For So Long

It’s the way the sunlight is a little clearer, the blue sky a little crisper, it’s how your lips dry and your head buzzes with static over the silence. An alarm clock rang at four in the morning, streets empty, a warm rain on the avenues as I raced downstairs to catch a car. Do the dances you could step in your sleep and here you are: home. Or away, it doesn’t matter, I forget in an instant the metropolitan sway of my hips and lean back in the drivers seat, letting my accent sink into saccharine slowness. We have never all been gathered before; a tree stands trimmed with lights and doused with candy canes in a corner, homemade snowflakes strewn across the lower half. An anomaly. For brief moments, if you stood in the window looking in, we might appear to be happy, cradled in familial warmth and comfortable holiday cheer. And yet some moments I look at these people and wonder how any of us will make it out alive.

The truth, of course, is that none of us will. But that’s only a philosophical irony. The trick is to make it through a little better than you dreamed you could,
And to give yourself credit for dreaming
in the first place.