Lean

I'm not a revolving door, she rants on the country radio in winding mountain passes, before static eats up the rest of her monologue. I'm a one way street. How exceptionally simplistic, you think as you hug the curves you know by heart. Life is so much more than platitudes. My mother cuts my hair, inches much too short and for just a moment my breath gets stuck in my throat. But it's only hair: it grows back.

The year races to its end, the decade saunters. You don't want to jump back, you don't need to run ahead. Somehow, for one short instant in your life, you are happy right where you stand. A year races to its end and you will not be sorry to see it go. A shiny new day rests on the horizon; is this not always the way? Ten years later, how much can you add to the conversation? The answer is that you have to grow every year to not bore yourself. You have to grow to make it worthwhile.

New Year,
Same You.

Just a little bit better
again.

Circle

(There must be a way
to be home 
and not feel like a 
wrung
out
sponge

but you haven't 
found it
yet)

Go West

You wish you had more words.

The way the sun breaks through snowy clouds over the mountains, the way the child who looks like your bloods ties himself to you in an instant, the way you suddenly sleep ten hours and you don’t know how, but everything is quiet.

I wrote her today, stretching on the warm back porch after and long run that went nowhere and said I am really, really happy.

Maybe those are all the words I need.

Ends

A day comes and goes too quickly. Promising to sit still, you end up rushing despite yourself and there’s never a moment to catch up with your own idea. Is it like this every year? you wonder, but memory is fickle. Walking through moments, it’s hard to know which one felt the most like a miracle, and still all you see ahead is Dark.

Set the alarm clock for well before dawn. Wonder if you’ll ever feel like it isn’t all simply slipping through your fingers.

What More Can I Do

Quiet apartment, you sit in the window watching commuter trains leave the city and counting down minutes until Christmas can land in your bones. The day was warm, sunny, like a beautiful spring day but you saw it only as a gift. I stood along the river and stared straight into the light like it would save me, and it’s not unlikely that it did. There was a great hole in the earth yesterday, did you feel it? Sometimes I think the universe dialed us in to the same connection without realizing; I don’t know yet what it means. The commuter trains returning to the city are empty.

Sometimes I think my heart would beat out of my chest if I let it go.

Squall

The snow, when it comes, is a monster, appearing out of nowhere and burying you in a second. You see videos later and it looks like an avalanche burying the city. The snow leaves arctic air in its wake, every step carefully calculated against risk and reward. We make our way into an old townhouse off 5th avenue, the ballroom coming alive with story and you marvel at New York City magic, how it appears and reappears at every turn. I whisper my gratitude into the night, and again, and again. Sometimes love overwhelms us when we forget to look for it, it rolls like waves through our insides and grows us whether we want to or not. Love is not proud. It always perseveres.

The day is mild again, the sun setting in fire at the other end of the bay, every step I take is in gratitude now, do you know that? At some point all the shattered pieces within me healed, at some point I could look in the mirror and recognize my face again, love is patient, love is kind. The darkest day of the year is behind us now.

Every step beyond this is a gift
is a
triumph.

Advent

December is a blur, more work, more deadlines, more scheduled cheer and you try to drink it in as best you can: mania is a temporary gift, and the January hangover already looms in the distance. I bought a light therapy lamp, sit staring into it in the mornings like an addict, longing for it when it goes dark. I'm sorry I never write, I'm just so busy keeping my hands to myself, there's too much light in this body this season and I need to share it somehow, yesterday I ran along the river and it was like my body remembered again who I am, what I'm meant to be doing. It's been such a long time of having forgotten, it's no wonder if we are strangers to each other.

But do not worry. I carry light with me now, I make my own. Stick with me, kid, I carry stars in my hands and you look like you could use a few in yours: the magic of Life is how it all
evens
out.

Upstate

Winding Friday night slog out of the city, it takes two hours just to get off the island and by then it is dark, the parkway shrouded in mist, it’s a horror story. We navigate the last few blocks by memory, the little town asked again to carry our dreams and our needs for escape: everyone is friendly, everything is quiet. We roast marshmallows in the fireplace and wear matching pajamas until noon, ride horse drawn carriages with jingling bells and enter the raffle with unknown rewards. So long since I last walked these streets; I was broken, then, a bowlful of empty and now how my steps are light, my limbs only here and nowhere else.

Do you hear me?

I carried the piles of my own smoking ruins, these devastated bones, I brought them through unending winters and raging storms and now I am here: I break and break but am not broken. Do you hear me?

The heart heals 
And heals
anew. 

Wintry Mix

You wake early, the streets black and slick with last night's rain. Everything is quiet, like no one really is sure what time it is. The radiator has lost its mind and pumps out steam enough to heat a small village, you swelter and open a window. Rise and Shine. You run to the trains hoping the weather hasn't derailed the time tables but knowing better; by the time you unearth in Brooklyn the mist has turned to hail, and when the sun finally rises, it is hidden behind a blanket of big, heavy snowflakes.

I wake every morning from strange dreams, wandering through dilapidated houses and wondering at the whims of the Universe. I think I was lost for a while, you know, and I'm sorry if I dragged you with me in the muck, but I am ready to step out now. Rain turns to hail turns to snow on our eyelashes, what can we do but roll with the punches? There is work to be done, books to be written, we have destinies to fulfill. Meet me on the shore whenever you're ready.

We can look at the map together.

Gumdrops

A day slips through your fingers: you were ever the master procrastinator, perfectly poised to tiptoe around the fire in perpetuity. Hours while away into pretended necessities. A year lies behind you, a thousand pages lie behind you, how many times will you have to correct your trajectory? I went for a long run along the river, before the rain, the air so mild; I've been forgetting to trace my steps lately and yet every return to the starting line is a remedy. My body is unrecognizable lately, my mind covered in piles of confusion and my heart crumpled. But a tiny flame sits, still, in the deepest corner of my chest, carrying on unabated despite the wreckage around. It is guarded by a young girl at the edge of a cursor. She runs alongside me, says: every return to the starting line is a remedy. Correcting your trajectory is better than walking the line.

It is dancing it.

Create

(the bar is loud despite the rain, you only have a minute and you squeeze as much as you can out of it, you eke out a trickle of words like drops of blood, crawling toward the finish line and it is constantly moved further away. We are at the end of this year now, do me a favor and crumple in up, throw it in the fire at first chance. Forget who you were and what you did to yourself, you won't want to remember it in your old age. Take with you only rage, only the stubborn grit that does not let you run away anymore, it is too hard earned to leave behind, it cost you too much to let go. The bar is loud despite the rain, you are here despite the darkness, a new year arrives on the horizon and god damn if I won't step into it and leave
these ashes
behind.)

of Giving

A Monday arrives, the days pass so quickly in December, racing toward a socially constructed finish line and leaving you grasping at remaining moments to complete your to do lists and impossible dreams before it is too late, before you are too old. An alarm clock ticks at the edge of your vision, reminds you it will soon scream into the ether and it will be too late for you to change your mind, to reclaim your soul and your beating heart from the devil with whom you made deals so long ago. You spent a lifetime building armor, and now you want only to tear it down, life is a cruel joke if you look too closely, best not to. You string another garland of colorful lights around the joyful apartment, sink into reprieve, see your body soften not from love but from protection, I know I have to do something about this because nobody else will, and anyway soon a new year will appear full of promise and potential, soon you can reinvent the wheels under your armor.

I think perhaps your cuts hurt me more than I knew and this shield just kept us both from seeing the blood as it drained from my body.

Sometimes I fear we know too much of life, and that is what turns us against it. Perhaps when the new year comes, we should shed our skin how we built it, should wash our memories clean and start anew with only hope, only faith, only beating hearts no thought to how they bleed. If ignorance is bliss, perhaps this is the year we transcend into oblivion.

M-I-SS-I-SS-I-PP-I

We're on a winning streak
I got a plan that's gonna turn it all around.

 A handful of free hours arrive at your doorstep: you are dumbfounded. Your liberated muscles creak with disuse, eyes blink at thee sunlight. I took a short run along the river, let my rusty lungs stretch before landing at the piles of words and wondering, but, you know, in the other sense of the word.

Wonder.

What a gift it is to age, and still be giddy like a child, to still swell like a balloon in gratitude, to still be amazed as though you had not seen this feeling before. We can fall in love a hundred times, and each time is as magical as the one before.

A young girl greets me at the end of the cursor, repeats my words back to me. I would not let you go into this fight, if I did not believe you had it in you to make it out. I fall in love with her all over again, wonder at the magic at my fingertips. Begin with cautious steps: break in to a run when you are ready.

Take Heart, Little Monkey

The Monday bar is quiet on a Tuesday; you sink into the warm, dark, downstairs mood as the cortisol finally washes out of you, we are superhuman when we need to be but achingly human when the storm has passed. A week has passed in silence, did you notice? I forgot: I forgot how to think, how to let the moments sift through words to arrange themselves neatly in my lungs, I forgot my own name how it sounds when all the accents are right. I am here, now but I'm not sure it's real. Would you pinch me? Would you shake me up and say my name, over and over until I feel like myself again? An old man in the toystore said he moved to the East Village in 1982, but I also got to live in the West Village for a while, on Bethune, that was a dream, and now here we were, wrapping gifts and talking about rent controlled apartments like we still hadn't achieved all we came to, and realizing we never would. New York is a dream: it puts everything you ever could imagine you'd want right in your hands,
and then you wake.

This year I am grateful for another year, grateful for more days on these strets and the promise of others to come. We lose so much, so much, all the time, including time, and we have to keep an eye on all that we gain. More days under our belt, piles of days, mounds of wisdom all adding up, one day I will tell you everything I know and it will be beautiful, this life is a miracle, I may be quiet sometimes, but don't for a second think
I forgot.