Ebb

February drags its wasted remains to an end. Always this lack of posts in February, always so few words to say, so little meaning. Enough money to pay rent trickles in your hands at the last minute: you look up, and it's all been washed away. You buy yourself one more month of a home. You don't even know what the word means anymore; home is something you carry deep within yourself, after all, it cannot be taken from you. New keys get added to your chain - no, chain is the wrong word - new doors open to you, winter is impossibly cold but the snowdrops are in bloom and I know everything is coming, everything, do you hear me? I dragged my wasted remains through the end, it turned out 

it was

only

beginning. 

Coach

And as soon as you taste it, how quickly it is gone. How quickly the rug is pulled from under you and February shovels the dirt back over your limp body. I sleep all day, awake at night and frown at the darkness. She sends a picture of palm trees and the pain sears through my gut; how I remember the feeling of sunshine on my eyelids, the way warm air hums at a different frequency and what life feels like when it runs amok in your chest. I long for it so I can't move, so the screams build up and lodge themselves in my lungs, every day I walk along the flowerbeds looking for signs that we are almost out of the woods, that if I hold on just a little longer I will be able to breathe again, that this is just a bad nightmare and if I wait long enough it will be over. My words fall to the wayside, everything I thought I was doing drowns. One day I took the train out to Coney Island and stood shivering at the end of the pier. The ocean carried on, as it does, forever changing and unchanging, an amusement park stood cold along its shore, quiet but not dead. Just waiting. An old Russian couple walked to the railing, looked at the horizon, and turned right around.

You can bury me all you like, you know. I will wait it out, and eventually you will be gone. I've done this for years now: I always grow back.

Change

It’s there when you wake up, waiting impatiently for you. A streak of sunlight down the street that doesn’t look like it did yesterday, an air in your lungs you haven’t felt all year. You step out, happily overdressed, run along a river promenade bathing in sunlight and yesterday’s melting snow. We laugh in the park and revel in birdsong, you know it’s too soon and the day will not last. But it is a gift, it is wrapped in sunshine and that smile on your face you know to be you, I am ready to carry the world again, I will pick the cup back up off the floor and I will let it
run
the
fuck
over.

-1

The weather app claims light freezing rain like it's a pleasant quirk of benevolent gods. Outside the street is pitch black and slick with ice (because let's be honest, freezing rain is just ice that falls). I spend a day in the window: my feet burning when the radiator fires up, my fingers freezing when it rests. The typewriter shivers and shakes under my thumb, but I am not trying to take out my anger on it, I thought we were dancing. Consent is only tricky when you're trying to make excuses. Guilt is not softened by milk and honey after the blow. The forecast tomorrow calls for spring warmth and afternoon sunshine.

Fool me twice, shame on me.
But I'll still take the honey, if you're offering.

afterthoughts

if it doesn't help you (grow)
let it go

Re:peats

The air grows cold again, the gold on your skin fades. Circle the equinox in your calendar, count down minutes, they pile on top of you like heavy snowflakes and you don't know how you'll make it out alive.

The thing is, you will.

Minutes are unbearably long when you await your lover, and also when you await your next breath. You remind yourself it's the same agony; there's something life affirming in the fact. Read old words and find the darkness to look the same every year, but your voice to sound wiser with each passing February. A previous version of you leaves little notes, secret messages, words of encouragement. Don't ever think it's forever. I know it seems endlessly far now, but it is not. Scan your photo albums for signs of spring buds and sunshine, mark the dates in capital letters. Ignore everything else you see, looking back.

I know it seems endlessly far now
But it is not. 
It is all still here
You'll be okay. 

Precedent

For days, the sun shines. For days, my nerves twist and stretch and remember how to do more than survive, but I still can't bear to look the future in the eye: too much is left undone, too much builds on the crumbles of what was before. I dream of the ocean. It lingers in me through the day: I remember that life is bigger sometimes than we can know, and there is a beauty in riding the current, a lightness in being more than yourself.

You are on the right track.

That is all that matters.

(of) Mine

For a moment, the sun shines. For a moment, the weight is lifted: you know better than to look for it, better than to ask questions. The glasses of bubbly refill themselves, a night ravels and unravels, a melody drifted through my ear drum today and I recognized it without knowing. When your lungs breathe, do not ask questions, when the sun shines, just let it. I know the road is long, but you're walking it.

As long as you keep breathing, you stay in the game.
As long as you keep fighting, you win.

Sleet

The forecast throws out every assault in its arsenal: you wake to find it wasn't lying. There's a crack in the window where the Arctic rushes in, I sit with my feet on the radiator in remedy. What are a few second degree burns against permafrost.

In a surprise twist, I woke breathing today. The action so unfamiliar, not like riding a bike at all, my body creaked and moaned and tip-toed around the momentary lightness like a foreign language. There's no telling how long the reprieve, you tread carefully but bask in the clarity. Watch your brown hands type stories into the world, keep the bigger picture at arm's length, I know there was something I thought my life would come to but perhaps it still will. Someone asked me today to come to a socialist dating event and I thought there's a pot for every lid. I didn't mean it, of course, all I mean is I'm not dying, all I mean is the edge is further away than the tips of my feet, all I mean is you've survived an entire life and you still collect gold coins and stardust, sometimes the cold takes the feeling from your fingertips but when they thaw
good god
are they on
fire.

Re:lied

Days pile on top of each other. They're suitcases at the end of a conveyor belt where no one picks them up, they land in a jumble, shoving and breaking yet no one can slow the tide. I drag myself through heavy mornings, force miles out of my feet that do not come willingly, go through the motions of every doctor's order and still this unwillingness for survival instincts to kick in. My skin itches, trying to escape itself. Trying to leave me. Depression looks quaint in books, you see, but in reality is mostly a large brick wrapped in cotton balls and sewn into your gut: nothing means anything. I try to think of the happiest, the saddest, the most anything I can imagine and it all comes up numb, like vague recollections of a dream you do not care to remember. An entire life passes before my eyes, it doesn't matter. They say the sun rises earlier each day, they say keep your chin up, they say nothing at all because who wants to stand so close to a leper, best wait until this blows over and Pollyanna returns, why isn't she here yet, we are tired. I wake by late afternoon, drag jugs of pathetically cheap wine to the typewriter, and cannot even scoff at the trope I've become. These things look prettier in retrospect. Weak fingers move across the keys; hold on to each letter like a lifeline, see meaning build itself with each verse. You can do nothing about the suitcases, they will keep coming, you can do nothing about the lead and the cotton and the crawling skin, they live in you just like your lungs, like your blood.

Put one foot in front of the other
one word after another
Write yourself out of winter
Eventually you will wake.

Abyss

You are here, now. At the bottom of the barrel, easier to shoot than the cold, slimy fish crowding around you. In fact, given the chance you may do the job yourself, save the world the effort. You wonder if not everyone spends their days treading water simply to keep breathing; it seems a novel thought, unfathomable. If you rest for a minute, how quickly you'd slip away into the depths, how easy. How relieving. On the screen, a man self-destructs against a romanticized Venice Beach backdrop; I google rental listings and am glad to see I couldn't afford any of them, because otherwise what could keep me from going? The itch in my vein is back, the clawing at my back, the constant threat of sick at the top of my throat. My brown skin dries in the winter freeze, the bottle beckons earlier each morning: I do not dress. Everyone around you tumbles, no one can carry the other. She writes to say the anxiety is an old friend, creeping in under her skin, always reliable. For two people who have never relied on anything, it seems we take what we can get. Every moment of peace is just a moment waiting for status quo to return. A collection of pills beckons at the back of my closet.

It's a good thing you're too tired to make your messes bigger than they are.

of Sand and Sea

A week sinks into your blood stream. A language wraps itself around your tongue like it belonged there, your feet turn brown and accustomed to the brushings of sand along its ankles. I breathe like I had never forgotten how, and suddenly the world appears, reappears, exists again. The sound of foreign music across the rooftops, the crinkling of palm leaves against adobe. The air smells of grilled meats, salt water, sweat, something sweet between houses, my eyes squint against midday sunlight, brightly painted houses, the locals huddle inside dark corner stores while I spread eagle in the street, soaking up sunshine. My eyebrows fade, my shoulder freckle. The mornings are mad with birdsong, the nights are quiet. Today I sat at the edge of the ocean and thanked it for all the things I forget to say, forget to remember when winter sits in my chest like a lump of coal no one deserved. This ocean which remains, at every corner of the world, at ever corner of my crooked life. Everything that is anything remains at the other end of this return ticket. But I am armed to the teeth with sunshine now, with other turns of the tongue, with brightly painted chambers in my heart and something sweet between, I know everything remains but I am not who I was when we parted. I am sunshine now, just you 

try and 

stop me. 

Was a Place in the Sky

A string of sunrises and sunsets come and go, piles of sand amass in your bags. It’s hard to remember that there’s a home waiting on the other end of your ticket, that there is cold and snow and all the realities you left behind, unchanged by your absence. She writes from across an ocean and wonders if it’ll always be this hard. You stare at a palm tree and try to remember what she means. You suspect the answer is yes. The breeze is soft on your cheek, the tide recedes on schedule.

Be here now.
Everything else will wait for you, anyway.

Conclusions

Today I sat on a beach in Mexico and cried. I will never forgive the world for letting me sit on a white sandy shoreline in the Pacific Ocean where the breeze is gentle, and cry.

But then.

I will never forget how the Pacific Ocean washed its salt water over mine and rendered  my tears invisible. I will never forget how the sound of its crashing waves drowned out the incessant wailing inside my head, how my arms grew tired diving in its perpetual waves, how eventually I forgot lead in my chest and floated safely back to shore.

The ocean heals and heals anew. One day it may even save me.

is Here

January ends, skulking silently through a back door, you do not miss it. I spent the morning with my feet in the sand, with my feet on the ground, with my back straight and my eyes staring into the sun, how easy it is to breathe again, I do not take it for granted. I counted every rolling wave as it came towards me, the entirety of a world condensed into whether to jump or dive or surf, there is nothing else. At the end of the day, the tide still tugs at my muscles, all is well. 

It’s not that everything else isn’t still insurmountable, it isn’t that winter doesn’t lie long and dark still at the end of your return ticket. It’s only that for a brief, sun soaked moment, it doesn’t matter. All the answers are here. I have all I need with me. 

Nayarit

The ocean is a different color on this side of the world, your limbs move in a different way and your tongue speaks words you didn’t know you knew. Behind you lies a polar vortex, an indescribable winter, ahead is only sunshine and lazy scents of coconut oil but here’s the thing. 

The thing is that you can run to another coast, another ocean, you can run yourself out of those heavy clothes and heavier walls, out of a winter that wouldn’t end, but you still wake up with yourself.  The weight that sits in your gut does not belong to a winter or to a place on the map, it is yours. 

Take a deep breath.

Start at the beginning. 

Dig where you stand.