you want to sleep for days. Did you find the answers you came here for? You never do. They wheel your father into the operating room with fewer answers than questions. He comes out with his heart beating again, and you have to tell your mother she does not need to go pick out kitchen tiles just today. She collapses at the permission. You think maybe everyone needs someone to hold them, sometimes, even when they look invincible from afar.

A year ago today I walked down Fourth Avenue, composing witty words to unknown ears, and a smile grew on my lips that did not wear off for months. If I had known then what I know now, would the words I drew sound any different? Would I have wrapped my heart a little more tightly before prying open my chest?

Everyone knows 
It’s going to hurt 
But at least 
We'll get hurt 
Trying 

No.

Light It Up

The sun returns, albeit hesitant. Everyone shivers, her childish skin turns to goosebumps with the wind but her determination wins every time: she shows you the jumps and tricks she’s learned over the summer as you both dive into the water a hundred times. Does she remember how you threw her in the air in Central Park all those summers? Does she remember how you raced around their apartment or went to the zoo or jumped off the swings or learned New York slang together years ago? She asks you to read her bed time story and you think nothing matters but this moment and that makes all the difference. He asks later what is the hardest part now and I think of a million things that sound trite, the truth is simply the days were better with you in them. We went back to the water later, the last bars of twilight echoing across the bay as our laughter dissipated with the coming of night; how dark it is in August, how sad.

I drank too much wine, we listened to too many songs, I suppose I spoke a hundred truths but I wouldn’t have it any other way, does he remember we’ve spoken a thousand truths before and I still can’t go to that bar on 23rd street without him, I wouldn’t want to. You carry people you love in your heart: the weight is immense and nothing at all, I would carry you to the ends of the earth and never regret it, please remember that if nothing else. The bartender let us keep the fancy bacon I gifted him in their cooler and asked I didn’t tell the health department. I miss New York so my heart aches, every sorrow borne of love is a treasure. Tomorrow it will rain but soon I will dive in the water again.

Let me show you the tricks I learned. Let me tell you I love you a thousand times still.

South Island

Land back in a capital town and recognize her face instantly in the street. Three countries in three weeks, you weave in and out of each other’s lives, what a comfort. Her apartment looks the same, this neighborhood looks the same, I lived in a beautiful little morsel of space at the foot of this hill, on the street with the church, I know I stumbled but oh, how the sunrises sang to my confusion. I ran along the water in the late afternoon and remembered a time when this was home, and what a sweet gift it was though I hesitated to unwrap it. She writes from the Californian coast and you both caress the insight you’ve built in the space between your time zones. Do I want too much when I have so much already? she says, and you wish for her more than her heart could ever know to desire. You don’t owe beautiful things to stay with them because they have been good to you. She buys me another beer and we wonder how life deposited us here, what we make of the tickets we were given. I speak half sentences and she knows just how to finish them: this is family. 

I sat on the train today watching a late summer landscape unfold around me. This land which is my home and yet to which I no longer belong, we could stare at each other and make amends with the heartache we’d caused. I scribble in notebooks: all I ever wanted to do was write, and it’s true. I miss home so my heart aches, there’s a hole in my heart where you used to sit, there’s an adventure in my blood stream that makes my skin tingle, and it’s true.

This life is short, and fleeting, and beautiful. I’d take this heartache over complacency, every damn time you asked.

Journeys

The town looks the same, all my life I’ve known these streets and as much as I may want it to, nothing has changed. They live their entire lives on the same blocks where you all were children; the stagnation eats at me even as I try to find comfort in its predictability. Her parents asked about you, I hadn’t prepared a response, and you reappear in my dreams on subway trains headed for adventure. I miss you. We biked home in the late night, the last wisps of twilight still on the horizon and a thousand stars spreading out around us. I know this road with my eyes closed. The bike is fast, gratifying, I laughed today like I was 15 again and this was all there is.

The point is that it isn’t. The point is this was only a short moment of status quo, you were given a chance to see it, you were given the choice to reject it. You ran to the ends of the earth and here’s the point I’m actually trying to make: you did the right thing.

It’s a beautiful place to keep in your memories. Adventure lies where you’ve gone after.

Get the Fuck Back Up Again

Across the ocean, your father rolls in and out of hospital rooms. He sends a smiling picture after coming home, before your mother follows with one of him passed out on a bed again, monitors and wires playing tag around his body. They can’t find anything wrong, she says, but isn’t that a ridiculous thing to say? In the old hometown I say my farewells (again, again, every day is a series of hello goodbyes and you think your heart must be a very strong muscle with all this practice) and board a train north. The sun shines without apology. This morning I ran along the water, along twists and turns I’d know in my sleep, sidewalks I’ve walked home late nights and early mornings, trails I’ve run in joy and in tears, the sun shone every step as if to say we’re all okay, and I suppose it’s true.

It’s only weather.

It’s only life.

The time has come to make it something more.

Firewood Yet

Your father is in the emergency room, she writes. I stand in their window with my wine glass in one hand and a cigarette slowly dancing in the other and try to figure out how I’m supposed to feel. Nothing comes to mind, seems appropriate. You wonder if the cries you hear are wolves that never were, but how little your sensible nature will help you the day their teeth have torn down the door. I wonder if my mother is scared, all alone in those woods, and I realize the backbone in me is all her doing. We do not frighten easily, we do not break. He tells me how his father came home drunk without keys and broke his ribs falling at the second story window. Sometimes you have to let go of the things you cannot change, he says, as I blow smoke into the late summer evening. How’s your book coming? 

I watched an ex walk past me in the street today. This sweet little town, how nothing changes, still he looked like a stranger. I did not say hi. The water was colder today, the cliffs crowded, I forget to whisper gratitude into the sky but you know I mean it. We have only this short moment to make something extraordinary of ourselves. Don’t ever forget that.

Everyone knows you're going to live
So you might as well start trying

Maybe It’s His First Time Around

Awake in sunshine. Walk past the apartment where you used to live, ride a tram past the school where you became who you are, it’s all been too long and you don’t feel a thing. Ring a doorbell to an unknown home but find the hearts within beating like you’ve never not known them. Have you seen what they’ve done to our pasta factory, they say, and New York reappears behind your eyelids like a spectre.

The sun carries on. We take the tram to the ferry, walk to the end of the island until we see only water on the horizon. I dive right in and take long strokes in the clear blue until the dog swims out to corral me: she’s only trying to protect her flock, so I let her. Everything is magic, I breathe a steady rhythm. You should be here, I have time to think before the ferry picks us back up and our skin glows with summer. We sit in their window, later, smoking cigarettes into the sunset and singing blues songs like we had seen heartache only in pictures. The apartment is white, designed, old and new at once, you sink into your heritage. Back home there’s a heat advisory. I sleep with the windows open and try to hear the city outside. If I listen carefully enough, perhaps it’ll whisper the answer.

I fall asleep before it has a chance to.
Wonder if I’d even recognize it if it did.

Salt Water

I sleep a heavy sleep, each dream stranger than the next. The little cabin is silent as the grave, dark, unintrusive. When we wake, the clouds hang heavy, Monday morning and fall is coming, a dread lingers in the air. We make our way to the cliffs; every stranger’s brown skin speaks of an unrivaled summer but you have yet to see it, the loss digs at your gut. The Universe reminds you that it owes you nothing.

By the time we dive into the water, the rain has started, but the sea is warm and kind. You let the salty water rush past your teeth, feel the seaweed between your fingers as you swim along the ocean floor. We tread water and speak of lives lost -our own- and wonder what happens now.

Some days I tire of the constant mulling in my brain. Tomorrow the sun will shine again, everything will be okay one day and when you are ready to turn your life into fireworks, you will. The Universe doesn’t owe you fireworks, after all.

You do.

Souldier

Sunday afternoon, traffic moves into the city but you pack your bags and move out. At the dock, a salty wind whips at your skin but the sun makes the ocean glitter: everything is summer. Catch a ferry and let the islands slip past; we get off at the last stop and trudge up a hill to the tiny cabin. One room, two cats. The only grocery store on the island closed hours ago, but we find potatoes in the pantry and ice cream at the outdoor bar, we do not starve. By the time conversation slows, it is night out, August night and you don’t panic now because the dark doesn’t own you like it did, you have left it. I jumped in a river this morning and the trees hung their branches to ripple the water. Everything real is so far away, I breathe without reminders. But you were supposed to be here, and I see your footsteps in every beautiful scene, see the absence of your smile in my every delighted giggle. Summer is beautiful on its own, it doesn’t need you.

I still think it’d be better if you were there.

Train Tracks

He said no, she says, and the silence that follows is deafening. She shatters in a million pieces, spills her every last confidence into the emptiness that remains. The thing about grand romantic gestures is sometimes they’re too late, the thing about our demons is usually they’re willing to wait however long it takes for us to find them again, for us to make room and let them devour us whole. You meet her on the corner of a neighborhood you once owned, streets you once knew blindfolded. The same tram still runs west, straight to the ocean, you watch familiar turns from its window as she speaks of the fallout. He’ll live in the apartment, so as least we don’t have to deal with dividing that up yet.

When you reach the cliffs, the winds whip the waves into a furor, but the rocks are warm with sunshine. You dive in without a second thought, quickly carried away by the current and both laughing. In the sea there is no failed past or fumbled future. In the sea there is nothing but keeping your head above water. You come up panting, but you come up alive.

That’ll do.

Lag

Land in familiar corridors and still be surprised at the language that echoes through them. Everyone looks like you, but more brown, more blonde, more raised in the woods. Walk familiar hills, ride familiar trains, everything is like home only duller: you’ve made this trip too many times without  adding anything to it, who do you think you are. She says she’s writing to plead for second chances (or third, or fifth, but a leap of faith for sure), and you love a grand romantic gesture but wonder what his heart tells itself at night. You unpack your suitcase and repack it again in a different shape: there is no standing still. The late night is still light outside the open windows. You know exactly where you are.

It doesn’t mean you’re not lost as hell.

Newark

The day swelters outside your window; you refresh apps and calculate costs. At last stumble down the steps of your stoop and into an unknown car, these are the gifts you give yourself. Snail through the West Village, remember the first time you took a car through these streets to the tunnel, how everything you owned rested in the trunk of that car and New York slowly faded behind you. Another sunny day, another throng of traffic, how you cried into the comfortable silence of a cabbie on the phone.

Later, at the end of a terminal, sit staring at the city from afar, as you always do. It's a habit, borne of love, 12 years you've sat in this strange space and stared at it, sometimes in tears, sometimes only in the joy of knowing it is yours whether you are near it or not. How I've tested your love lately, New York, and my own in return: this is what life is, and we do not break from the trials. We merely bend, recoup, and find our way back to each other. This is what love is.

A strange calm settles over me, it always does in this strange space, I should have remembered to expect it, I should have had faith in the process. I can leave you, New York, for a minute or a month, you remain etched in my muscle memory regardless. I can leave you, New York, without leaving you behind, I can run into the world without running away, I should have known to remember, forgive me my momentary stumble. I spoke with the Universe this morning and everything is under control: that which will come, will come. My heart loves and loves and grows by loving, I miss you now but only in fondness. Soon I will sleep in your mad peace again. This heart will remember your name until then.

A/Way

The woman at the drugstore hugs me when I say I'm going away. Dilapidated old drugstore, they put the Village back in this neighborhood. The old Chinese woman who invariably sits smoking on her stoop no matter the hour I pass her smiles, and I nod; we are not ready for hugs yet, it took us months to get this far. Return to my apartment to try to fit this chaos into a suitcase, eat as much of the expiring food as possible. I look around my room like it's the last time: an oddly familiar feeling, I try to shake it quickly, that's not what's happening here. The back of your spine is a weather vane better than than the newscaster, a silent beetle spinning in circles before the earthquake even begins to tremble. I only pretend not to see it out of fear for what the storm will ask of me. In a cold, snowy, Brooklyn window I saw the year spread out ahead like a miracle, like an obstacle course, like a Life, and here we are, deep in the mud but still racing. I spoke to the Universe again this morning. It says hello. It promised to look after you while I'm away, or was it the other way around, it doesn't always speak so clearly but I think it has everything under control.

A ticket lies in my back pocket. I plead with it to tell me something I don't yet know.

Vow to make this not a year without fear
But a year I am fearless.