Tussin

The illness drags itself up and down the length of my body like nails on a chalkboard: incessant, grating, relentless in its demands for attention. I don't breathe right, I don't sleep right, my limbs are heavy and do not respond to my calls for action. He writes from across the river to say the same thing, and we spend hours on a couch just breathing in raspy tandem, while the dog happily settles in the quiet space between us: this space with expands and contracts with every question we answer, or fail to. I am so many unanswered questions lately, they waxe and wane through my chest like this October congestion, one minute consumed with impatient conviction, the other resting in accepted ignorance. When there is much to win, there is always much to lose, and the heart in your chest steels itself for another season of assaults on its soft underbelly.

But here's the point I'm trying to make, New York, however ineloquently, and it is that I love you. It is that no matter the day, or year, or weather, I am happier with you than I ever have been without. That no matter the money in my pocket or the success on my papers, ever day I live here I have won. That I can look back fondly on the violent sorrow of every time I've left, a sadness that tore the organs from within my body and drained the light from my eyes, because they seem now a maudlin recollection of a time when we did not know better, of a threat that will not reappear. And however lonely, or mismatched, or confused I may find myself, simply walking your streets will make sense of the world again and make the pieces fall into place. I sleep sounder in your crazy cacophony than ever I did in the quiet darkness that is everywhere else. You make me a better person, you make my life unequivocally worth living, and I will spend the rest of my days attempting to deserve you. 

The point I'm trying to make,
is that I am not afraid.