East 5th Street

You don’t know how long you've been away, it feels like years and minutes all at once. The bartender still knows your order before you’ve even sat your bag down. Her boyfriend arrives later with presents; they share a quiet sweet moment at the short end of the bar and you feel stray daggers in your chest despite yourself. A loud man at the table next to you tells the women he’s with what they’re doing wrong and his loud laugh grates at you, what you wouldn’t give to decimate his kind but yes sure, he also has his good moments. You are not that great all the time, don’t forget.

I sat in the windowless office earlier, with the weight of too many weeks on my lungs. He tries a hundred different ways to lift them from you, how grateful you are for the lifeline, but in the end I know the answer, I just need to hear it repeated sometimes. The answer is always work, the answer is do the thing, the answer is put one god damned foot in front of the other because it is the only way to get anywhere at all and the secret is you want to get everywhere before it’s over. You cancel dates and sit at the bar smiling. A small girl sits next to you, eager to read the next chapter, eager for you to take the both of you into a better future. You feel her little hand in yours, even as it is weightless. This life is bigger than you now, it is bigger than you know but you’re getting a sense. You waver sometimes, you are bound to.

But I know where it is I’m going. And no matter how I get there, the point is that
I will.