Ends

A year on fire comes to a smoldering ember, is stomped  out by the collective exhaustion of a people dragged through its flames. We sit waiting, anxiously counting down minutes, knowing nothing really will change at the stroke of midnight but thinking maybe, maybe there’ll be miracles at the end of this clock, at the end of this drink, thinking I am going to make it through this year if it kills me, and hoping it will not. 

79 minutes left. We pour another drink, light a fire in the backyard and watch a full moon cross the heavens, one year I watched the stars in the black sky of the west and said the Universe has already given me the gifts, it is now up to me to use them. And this year the Universe took all our gifts from us, took our hard earned wins and the ground from under us when we’d always taken it for granted but god damn, it did not take our hope, and making it into the new year is how we prove it. 75 minutes left. You will start from the bottom, yes. But you will build towers and light stars, you will give the Universe gifts in return, 67 minutes left and in the new year you hold the Universe just as much as you wanted it to hold you in the travesty of a year that passed. 

It’s a new year. The you is old, but damn, if this isn’t a year it’ll be good. 

Announce

 (I am done
accepting mediocrity
in this life when I am working so
hard
to create miracles, 

am done allowing
complacent,
half-hearted,
attempts at my
attention

when I have whole
hearts
of attention to
share, I 

am no longer taking
applications
on paper napkins
without poetry,
on the backs of
receipts
without sweat stains and
echoing laughter in the
margins do you
hear me?
I am done
with anything less than
your absolute

Fireworks.)

268

I fail, at every turn I fail, not reaching the bars haphazardly splayed above me but tumbling instead into depths below, perpetually convinced that to not reach the top means to be firmly mired at the bottom. Does midwinter always feel so hopeless (the answer is yes)? A dreadful year comes to a close, but you never can outrun yourself. Did you do the things you thought you might make of your life (the answer is never)?

But I see the numbers rise on my list of notes written. See how this year has somehow, despite the muck and mire and the feeling that you are forever so many steps behind, added up to more stories than any other year before it, see how twelve years of keeping this record has been more prolific this year than ever. Sometimes growth does not announce itself in great fanfare. Sometimes it merely arrives, nestles in, after you've walked ten thousand miles one step at a time, after you've built your story brick by brick, sometimes it is just there, and you made it. 

The new year arrives with fireworks and countdowns and much hollering, but that doesn't mean that everything will, nor that if it doesn't, it is somehow less spectacular. 

Keep your eyes open. You may not be falling at all.

Dawn

She comes into the room while it is still dark, 4-year-old bare feet tip-toeing across 150-year-old wood boards and crawling up into the little nook formed by my half-sleeping body. As dawn stretches across the river, we watch the snowflakes start to fall, more and more until they cover the ground and blind the view of the old cemetery. I make a large pot of coffee and take out the sourdough rising in a cold stairwell; how mornings in the country move at different speeds. 

Later, at my desk, staring straight into the appearing sun, I flip through piles of paper to remember the year that past, try to build a new one ahead. Eventually, every memory fades into objects of our illusion, isn't this life so strange? I wanted you to be the one thing I never forgot, but now I can no longer trust my hazy ideas of what you were. I dream such strange dreams here in the country, perhaps it is no different. 

All years end, eventually. 

This, too, shall pass.

Flurry

The morning arrives dark, dragging itself into existence. I sleep a deep sleep and outlast my alarms, this does not happen. The long sleep should make me well-rested, I think as I wade through a day of heavy eyelids: nothing works according to your plans. Little snowflakes dance their way to the ground, they do not stick (what does?). It's only Monday, you tell yourself, always with the mantras, always with the reminder that better things can come if you endure this life. Were we only ever meant to endure it?

I miss a simple joy. 

But it's only winter. 

There is life yet to be lived. 

Isn't there?

Pleasantries

In the late afternoon, midwinter sunshine across barren fields, leaving New York City behind and speeding down the highway, it's a special kind of joy in the freedom of driving out that I haven't quite wrapped my head around yet. The joy lies perhaps most in knowing I can just as easily return. 

I arrived at the creaky little house right as twilight settled across the Hudson, a magic moment and happy faces in the door, a longed for breath of fresh air. Everything is surreal in the side-real, the sun seems to rise at different angles, the clocks move at speeds all their own. We sat at the bar later, a bar, can you believe it? and tried to catch up on things which refuse to be caught. A book of poetry burns a hole in my back pocket, what a dream it is to live in words, what a gift. It gets dark so early here in the country. 

I wonder if one day I'll show you. 

We can set the clocks however we like, I promise.

Rite

(The great magic comes over me. The late-night, grows-in-silence, paints-in-words magic that gave me every purpose, created every guiding light, the impossible magic that delights and astounds me, that tortures me in its absence, returns. I sit silently at the word processor and watch the letters turn into sentences into entire worlds under my fingertips. Sometimes I forget what it is to be moved by the word and think I have been abandoned entirely, that this madness was only youthful conceit at last to be washed away by wisdom and sense, but oh, it is not so. 

if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. 

May we never be so old,
that we cannot hear our own soul
when it speaks to us.)

Arriving

The wind rages through the night, turning over restaurant awnings and newspaper boxes. For the first time in a year, I sleep well into the late morning; it feels like a gift I do not know how to unwrap without guilt. The apartment is a mess of celebration and light, it's a sweet awakening in a silent day. You decide not to carry anyone else's grief on your shoulders. Not today. 

You have plenty of your own, and as this year draws to a close, your muscles are weary of the work. 

They say not to believe the sun will rise on January 1st with all the ills of the old year wiped clean, but it is too tempting not to. This year has dragged us through the mud and left us there, with nothing but our daydreams and memories of clear skies for solace. 

And yet. 

And yet, I leave this year with a clarity that could not have come without the dirt along my hem, with a longing for sparks that would not have set itself on fire in my chest had I not gone so long in stillness. What you want out of this life is becoming clear now, only through the mist of what you have not been allowed. We will stumble out of this madness like after a long illness, smelling the spring air as though it had never carried so sweet a scent. 

This holiday afforded me a chance to sit in the stillness, to hold myself in gentle kindness, and to reaffirm my vows to the city which has weathered every storm it has encountered since we first met. There is no greater gift than to find love, in whatever manner it appears, and love will not let itself be dispersed merely by global disasters and sorrow. 

So you see, this year was not for naught. You know, in truth, they never are.

Eve (revisited)

On Christmas Eve it rains. Great big torrents of warm water from the tropics wash Second Avenue clean and solitary, it is a sweet sort of gift of the season. Even after all these months of solitude, there's a particular kindness in silence; I turn the lights down and let the colors of the season rest in the periphery. Years of practice have perfected the routine: deep, gentle sorts of pleasures, slow steps and thorough breaths, dotted with delights. You sound awfully happy, he says, and though you know there was a time you never could have believed it, now it is true. Somehow, you have been given this brief breath in which to rest, in which not to fear, or despair. I know there was a time when the rhythm of your breaths calmed me in the night; I know there was a time when I believed all of life lay ahead of me and the Mad Word might follow me indefinitely. Such innocence is gone.

But I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge again, today, as I do every year, and while this year I have crossed that damned bridge more than perhaps ever before, turning around to see Manhattan tower before me still takes my breath away like it is the first time I see it. Returning across the span to the island, I can still remember it from that fall in my youth when every step on its streets seemed an impossible dream. This city has grown itself into a home, I have let it twist and turn itself around my every nerve ending, inhabit my every emptiness, I know the outline of this city like a lover I no longer fear losing, and that is the greatest gift. 

So that even in a year such as this one, a year so cruel, so intent on stripping us of every last shred of our humanity, so impossibly relentless, I can look out at these empty streets and still see the home I fell in love with once and a hundred times since. So that even in a life such as this one, I can be overwhelmed with gratitude that I have one thing that is so good, it makes the agony bearable. 

I have one thing that is so good,
it lets me want for nothing.

that Life is Okay and

In order to reach order, she says, you must allow for chaos. You survey the disaster that is your supposed sanctuary, try not to consider what it might reveal about you. Here is a woman who has lost her mind. He speaks of food like it's a language, of language like it's a story, of stories like they are possibility. You feel irreparably damaged, feel scarred along your nerve endings, like your eyes reveal your disability in how the sides won't crinkle right when you smile. Remember a time you weren't broken and wonder how things could have been different. 

They are not. 

He speaks of poetry and the mere mention softens your spine. You take more comfort in silent ink than beating hearts, none of this is new. You buy a shovel for the car, as the snow at last begins to melt. Christmas arrives in the strangest year yet. 

You asked the Universe for this. Did you make of your wish what you could?

that I won't be with you

When I was a child in the South Pacific, the children touched our hair and called us angels; this concept brought to them by crusaders with their white god, their pure heavens. I learned something on that island I could not quite place. I wrapped my pale skin in a lavalava until it made more sense than the alternative, curled my feet in deference, revered the hibiscus. When I returned to the north, they called me gingerbread, and I thought I never wanted to be different again. 

We can choose how we walk the path of our life, but we cannot map it entirely. I was given strange gifts for the journey but they are what I have now, I grew up in a life that tried to save everything but did not try to save me, these are the road signs I navigate. All I ever knew was the Word, all I ever knew was this city held a secret and that writing was the way I'd reach it.

You are here now: that is all there is. You have only the next step, where you take it. You did not pick your cards. But the time has come to play them. 

So go play.

In a Wonderland

The great snow passes. Leaves the city quiet for a minute, the city that's been quiet for a year. We come out of our caves later than usual to survey the damage; it's just enough to delight the children, but not enough to halt the life. Do you remember the blizzards of 2010, how we owned the West Village streets where no cars could go? I dragged a heavy suitcase down the subway stairs at Houston and unearthed in the South Pacific, what a life this is. I wrote a kind word to my father and he replied in tears, perhaps there is magic left in love. 

Wished for a life this year
it's brand new. 

The car is buried. Heat steams out of the radiator in great clouds. An avocado plant grows despite itself on the windowsill. 

I haven't told you yet,
but I'm gonna be with you.

Snow Day

The night before the storm is quiet, calm. I bike home along the west side and watch the Hudson River lie still in anticipation, all black glass against the lights of New Jersey. It's cold. When the snow comes, it is strange, like something you knew once but which left you long ago, something familiar in your bones but foreign still. Late at night, children come out to kick around in the streets. No one does any work on a snow day in the year 2020, we've lost all sense of time and reason, rhyme and season, what I'm trying to say is we've lost our minds, the snow turns to drops of ice against the window pane and these old tenement buildings haven't seen proper heat in a hundred years, the risers just crack with one deep breath of steam in the night, my body can commiserate. It's dark so early now I forget the day is over, midnight rolls in over my wide open eyelids and guilts me into rolling over. Do you remember when you were still there to roll over to?

I don't. 

It's strange, now, how foreign. Your skin against mine is just a crack in my bones. 

And every storm passes, eventually.

Pause

The days whisk themselves from underneath your feet, run through sunny spring days and into biting cold. Along the river, your cheeks flush with sunshine, or promise, sometimes it's hard to tell. He calls you later and feels a million miles away, you always hated to let anything go. Christmas approaches, a new year approaches, you look to the screen for answers but it has none, rumor has it the answers are inside of you. We're surviving a year that seems unsurvivable. 

It's a low bar. 

Or maybe it's just right.

But Soft

Winter comes, at last, the little tenement apartment takes its century old cracks and twists itself around the polar winds. I find a parking spot around the corner from the apartment, spend the street sweeping hour chatting up unknown neighbors and thinking New York still holds a little magic, after all. My muscles creak with unexpected use, I stretch my legs along the river and smile into the sunshine. There is hope yet. We end the evening on that irresistible block on west 4th street, three bourbons in, heat lamps beaming above our heads. This year has twisted everything around, has beaten you to the ground, but you are still human, after all, you still can delight in the little gifts the Universe can afford. When I wake in the morning, before dawn, the living room hums with colored lights, with twinkling stars in the windows. We all hurt, now, we all hurt. 

But we can stretch these muscles,
and build something new from their pain.

Snö

I grow silent under watchful eyes. My hands freeze at the keyboards — literally too. Outside, it snows. New York feigns London winter of 1962, you put on another layer of clothing and vow to keep your head out of the oven. The light therapy box beams at all ours now, I cannot fall asleep for the manic energy it affords me at night. Is this not the time for poetry? Surely, surely it is.  Surely the depths of our ennui, the darkness of our weary despair, leave only room for art and nothing else, this is not a loss. I pick up a pen again. Lace up my sneakers. Take a deep breath. 

We have so far to go, still. 

Can I tell you a story while we wait? 

Riverside

A day winds itself beneath your feet, twists and turns in the strange ways of a life. Every now and then, you strike a turn of phrase that seems you to bring you joy, seems to shake you from your slumber, and you remember the curlicue magic of the word, so long dormant under the weight of your darkness. He speaks to you of Mexico, of poetry festivals in New Orleans, of finding home in the American West, and you contemplate what it means to live an entire life. The East Village lies quiet, I write creaky poetry into its evening, and remember the madness I tried to follow into its avenues, and what remains. 

What remains is the seeds to rebuild, though. 

What remains is that this city has been burned and beaten for centuries, and yet we keep coming, yet we keep stitching it together in accordance with our dreams. It was always better just before, and of course the truth is that isn't truth at all. New York is always perfect, you are the one who is fallible, you are the one who is human. I look at apartment listings, I look at job prospects. That which will come, will come. 

The word is a seed
which grows anywhere you
Make it.

Haste

Monday morning comes, the firetrucks disperse from seventh street as the bulldozer continues to raze the rubble of what once was an unmoveable building. Nothing is forever. Even you. 

The to do list looms, winds itself around your neck, your head filled with cotton, whispers its demands into the sorrow that is your muscle memory. Don't make a backup plan, comes a small voice deep inside you. Have nowhere to fall, nothing to catch you. It's been so many years of tearing down the structures that held you in place, you wonder if you at last have done it. At the base of your spine, little spires of curious greens begin to grow, little wondrous words and turns of phrase that turn amazed, when all is said and down and you've burned your unmoveable cage to rubble, is there not always a story left in the ashes? When you have nothing left, does the word not always manage to remain? 

It occurs to me I've spent so much time looking for something I found long ago. Perhaps the cure you are looking for is against your own resistance. 

If the abyss is deep
and dark
and impossible

You will leap. 

Melody

A weekend comes, and goes. You get a brief moment's break, but what is a bandaid against a bullet wound? The days are sunny, so sunny, I ran along the river with my eyes closed, trying to blind myself with its powers, she says did you ever think of moving somewhere brighter but what does she know. A building three blocks up burns to the ground, takes a neighboring church with it. Those who've been here before say it reminds them of the way back when. Rents plummet. You wonder if maybe there's a chance to rise out of the ashes ahead. You want so much to rise out of these ashes. 

Three more weeks of a year that burned the ground from under us. Three more weeks of a chance at redemption. You start over a thousand times, at some point it's bound to stick. 

If you just set enough fires,
eventually you have a numbers game
on your hands.

It's Ok

The piano trembles in minor keys, dripping back and forth under heavy fingertips but it's only for show, it's a harmless sorrow to bleed across vocal cords, let it seep out into the ether and dissipate. Let it go. The sun beamed on the bridges to Manhattan this morning, how can I not smile at the mad stacks of life that are this city? How can I race downhill toward Delancey Street, with the whole island spreading out around me and not know that everything will all be well? I stare into the sunlight like a drug, like I cannot get enough, I fill my every nerve ending, every last cell with its light, 17 days until it turns, I know we've seen the bottom, my dear, I know we grate our skin along it time after time and think we'll never breach the surface again but oh, oh how I know there is always a moment when you kick yourself up, you are suffering now, make no mistake, but you will not always. Some day, this pain will be useful to you. 

No one reads a book
where the character just wants to make it to the end.

De:scent

There's that brief moment in a morning, when you linger in dreams and your backbone still assumes the fresh start of a new day. It disappears quickly, dissipates like morning mist on a still lake burned off by summer heat and you don't know how to recapture it. Could you start over? Reverse your steps into bed and paint a new backdrop for the day? I stare into the light therapy box like it has answers, like it has promises, but it only beams its sunny indifference at me, I am still alone with this cinderblock in my chest. She says fake it till you make it but it seems to me eventually you have faked it so long you no longer have anything real inside yourself and then what does it matter if you are smiling on the outside?

All we want is to be seen, to know that we exist. 

I turn the camera off my computer. I know exactly what that means.

Re:trieve

The days continue in tar, you wade waist-deep in it now, there's sunshine on the horizon but your legs are lead. The bills do not care for your diagnoses, do not care that you are trying to make it just one more day, one more hour, trying to get to a bank in the whitewater where you might breathe for a spell. They'd like return on their investment, and you're looking like a hazard. 

I begin to chip away at the mountain of work ahead, try to eke out a path where there is still only darkness, but you are carrying an elephant of lead on your shoulders, is it any wonder you feel so tired all the time? The wind picks up, carries the last leaves of autumn into oblivion, wraps its cold grip around the city, I fear I have so little left to give a year that demands more than we could ever have guessed. He says tell me one thing you like about yourself and all I can think of is the cotton between my ears. I get back up again, I say finally, matter-of-factly. I no longer have access to feelings like pride, like joy, but a few rational shreds remain. 

I dust myself off
and I get the fuck back up.

Descent

There's something in the cold November rain that wakes you, something in the gale warning, it blows the gold off the gingkos, soon all will be dead and barren. I try to barrel into a Monday morning, turn up the therapy light, will it to wake the parts of me that still work even as I sense them starting to wither. I consider the refuge under the covers, but am well aware that path is lined with barbed wire and self-inflicted dagger wounds. How you can spend years running from the illnesses within you and still find your flesh has turned to gangrene, how your insides fall apart when you most need something to lean on. 

Disease steals our days in different ways, but the inevitable fact is you're still getting older, still running out of sand in your hour glass, what will you do with the grains that remain? What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? The rain carries on outside unabated. Life asks its questions of you incessantly, ignorant to your attempted bargains for more time to answer. A small girl sits at the end of your cursor, pleads with you to carry on if only for her. You try to explain insufficiency, but she only knows that she can exist or she can not.

Fine, you think to yourself, hit rock bottom. Try it on for size, let me know if that feels better than clambering in the midst of crashing waves to a shore that will not have you. The water at the bottom of the ocean is still, yes. 

But what peace will you find
when your lungs are full of it?
 

east 5th street

We drive down the parkway in late afternoon, a golden light across the city you could not have made up in dreams. I drop them off two blocks away, because such is the beauty of neighbors as family, and park the car around the corner from us both. I pass it a day later, returning from the writing bar, which feels right even when the November wind blows. It's been a mild season so far, you wonder how long the gift may last. It gets dark so early, but it's still bright when it is. New York continues to be a gift, continues to remind you how you have everything you need right in the palm of your hand, even as it stretches out for more. He disappoints you with his humanity, when you are looking for salvation. 

Tomorrow the day starts anew. Dust yourself off and get back up. 

Black Friday

I grow uneasy with the early dusk, watch the light fade from the gray skies over the river, and we are still in pajamas, letting the day meander from under us. The break is so welcome, and yet already I feel the woods close in around me. As though I require the time off to pay me back in answers, in insight and direction. Where do I go from here? I look back at previous years and wonder if the words weren't better, if the gratitude wasn't more eloquently crafted. It's a year that's made it hard to be eloquent. Did I ask for this? Did I think something better would come out of dragging my soul against the gravel, that I had hidden treasures yet to unfold? 

We are who we are. Around my undiscovered corners lies only more darkness, how could I believe otherwise? The truth is that the world didn't break you, so much as you broke yourself in its name. The truth is you could have moved onto another narrative by now but you keep that head so far into the clouds that you cannot see the forks in the road when they offer themselves to you. He asks if he can spend the winter in the comfort of your smile, but your know the frost beneath your touch doesn't thaw for less than a miracle, and then it sets the whole place on fire. 

We have another drink, rearrange ourselves on the couches and floors as the November afternoon turns to night in our repose. I know I have to change this story, that no one else can, that the days will continue to come and go regardless of what I do with them and how much the darkness swallows me on the way. Just because you know this melody

doesn't mean you can't change the key.

Flyktsoda II

We take a walk in the late afternoon, dusk already settling in that way the day ends in the north, you remember winter in your bones and you wish you didn’t. Growing up in the Arctic was a trauma, you do not take pride in surviving it. The country air does you good. You return to closed laptops and silent telephones, to a large country kitchen and the peace of a holiday ahead. I know peace in my lungs only when my hands are busy making, it is no great secret, and you do not avoid it. He calls to tell you his soft, sweet stories and your lungs freeze again, how does that always happen? I want you to be happy, why do my lungs not remember I want you to be happy? I write her drunk messages of open wounds but she sleeps, everyone sleeps but the Christmas tree, what a benevolent silent partner it is. Take a deep breath. 

There’s a nook in the attic that is yours and yours alone. There’s a country air and a brief break from reality, there’s a hundred miles between you and the city, there’s a month left of this terrible, terrible year, what will you make of the tempest at your fingertips? How will you make this year worth a place in your heart? 

You have one day to remember your gratitudes. 

You may have to try a little harder. 

Seesaw

Did you drive in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping? her four-year-old wide eyes smile at me in disbelief. Like magic happened when she was unaware, and the adult world still retains a wonder. The Christmas tree is lit, in 2020 we do not mess around anymore, do not delay the few joys we may have. The truth is I did drive in the night, weaving out of Manhattan in a necklace of string lights and floating along the dark upstate thruway, pulling up to the little Victorian house long after the town turned in. 

I pack light but bring a suitcase full of questions to answer. The sun rises over the mountain ridge, the air is still, expectant. Who do you want to be, when the storm subsides at last? A new year lies on the horizon, a glimmer of hope that things may be different. You consider the possibility that you could be too. 

Consider the possibility that something better
could be yours.

Pack

You break up. Tell the woman with the listening face that this isn't right, tell the man with the seeking hands that your body is not the treasure he is looking for, you clean your slates and sweep your stoop. He asks to spend the winter, asks to find warmth from the cold, and you remind yourself your promises to avoid the as if when it comes. It always comes. You pack your bags, not in the way you used to, with the getaway car rumbling in the street and you with the gas tank spilling behind you as you go. No, this is intentional, this is reprieve, New York don't you know this time I'm making it stick, we have nothing to fear. I smile at new ears on the screen, reach my trembling hands toward new fingertips. I  do not set fires any more, but I believe I can still keep myself warm through this strange, unending winter. One day I will reach for that quiet, vulnerable spot at the nape of your neck, and you will laugh and tell me stories to keep me awake while the miles move from under us. We will be in the getaway car together, just you wait. 

Good things come
to those who do.

Pull Me Out

We careen down second avenue in the early morning, keys to an old apartment left on the kitchen counter and the promising jangle of keys to a new one in her lap. The west village turned to face us with beaming November sunlight and trickling yellow gingko leaves on the little street, like it was made for this moment, like it had been waiting to give it to her. I parked my car underneath her fire escape and remembered just how it felt to move to the neighborhood all those years ago, to turn down a dreamy, tree-lined street and feel like I was home. I never thought I could live here, she says, and we both take a moment to sink in something so good from the Universe. He writes to say Central Park was beautiful today and we decide to let him prove it. The neighbors upstairs have a party. I start to hallucinate things along the sides of my vision. 

It's quite possible for bad things and good to happen at the same time. Quite possible to feel joy even when one is so sad. 

There's no great answer there. Sometimes the world spins on, without them.

Sprain

I drive home in the early morning, the Taconic Parkway dreamy in dawn, soft sunrise playing across frosted fields. For the first 50 miles there is only silence. I hug the shoulderless curves and think about life in the country, wonder at simplicity, if this is happiness. 

But then a few hours later, with the day well under way and the cars amassing in the veins, I crest a hill to see Manhattan spread out before me, and I take a breath so deep I didn't know my lungs had been empty all this time. Returning to New York City after a time away is like seeing in color after settling for black and white. It's turning the brightness up on your dimmer lights, it's a buzz in your skin that you never again want to lose. I drove alongside the island, watching it undulate from the Brooklyn shore, and thought only I love you, I love you, I love you, and when they tell me I should perhaps learn to be satisfied, or settle, or build a life of good enough, I will remind them that if a person, place, or thing does not sit like a deep breath in your chest and a smile in your heart, it would be a dishonor to our lives to stay with them. This city taught me what love is, and now I never have to accept any less.

It's not hard to be thankful,
with such gifts in your hand.

Unmade

Good morning, she whispers into the predawn dusk, and I only just have time to piece together where I am and how I should be reacting before she stands at my bed with childlike eagerness. My weather app says it's beyond cold, says winter is here but I'll soften the blow with some sunshine. I sit in the window basking, eyes closed, heart open. There is much work to be done, so much work to be done, but some mornings it feels quite enough just to have survived, just to be living. 

I take a deep breath into the upstate day. Write all your words, he says. There's nothing like the freedom that comes after the explosion, nothing like the relief after the fire you feared is over.

Track

I lose hours in this attic, I lose days in this town, the streets get dark so early and I forget there are things to do beside sleep. I speak with outside voices and they carry on, but nothing seems quite so important. Like I'm wrapped in a few bales of cotton, and it's numbing, but also soft, and sometimes it's hard to weigh what you lose against what you gain. The days carry on regardless. I do not write my book. 

 I should be writing my book. 

The thing is I am not so sad, anymore. The thing is, cotton will never be fireworks but some days it is enough not to hurt. 

The thing is I'm still alive, despite - *waves vaguely in the general direction of the year that's been* - and perhaps that's the bar we set for now. I ran a slow, cold jog along a country road today and did not marvel, but I ran it. This heart has been dragged across the pavement enough to build scars as thick as the Arctic ice. 

Which is to say it's solid now. 

But it'll thaw eventually. 

And then what a tsunami it'll be. 

Begin

I pour a bourbon as the last of daylight wanes. It feels like the middle of the night out here without streetlights, without traffic, I forget all the fires racing through my blood when the air is quiet. I unfold a card table, spread out my few knicknacks. Don't be precious, a sticker on my computer reads, reminds me to write anywhere, so I do. 

The clock keeps showing 11:11, you know, the Universe keeps nudging me with kindnesses and calls for my attention. I fear I am too numb, I fear it is already too late, I know you know you are losing me and I just haven't pulled the trigger yet, they tell me to stay another day and I think why not because what else is waiting for me downriver but more steps inside a vacuum? We are traumatized by a year that will not let up, do you really think we might live again, you no longer know what living means. 

Write anywhere. Do all the things. Everything ends, and you'll regret what you didn't. There's a light on in the house down the street, there's a light on in the deepest corner of your heart, just hold on for a little longer, and surely you'll have found your way. 

Surely, you'll have found it by making it.

Upstate

The little town is quiet in the late afternoon when at last we turn onto the main street and snake our way up to the little Victorian gingerbread house that is ours at last. The restaurants have all moved indoors, it is too cold, and the people too tired to fight it anymore. They sit inside the warm, cozy spaces and watch the world on fire around them, while the Hudson freezes over. We move furniture in the middle of the night, fill the car with impulses, and set up the Christmas tree way too early but this year all bets are off, (we say giggling and crying all at once). He writes to say the sabbatical he had planned didn't quite follow his trajectory, that a world under siege is a strange place to work out your clichés and discover your meanings. You think what a privilege it is to do that work at all, while your bank account dwindles in the margins. Winter is coming. 

After two days of country air, your lungs begin to move differently, your muscles strech in new ways with space, you sink into slow food and slower dreams, waking only to hear them move furniture again and to watch the sun at last rise over the old cemetery. It's a strange vacuum, and you know it will not last forever. 

But nothing lasts forever. That's the whole point. 

That's why we have to make the most of every damn morsel we can find.

Confines

An entire day rushes past, I wipe leaves off the car and bike back across the bridge to whisper my good mornings to the city. It whispers back, gives me a nudge. I wade through the stories of all the years that built me and marvel at the turns our lives can take. It gets cold outside. He writes sweetnesses into the ether, and you do your best to let them run like water droplets off your shoulders. You pack your bags. 

The numbers are rising around us, the walls building back up. The  powers that be do their best to corrupt the last vestiges of our dignity. I miss you so much it aches in me sometimes, but then everything aches in me so maybe I just can't tell one pain from another. These stories build me, yes, but on shaky foundations and jenga acrobatics. I wake up never quite knowing who I am. 

The rain passes. But the woods are getting dark. You better shine your light real bright if you're going to make it.

Introduce

A day races across your shattered nerves. It asks you to curate the design of your life, asks you to tell me a little bit about yourself, and you want to be the diligent student more than ever. We reminisce about Los Angeles in our youth, try to weave our futures into one another the way they were before, before before there are so many befores now my body has stopped predicting afters. It sounds like you want to be happy, she says, and you laugh at the summary. But technically, she's not wrong. He turns a curious eye your way and you wonder what the tales you tell sound like from the outside. You can schedule another session for next week whenever you're ready. You are so busy your lungs forget to breathe for a full day. The rain arrives, you miss your steady steps along the river and instead here we are racing into another pair of smiling eyes, another set of hopeful futures, don't you know I came to this city making deals with the devil and as long as I am
still here I do not feel
I have lost.

Portfolio

You sort through the piles of your life, looking for treasures and finding little grains of sand where you'd forgotten they might be. Realizing how much you'd like to shake up the choices you've made and knowing that button is not an option on your console. You are where you are. Dig where you stand. We get one more day of sunshine, you run from smiling face to smiling face, for just one brief moment your life feels like New York of old and you try to remember that person in your lungs, in your veins. How long she's been away. So much of your time now is spent surviving, is spent going to sleep one more time and hoping for the best at dawn but waking before alarms with a boulder on your heart, it is not a life, not really. He sends you songs and softness and you distract yourself off topic until it passes. Your regular bar braces for winter, builds a treehouse on 5th street, you have never loved New York more than you do now, and it's a welcome reminder. 

Just because your edges are sharp
doesn't mean you are made of ice.

Edge

A new day rushes ahead, bursts into existence, demands attention. You barrel through the piles of work that collected dust in the week of limbo, while the weight sits sulking in a corner, looking again for its time to shine. Little pockets of chance appear, but you pay it no mind and close the door again. I do not have time for your wailing, you hear yourself say under your breath, while you straighten your back and carry on. Yesterday we weaved through a Central Park in full regalia, fireworks in the trees and smiles on the ground, we were allowed to forget for a short while the cruelties of the world and just enjoy. The work will return, the world, but now, just now, we can meander slowly through our love for this city and speak like old friends, like we lost nothing and gained everything. 

We took the elevator up into the sky and watched the sun set over New York, I know I said I wanted to love someone else but I don't know if it's true anymore. I think maybe I have everything I need underneath my feet, I think maybe everything has been mended with this air in my lungs, the world is on fire but I am unafraid again, do you hear me? Winter is coming. 

I'll be right here. 

And I think that means something.

Not Nothing

I wake with the Weight still deep in my chest, it chains me to the bed and makes friends with the hangover in my head. Drag it behind me out to the river, taking slow steps with raspy lungs and wondering what the point is. Underneath the Manhattan Bridge, I stopped, looked at the downtown skyline, and let everything settle along my spine. The cure for mortality is to leave a legacy, the city whispered to anyone who would listen. Have something to prove, then prove it. 

When I came home, the newstickers flipped themselves into a frenzy, and the city so long under siege erupted into a festival of relief and gratitude in a heartbeat. I biked to Prospect Park and watched waves of cheering undulate across the sunny lawn. Biked to champagne toasts around the borough in a day no one wanted to end. At midnight, we stood by the fountain in Washington Square Park and marveled at the simple joy of relief. You are far away, now, and cannot see this. Do not know the joy in my eyes, the tremble of my heartstrings, life is cruel like that but I'm sure you are happy, too. 

It's been a long, dark year. We are not out of these woods. 

But getting a flashlight is a hell of a thing, when you've been stumbling blind.

And Now I Am

I’ll be gone by tomorrow, he says, and you do not understand how to explain the pit in your heart at the words. You weave yourself around your traumas, nestle within their safety and watch the years pass by while your wrists bleed. It wasn’t mean to be, but you do not know what you are without it. 

You asked the universe for a challenge out of your control this year, and oh, how the universe delivered. You should feel rich that the Universe would grant you such a wish. 

Break now. And when you grow back, grow back strong as as the entire wood. 

This Year

We wake glued to our live feeds. We fall asleep with their regurgitations seeping into our nightmares, each hour is the length of a year, and this year is the length of a lifetime, it seems apt. I listen to voices who say it will be okay. I try not to think about the other option. I will think about the future after the now is called, I tell them when they ask if I return now. But it took me four hours to move my car today and if that isn't a lesson in mindfulness,  I don't know what is. The sun was bright, a friend jumped into shotgun with a grilled cheese sandwich and a can-do attitude, and we chatted up the diehard New Yorkers while waiting for the traffic cop to leave us alone, there's nothing like the Lower East Side on a sunny day, and you returned to your overheated apartment without a shred of the weight that has dragged itself in your shadow for so long. 

There is always a dawn. There is always a day to follow both good and bad. They're counting the votes. You put one foot in front of the other. You do the work. Eventually, the parking spot appears, eventually the sun shines, eventually you make it work and and remember that small ember in the back of your throat. 

Eventually you speak a fire.

Given You All

I sleep a deep sleep, ignorant of the machinations on the outside. When I wake, my phone is a wasp's nest of terror; before my mind has even righted itself, it spins dark tales and confusion. I try to work but spend most of the time staring into a wall. My phone continues to buzz with mostly the same, anger and confusion, inability to put one foot in front of the other. A limbo that pulls and stretches and abandons us all at once. He bikes into the city to give you a hug despite your symptoms; you sink into his shoulder and wonder when the last time was another human touched you. The year has been cruel beyond belief. A few medical professionals poke and prod you and say probably no need to worry, but you feel like that's what the democracy told you too and yet here we are beside ourselves with fear. Across the water, your home country shuts itself down too, like a clam retreating from the treacherous waters beyond. 

The year has been cruel beyond belief. 

But I sat in Washington Square Park today, warm November sunshine on my face, dear friends at my side, New York like a perpetual beacon of hope all around, and for a short moment everything was not on fire, everything was not violently turning to ash at our feet and if there is one thing this year has taught me it is to appreciate that moment more than I ever knew I could. 

We're not out of the woods yet. We are as deep in them as ever. But they are only woods. If we keep walking, eventually we are bound to reach a clearing.

America I Have

Wake early to incessant buzzing. I'm at work at the polling station. 5 am. I am seventh in line to vote. 6:15 am. Daylight Saving jet lag brings me out of strange dreams, the reality of the day snaps me to instant attention. Christmas Day. But bad. My throat is sore, a slow November congestion making its way through my muscles. Read the room, I tell it, but none of the monsters are reading the room this year, why would this one be any different? I wonder what plans I have to cancel, when I can get tested for worse ailments. Everything all at once.

It's a day of italics. A day of squeezing sentiment between the lines. Everything all at once. Here is the day, did you do all you could? Thriving is an act of resistance. A new story builds itself at my fingertips, on the blank page. It speaks of the fallout. It speaks of the Resistance. If it doesn't go your way, will you move back home? he asks from across the sea. 

But this is home. If it doesn't go your way, if your house is on fire, do you leave it behind? Or do you stay, in defiance, and try again to make it better?

Do you stay,
and determine to thrive?

Eve

It's like the night before Christmas, I hear myself say, except bad. The air on the streets is different, or maybe you're projecting. He calls to rant and you feel your body begin to tremble, indiscernible at first but by the time you hang up it trembles deep in your bones. I stock up on bourbon while the liquor store boards up their windows. Just a precaution, they say smiling. Just a precaution for the end of the world, as it were. I pour myself a glass, sit back down at the computer. The words come easier in crisis. It's a cruel payoff. The sunlight along the river whispered of winter today, the cold winds made no mistake and still I smiled as I ran. It's strange to hold a light heart when the world is heavy. 

The important thing is wielding a strong heart when the world goes dark.

Home

We drive three hours in monsoon rain before crossing into the Bronx and a tollfree bridge onto Lexington Avenue in Harlem. Home. We meander down the avenue as the rain slows, jump onto the FDR, and veer into the East Village when the slick streets are black, the Sunday night quiet. I drop them off and snake up and down the streets, content just to be there, marveling at how different an avenue can look from another point of view. The fear washes off, there's a calm in my chest. New York is a gift even when you do not expect it. I find a little nook near my writing bar and nestle in, wondering what the Universe was trying to tell me even though I haven't asked much of it lately.

I walk around the block to my little stoop behind the fish sign and I know it. 

Everything is a numbers game. Keep driving until the spot appears and then take it. Keep showing up until your chance arrives and then you are ready for it. 

When you are ready for it, the fear is rendered mute. The Universe rewards those who keep going.

Apocalypse Noir

A month begins. Cold, dark November with its messages mixed, with its candles lit across graveyards like at attempt to love death to life. We wake early in the twisted clocks, wander up and down rickety staircases in flannel pajamas like a Hallmark card, but when their eyes are turned my insides shrivel. I woke up in the middle of the night, street quiet, sky dark and full of stars, and cut open wounds I didn't even know had any nerve endings left in them. In the morning, he writes to say he has started another story; he gives you the chance to do the same and though you have forgotten what it is for something bright, you reach your trembling hands toward the light and pray, and pray you might catch a lifeline. Your notes for the burgeoning story stand out in the leatherbound journal at your side: No one reads a book where the character just wants to make it to the end.

A month begins. 

You sit down, and start to write.

Fall Back

Halloween night, full moon turn the clocks, we've already lost all meaning of time in this haunted year, what more can you want from us? The children are delighted at the treats and wonder less about the tricks, the old Victorian town does so well around the holidays, we remark, and I wonder if I'm losing them forever to this dream. The whole attic floor is yours, they say. We thought your writing desk could go here by the window.

Later at night, as I bury myself under layers of November bedding, the demons return to fill the spaces in the silence. The street is empty, the little town dark. I went a long way, but they can smell my shivering heartstrings a hundred miles out of sight. Every escape is temporary, they say. You haven't answered anything, and you know it.

November approaches in the icy darkness. My room is so quiet, so absolutely still, if I only try hard enough, maybe I'll believe this vacuum is all we have left. Maybe it will look something like peace. 

and Good Things Ahead

I am going to make it through this year

if it kills me. 

We tell tales of times past and realize too late it was only February, it was only last Christmas, doesn't everything that came before feel like a whole other life and we've aged impossibly since then. In the early morning, I hurry across the bridge to find the car, forgetting every stress in the drive back to Manhattan, sunny and still across the river. By the time we race down the parkway, Catskill mountains on fire in the distance, I feel the Darkness lightly lift off my ribs at last.

We get brief moments of respite. It was not what we had hoped, but oh how rolling with the punches means appreciating what we can. 

If there is one thing this year can teach us, it's that before anything else, the most important thing we can do every day
is survive.

And

The rain gives way to glacial winds. I am failing at every turn. There are no avenues left I haven't walked in the downward spiral, no stones I haven't turned to look for evidence of hopelessness. These aren't the words I wanted to offer you, these aren't the fruits I wanted to harvest from my labor. It is winter now, and I am too tired to fill my stores. There was a time when I wished on the Universe for delights unexpected, but I have learned now the Universe doesn't work according to wishes. 

Just give me a minute. I'll figure out how to work without it.

Any More Time

 "Remember when you thought I had hit bottom?

That wasn't bottom."

Respire

 The rain continues. I have brief moments of levity followed by eons of a cast iron weight on my chest. I know we're meant to tell our younger selves it gets better, and we're not wrong, only, the house is on fire also seems an appropriate hint and maybe my older self could be kind enough to warn me. I came to New York to be a starving writer but now I only starve, it's so hard to remember how to tell stories when your fingers are frozen stiff. Poverty eats at your dreams, if you were just a little bit better you wouldn't need security in order to fulfill them.

"What I could do, apparently, was daydream the years away: go on yearning for 'things' to be different so that I would be different," Vivian Gornick writes. "Now there was only the immensity of the vacated present... It was there on the street, I realized, that I was filling my skin, occupying the present."

Perhaps I daydream too much, try to solve my hollowness with hope instead of accepting reality and conforming to its laws. No one ever pointed out to me that my heroes all died in middle aged destitution, and I was too young to ever think middle age would come anyway, what would it have mattered. Here we are now, groveling in the dirt while our friends buy houses, move on, fertilize their bank accounts. 

This train of thought comes with no answers. 

One foot in front of the other until it does.

Ache

The forecast calls for rain unending, hour after our of thick cloud covers on the radar and you are probably better off huddled in a corner for the remainder of the day. A man rides by on a bicycle across the street, one cigarette in his mouth and another in his hand. You think of paper pulp and how ridiculous New York can be in its beauty. You've never stopped loving it, and perhaps there is something to be said for loyalty. The rain picks up. 

Last night, at the regular bar shrouded in orange lights, she says she's trying to move them all back home. Hoping the motherland will offer solace, solutions, solvency. But if we go, we won't be able to come back, she says, and you wonder if it's worth giving up this madness for anything. The day offers a brief pause in your despair, and you're a hundred pounds lighter without it. There's something in life you have yet to figure out, and in the parting clouds you remember a desire to do it. To turn stones. To find one gift you did not expect. To marvel. 

The rain picks up. But so do you. One day at a time. Eventually we get where we are going.

Andante

There's a brief moment every morning, when I do not remember the weight of my chest. Like a heart in mourning, rising from sleep in blissful oblivion and forgetting its loss just long enough to know peace. It makes the comedown crueler, somehow, and yet how you live for that short pocket of air between your lips. I try to barrel into a day, thinking if I keep running, I can remain ignorant, thinking if I do not acknowledge my bleeding limbs they will work as intended. Sometimes I can buy myself an hour. But when the bar has been lowered into murky waters on fire, an hour can look like Elysium. 

I know this specter too well, remember its heavy shroud and cloying desperation, its detrimental whispers. Know how the hours pass, how I wake up in the middle of the night with an itch that will not leave me alone and in morning cannot rise from under the covers. I know the temptation of eternal sleep, its one offering. But I'm not looking for your prizes. 

This is all the attention you'll get today. You get this one acknowledgment of your existence, before I was you out of my hair, run you out of my house, before I meet someone better who knows what it is to love, I have, despite the odds, decided to move on and be something else moving forward. 

I don't have any answers. But neither do you. So I'm done
hearing
you
out.

Lucky II

Everything hurts. I try to breathe but it gets stuck in the fog, in my desperate attempts to remember how to do it. I try to bury myself in work, but bury work in the desk drawer to avoid reminders of my own shortcomings instead. A book manuscript stares at me in horror, but the demons are louder than any of its complaints so I am left to piece together its pleas from my own haunted innards. I go back to bed. Desperately try to remind myself how to know better. They say death by hypothermia can make people feel unexpectedly warm, a brief spell of relief or confusion as the body fires off its last attempts at survival. I know this bed is a virtual roll in the snow. I know the relief of sleep is only waste of a life, but oh, what a blessing is a short moment of respite. If I make myself perfectly still, perhaps this life won't notice me, won't ask things of me I am no longer able to offer it. 

I am too soft, and life is too far out of my reach. Everything feels warm now. 

I'm starting to forget what I was fighting for.

You Said

The problem with the Darkness, of course, is that it swallows you whole. You're only dying slowly, but you do so entirely, aware of every minute as it passes, numb inside the cotton vacuum behind its jagged teeth. I do not open my eyes properly, move my muscles or fill my lungs, everything is stunted. When they knock on my window and ask me questions, I reply in half sentences without punctuation, leaving trails of clues behind me but only if you already hold the riddle in your hand. I force myself to runs along the river, my feet pounding in automatic routines, while my brain ruminates like a cow recycling the same three straws of grass for an hour. Nothing new happens, nothing changes, it does not have the energy to build any story, and I don't force it. 

The scariest part of the Darkness is always the apathy. The way my marionette limbs can collapse on a couch in unhuman forms and stay there reluctantly. The way my heart wants to sleep at 7:30, concocting rationales of detrimental sleep deficits and productive tomorrows but in the back of my mind a foggy memory of the Darkest Year when all there was was sleep. I carry this illness like a leper's, closing all the gates to protect the uninfected world. How could I ever put anyone through this? I'm sorry I'm defective, I whisper to the piles of clothes on my floor, the unwashed coffee cups and messages awaiting reply on my phone. I'm sorry I whisper to the unfinished manuscripts, the emptied bank accounts, the strangers who I am supposed to impress into adoration, the city that agreed to hold me as long as I kept deserving it. 

I write a long to do list for morning. Try desperately to wipe the slate clean, do all the right things: fake it till you make it. The Darkness moves across your body like tar. I'm only closing my eyes for a bit.

Cake

Summer is over, the voice rambles, as if we didn't already know by the fire of the leaves. You spend your days pushing new parts of your psyche into the darkness, as if challenging it to move, to surprise you, a game of chicken that no one wins. New voices speak to you across the ether and you see yourself building layers between the rivers, protecting what feels frail, and you don't know why. 

In all these years, after all, you've never broken. But the foam protection couldn't keep you from bruising, so why do you insist on wrapping it around you? 

The trees on Second Avenue turn yellow, bright, beaming, blissfully ignorant of their impending death. The country reels from the last few turns of a mad man's merry-go-round, how long can you be sick to your stomach before you forget you ever felt well? This year asks that question a hundred times. We eat cake and celebrate another unusual birthday, it's a good thing we cannot see into the future, we would never get out of bed. You are determined to keep getting out of bed. 

Summer is over, you repeat to yourself, as if willing your spirit to stand up against it. The pharmacist jabs the needle into your arm, says record numbers this year. You think the great gift of humanity is proving itself wrong in the face of such devastating mistakes. 

You always get another chance to do choose to do it better.

If It Kills Me

Take a deep breath, comes the calming voice across the screen, get started. I opened my eyes, a strange arrangement along my spine, an unusual clarity. Do the work, first, think later. After days in the muck, days of brain fog and despair, of not remembering how to make a lip smile, I wake with a hesitant lightness. I have been fooled before, yes, but the lightness remains, so that I feel my breaths almost reach the edges of my lungs. I tip-toe around the day, trying to fit in as much productive work as I can before the break inevitably ends, trying to get a step ahead before I fall three below. You see I know this parasite, have learned its ways and recognize its game. It offers a moment's reprieve, gives you just enough to dare to hope, before it sinks its teeth in you again, and don't your wounds bleed worse after they started to heal? It's a ruse. 

But I drove into the forest yesterday, sunny whispering forest and a blessed solitude. I could not breathe, then, could not smile at the gift, but I still gave it, and I still opened it, and today I remember. The rain today continues unabated, but I do not hear it, do not see it, do not let it chill me as it will. There was a short moment of lightness, and that is what I will remember. 

This year drags us through burning treacle, holds us under the surface until we choke and a little more, every day seems more cruel than the one before. Is it any wonder if we despair at times? 

Is it any wonder if we forget our way?

Dig

(But then, when all the layers are peeled away, when we are reduced to our most primary colors, when we have nothing but our fear, and longing, and love, and loss, there appears on the page art so true that we cannot defend ourselves against it, creations so void of polish that they fit in our chests like they were tailored. I know, I know, I know you are suffering now but there is a grain of sand in this desert worth finding, there is a truth in this darkness to show you the way, if you hold on just a little longer I think you can catch it, if you carry on I think you can do Something Good.

It isn't over
until you say it is.)

Weight / Wait

October comes for us all in different ways, sly, insidious, coddling. A straggler staggers in the Monday morning gusts, unable to stand upright in the wind, in the intoxication, their legs won't hold. The cafe owner downstairs says the neighborhood is not what it was, he's taking his restaurant to Brooklyn. Park Slope, he says dreamily, it's nice there, you should come. I try to explain to him my stupid loyalty to all things broken, how I never leave anymore, but he is not listening. 

No one is listening lately, and I wonder if I'm only screaming on the inside. 

The rain continues. Yesterday we drove top down in unforecasted sunshine out on Long Island and I thought I never have to come here again, all unending strip malls and income disparity,  but the ocean is a gift every time and I took it. I tried whispering my gratitudes into the rolling waves but I get distracted so easily these days, my mind is a fog, once upon a time I called myself a writer but look at this jumbled mess, this is not what you came for. Me neither, frankly. 

Everything is treacle. I drag my heavy limbs through its days. But why?

Manifest

Eleven years I've been writing this blog. Twenty-one crafting myself birthday letters, twenty-five jotting my thoughts into countless journals: a lifetime of trying to make sense of a life which will not let itself be figured out. You pretend you imagined eventually the answers would come, but you always knew yours was meant to be a life of mists and confusions, of endless questions and the perpetual search for meaning. You never deluded yourself to believe everything would align itself before it was too late, that if you were just patient everything would make sense. But perhaps if someone could have warned you that the person you were is the person you would be, it would have saved you the heartache of dreaming differently. 

You think there must be a purpose to pain, a way to channel the heartbeat in your scars. 

It's hard to see it though,
when you're bleeding out.

En Rose

The mornings are dark now, if you rise early enough, whispering of cold and death and the end of all things. As though we haven't faced that spectre for months, bring us a new horror, this one cannot faze us. I bike across the Williamsburg Bridge at sunrise, the bric-a-brac of the Manhattan skyline glowing in the morning light. I make plans to always rise at dawn but reader, we know I never will. The car moves with ease, squeezing into a spot beyond its means but who are we in life if we cannot be brazen at times. We drive past the old loft in Greenpoint, and nothing looks the same in the old neighborhood. How New York winds and spins, and yet I remain. I was always slow to change, loyal to a fault, but sometimes it does not hurt me. New York, it never hurt me to love you. 

In the depths of this cold death, we must hold dear the joys that still move our hearts.

Dive

She arrives at the outdoor bar with that gait she has, always a little sideways, always like her body is trying to pull her in different directions and she cannot commit to just the one ahead. It feels like coming home. A month worth of unspoken secrets, we stumble over ourselves to fit as many of them into the limited space we have. I tell her, a little too loudly for the quiet street to absorb, how I realized the hollowness of my endeavors, how I've spent a whole life shielding myself from pain by attempting to prove nothing at all. How sometimes the Universe shines on me and I take what it offers, but I never climb into the sky on my own to get what could be mine. 

The days are endless spirals now, are hard-won steps to breach the surface and then easy tumbles to the depths again, how do we spend so much time just trying to survive. You wonder what the year is meant to prove to you. But perhaps those are the wrong questions again. 

It's entirely possible to survive
without living, after
all

With Purpose

But what is it you want?

The voice rings in my ears, echoes of the same question badgered at my every creation, my every turn. What is it I want, what is it I have to lose that I cannot bear to, where is the tension that makes this narrative a worthwhile way to spend a life, why should anyone care? A character in ink climbs across a hundred of my messy pages trying only to avoid life, trying only to react when it happens, and you wonder if she isn't more a symptom than a gift, wonder if she isn't a message you are desperately trying to deliver to yourself. 

I know the chasm is so deep, I know the bottomless pain that resides there is enough to keep you from ever stepping off the middle of the road and risk falling in. 

But what if instead of using mediocrity to douse the flames
you used the fire to fuel this one life into an explosion?

We Are Standing on the Edge

 Pull me out of the aircrash

Pull me out of the lake

I feel my luck could change.

Orchards

Early morning is crisp as I race across the Williamsburg bridge: October. Lazy sunshine, a familiar face down Broadway, a familiar car along Kent and the early risers stumble toward their hipster coffee. We make our way back across the Brooklyn Bridge, weave across a whole island topple out into a valley on fire. Leaves do not care for your apocalyptic years, they still fulfill their timetables and dazzle on schedule. We hike through whistling woods and sit staring at the enormity of the world. For a short moment, we are rendered irrelevant, and it is a most comforting tonic. 

Hours later, in the golden afternoon, the great spikes of Manhattan appear at the end of the river as the car careens down the hill. Did we get what we came for? It's hard to know. I sneak the car into a newly appearing spot along the gleaming skyscrapers, make my way back across the bridge just as the last rays of apricot sunshine make their way over the top of the skyline. Saturday evening bounces in the East Village, we try to squeeze just a few drops of joy out of the year that nearly killed us. 

It's a worthwhile endeavor,
if we do nothing else.

October 1

I wake in the middle of the night, a steady beeping somewhere in the apartment poking at my subconscious just enough to annoy me out of rest. Fire alarms are always elusive when you need them not to be. After surgical removal of waning batteries, I lay back down and remembered all the things I had forgotten to let worry me through the day. Soft songs of things you used to say swept past me and I tried not to hear them. It's been too long, I said in the newfound silence. You can't come here anymore. It did not help me sleep. I'd like to think my own voice would be enough, but here's the thing: in the vaccum this year has afforded us, the absences have come into stark relief. My voice carries further against the tongue of another. Carrying myself is only useful when I catch another's stumble. It is not enough for me to smile in safe spaces, do you not see I want the Universe in the palm of your hand, do you not see I will not settle for sleepless nights without you?

A rat lay suffering on the sidewalk near Avenue D last night. It did not move as I approached, and I had no relief to offer. An hour later, after the September sun had set and the glass towers of Brooklyn had sparkled in that particular way they do in autum, I returned to find it dead beside a tree. No more, no less. We do the best we can for a short while here on earth, and when we die that is all there is. I wake in the middle of the night and stare at full moons, stare at October rising to a year on fire, we do the best we can. 

Only, I think we'd do it better together.

Offer

(Careful what you wish for. 

When it lands on your doorstep you have to let it in.)

Skin and Bones

(I condensed my being into a sheet of paper for you, just one sheet of paper to tell you all the stories inside this Universe, what impossible feats we expect of people just for a moment's chance at a spark, just a spark's chance at a lifetime. I know you are not far away, I know New York City is a tiny maze in the grand scheme of infinity, that we saw the same full moon last night and that still somehow the distance is endless. I drove across the country to save my own life but I am here now. I would do the same for you, if you'd let me.)

Xìng fú

Wake early, determined. 

Barrel into a day, a week, a month, lead with grit, ignore your knees when they tremble. The sun breaks out, late summer sunlight and you feel happy and sad all at once. He comes to see how you are doing but does not ask, and so you do not say. The dances get stranger with age, I take a long run along the river (it gets dark so early now, it's hard to see your steps, the strangers you meet) and land back at the footbridge in a worn pile but it's better than hearing yourself think. The apartment across the street is still empty. Fall into bed exhausted. One day down, countless to go. The coffee grows tepid if you do not drink it. 

It's me. I'm the coffee. 

But you knew that.

is Now

It gets harder and harder, standing up again after being beaten down. The protests still make their way around the city, roaming bands of justice. The honeylocusts sprout frosted tips, little flashes of yellow dotting their crowns while the humidity still swelters. Almost October, you whisper to yourself and try not to hear it, buried under blankets and unchecked to-do lists and failure. Your roommate packs up her room, the dog paces nervously and you miss her already. But you miss very few things when they are actually gone. 

(There are some notable exceptions.)

I spent the morning writing, in that delicious way Sundays will let you do sometimes, when you are left to your own devices and can't think of anything you'd rather be doing. I could never write while you were around, I would always rather be with you, perhaps it is better to be without that. I'm grappling at straws trying to find the person I lost, but I think who I'm really looking for is me. It's so dark outside suddenly, blustery, I am happy and defeated all at once, my bank account is drained and I don't know who I thought I could be, but I'm still someone, am I not? I'm still here, still standing back up again every god damned time, am I not? It's getting harder and harder, yes. 

Does that mean I'm getting stronger and stronger for doing it?

Spring(')s Eternal

The old piano moans and creaks under my touch. Or perhaps it's my fingers that creak, stiff from years of absence, if you long for something for too many turns of the sundial eventually you bury your ache deep, deep within and pretend it isn't there. It's a way to survive, yes, but not quite to live. I feel another crushing wave approach, it begins by steam rolling your lungs so there is no breath left and dissolving your bones into peanut brittle, what use is seeing the black clouds on the horizon if you cannot outrun them. I make lists, more lists, my room is a pile of lists while the world burns, what good will mountains of paper do at the end of the world?

I cannot outrun these demons, you know. They are always faster, more persistent, they wait me out until I'm too tired to go on, the sink their claws into my shoulders and drag me down until I stop. At what point do we make amends with the ghouls that haunt us, allow them to pass through, look at ourselves in the mirror and say, here you are, and gather the courage to accept that?

It's almost as though I drove all across the land only to find
I was in the car the whole time.

Say Her Name

The air is thick with the sound of helicopters again. Second avenue is a wave of peaceful protest, followed by a brick wall of unmarked vans and twirled batons. A woman is dead and the powers that be would like to move on now, thanks, we have a country to dismantle. The countdown races ahead and you wonder what will come of all of it. Will there be any reprieve, any relief? We have stopped wishing for joy. 

It is hard to carry so much fear, so much sorrow and anger, and still try to go through the world as though business were the usual. How do we sleep, eat, file papers, when everything burns in the margins? How can we justify taking out the trash when they ask us, after the holocaust, what we did to stave off the tsunami when it came? 

Breonna Taylor is dead. 200,000 people are dead. America, you have taken all, and now we are..

It occurs to me that I am America.

Oh Happy

My back aches when I wake now, I realize it is not my old age after all but only poverty presenting itself in the form of failing mattress springs. The phone overheats with angry rants and desperate pleas, we are collectively losing our minds and yet somehow making our way through the days as though we were capable of it. I drain my savings account to pay for a lifestyle of bare minimums, my roommate moves out and I hoard her clothes, her notebooks, a Great War mentality sits in my spine, inherited through the ages, when the earth moves we do not throw away and this is how I came to cook soup from stone, my people have changed the meaning over the years, we have learned to eat gravel and like it. The dog is confused by all the packed bags. In Kentucky, murderers in uniform are wiped clean of the blood on their hands. Washington burns, burns and hopes the smoke will hide the dead. Twenty-seven years ago I chose this country and I have kept choosing it ever since, why do you make a fool of my love, America? Why do you dishonor the dream upon which your foundation was built?

I return to the drawing board. Rewrite the narrative, adjust to the apocalypse as it moves and undulates beneath us. The mantra under my breath has changed. Now it is simply: survive, because you have to. 

For now, it will have to do.

Parallel

Our last night on the road we spend in Nowhere, Ohio. The residents seem inclined to go along with this moniker, even though I suppose the place has a name. Everything closes early, the roadside motel dark in the back of a gas station parking lot when we pull in. Long after dark, we snake our way out of the highwaya exit stop again to find a field under the stars and tune our radio to the drive in theater's frequency. An old classic revs up as the night grows cold outside our window. I wish for a blanket and a shooting star and get neither. Come morning we gather our things quickly, leave before breakfast, and make it to New Jersey by early afternoon. 

There's a certain thing that happens when you speed out of the Holland Tunnel and onto Manhattan soil at the appendix just off Canal Street. It's always that deep breath, always that slight settling of your bones into alignment. But arriving in New York, after so much time away, in a car that has crossed the entire country and which is now yours to keep on this ridiculous island, turned out to be more than my little heart could handle. I exploded in uncontrollable giggles and sobs behind the steering wheel, looking around in every direction and trying desperately to hold the buildings, to touch the concrete. Rush hour traffic was picking up, the street a tangle of cars and a mess of pedestrians and skateboarders, and still I reveled in the sight. So this is what it feels like to be home, I thought, and I know now after so many years it's stupid to keep harping on it. Of course this is what it feels like. How many times must New York tell you it is the best thing you have before you start to take it for granted?

I dropped him in Brooklyn later, just as the sun was setting across the bridges and everything had that sherbet glow, had that incandescent hum. By the time I reached my own stoop I nearly forgot I had been away, nearly forgot I had crossed the great land and that the back of my spine was bringing a whole new manuscript with it up to my little desk by the window. My muscles weary with the miles under my feet, my soul still buzzed with all that it had seen.

This year bathes us in tragedy. Joy is our best resistance. 

Smooth

Maybe it's that there's only so much corn a girl can handle before it begins to itch at her spine. Maybe it's that despite my reticence to the speed and crowd, once I settled back into the currents of a big city I felt like myself again, remembered the pace of my step, the sharpness of my tongue. We laughed and chatted across the Chicago bridges and sounded like ourselves again, how strange the turn of a dime. The car weaved just as well through a conservative farmland as through the sharp one way turns of a metropolis, I pat it gently in the garage before we close it for the night and ascend onto the streets. What a gift this life, I have time to think, what a marvel this land. If it falls apart, will we say we had a good run? Or will we bring the shovels and start to dig through the rubble?

Build something better with the shards we uncover.

Ice

I wake slowly, new time zones and a strange haze over Nebraska. The forecast says clear skies and sunshine, is this what constitutes a clear sky here? Perhaps the world is coming to an end. 

The newsfeed is all obituary in the form of partisan warfare. The view from the 8th floor window remains blissfully ignorant. A few cars loll by. He returns with coffee to say there is a farmer's market down the street and we have to go. You wonder if a farmer's market is different here, where the farms creep into the city limits. I miss New York. 

A story continues to bulge and undulate behind my temples. It adds the rickety old houses to its memory bank, adds the alienated feeling of not being quite sure this is the same country where you live. I look over my notes, remember the point of the story. 

Remember the point is I am all story, no matter when I try not to, no matter when I forget. 

A wedding begins in the banquet hall downstairs. 150 people as though the world wasn't ending, only beginning. Hashtag Wray of light from the newly minted Mr and Mrs. Well, he gets to remain. She's changing her entire self. 

Add it to the memory bank. Think art is a form of resistance. Gather your weapons. Prepare to draw.

Lincoln

We roll into town at the last rays of sun, golden hazy cornfield sun like a full moon behind us and I don’t know if the smog is wildfires from the west or just business as usual it everything is peach. We wander the streets under neon lights and wonder who lives here. By the looks of things, mostly the young. They embrace Friday night like there isn’t a pandemic, like another crack in the armor of democracy just broke like a heart in mourning. We have a beer and a smoke and take pictures of quiet brick alleyways and string lights in dark corners. 

In the late afternoon, in a small town surrounded by fields, I stared at a pony express station and marveled again at history, at human perseverance and dogged determination that there be a future. She writes from the west coast and says you’ve never sounded more sure, that’s why I believe you now, and you know she’s right. You know what you want now, and it makes everything else irrelevant, like you could take it or lose it. I walked across the land in search of the good word and perhaps the search was the word all along. I sleep a heavy sleep. Vow to keep looking, come morning. 

News

We leave a canyon on fire, waves of orange and red leaves washing the mountainside in color. It is breathtaking. I try to fathom the journey I have just started, but there is no wrapping my head around it. A car rolls under my hand, and it feels like mine already. We practice parallel parking in small spaces at the top of a mountain rest stop, the entire wild west spread out around us. The Rocky Mountains spike and dive around us, we soar into Denver at sunset and I wonder if this is how Jack felt, chasing Neal a mile into the sky, before the feeling trickles away in the beer glass in front of me. America lies ahead of us, already we have covered hundreds of its miles and we have many, many more to go. Take a moment, remember to soak it in. Storms and destruction lie in our future: give yourself a moment under the stars, give yourself a deep breath in the American West, remind yourself what you are doing and why. 

Our short existence is insignificant in the grand scheme of the Universe. Just make it significant for yourself, and you've already won.

Carte

The maps spread out in front of us, comparing and contrasting themselves, calculating hours under our hands and gauging points of interest along the route. The truth is on the road you don't know what you want to see until you see it. The stars were muted tonight, unwilling to leap to their deaths for my flights of fancy, how cruel reality when the fairy tale will not budge. If we drive the southern route it'll take us ages to get across the mountains. I wonder what I'm running back to. They say fall has arrived in New York, they say parking is a nightmare. 

But I have nightmares all the time, and wouldn't I rather go through them with an escape plan? The entire world has been a nightmare lately, so what harm can a little adventure do? The other night while lost in the dark, an entire new novel outlined itself against the back of my eyelid. This is the magic of the road, or of words, or of the stars. I run back to New York because I miss it while I'm away, because I am not whole outside of its borders. The rest works itself out because you make it. 

In the midst of this nightmare, we have to fight to dream.

Black Cab

 We rolled down to the reservoir, frigid mountain run off and the last days of summer frantically grasping at grains of sand, out all day and I didn’t burn. I will never forgive this year for taking summer from me, I have time to think, but didn’t I see the Hudson River at sunset, didn’t I eat birthday cake in the Rockaways and pick berries in patches and drink frozen drinks till my head hurt? I am pale, yes, and tired and wrung out like a wet rag but summer was here and I saw it. This year has taken everything from us and yet we are not poor, we are not empty. A fire rages in our collective bellies, a new determination and a different point of view. I have vowed to come out of this year with one thing so good it makes the horrors pale in comparison. We have three and a half months, 2020. 

We better get to work. 

Nine Eleven

The carnations on my desk begin to shrivel and wither. The vase was my great grandmothers, she always had pink carnations in it, so for 130 years that's what it's held. It has moved the length of a country, to the northern forests and southern shore, crossing at last the vast, wide ocean and landing in the desert West. Could she have imagined such a fate for her crystal? Could she imagine that four generations later it's still filled only with light pink carnations, so sweet in their countenance, so reliable in their tradition? What a marvel this life, after all, how small our tribulations in the grand scheme of things. What is a day's sorrow, compared to the wonder of a whole existence?

I sit outside later, long after the sun has set behind smoky moutains and the sky again has turned to an ocean of jewels, and I think of all the miracles it took just to get me here, too. It's hard to be despondent in gratitude. It's hard to be grateful, and not want to climb out of the ditch. Honor those who came before you, honor those who didn't make it all this way. One sunny morning in New York City, everything changed, and still the city remained for you to see it. This year in New York City, everything changed again, and still you remain. There's a whisper somewhere in you that has the answer. 

Stick around. One day it will rise to a song, and you'll find you know it by heart.

Valley

Are the highs worth it, when the lows do drag on so? you feel yourself ask, as you guide the old station wagon through the mountain pass. The leaves change color and I cannot feel a thing. Later, under a stream of increasingly hot water, you try to remember that this state comes and goes, that the depths of your lows are no more valid than the dazzle of your highs. This is not proof of your utter insignificance. 

But one can only spend so many hours staring into the abyss before it begins to feel familiar, can only wade around in the muck of one's own misdirection before the path seems out of reach forever. Eleven years I have been chewing this same cud, and what have we learned but that time wait for no one and you should've planted that tree eleven years ago, you daft cow. Nearly four decades you have known the only path you wanted to walk and yet all of that time you have spent rolling instead in ditches. It's no wonder you wonder if the ditch wasn't where you belonged, after all. 

You're not paranoid
if they're really out to get you.

Frost

Dawn rises careful, wary of the winds but none remain. The valley is blanketed in the first freezing night of fall, the vegetable patch covered in tarp and for just a second I am overcome with fear that my parents will not have the time to tell me everything they know before it is too late. What if one day I have a vegetable patch and do not know how to tuck it in at night? I look away. My throat is rusty. 

My spirit attempts to run away, to avoid the hard steps to take, how does it always know to do that? I wonder to myself if yours does the same, if we are all nervous pinballs in the world, or if it's just me. The river is wide, how far the other shore. Just take one first step. Take one first step and see if you cannot find another stone in the stream on which to stand. 

Take a deep breath. Find your path by walking it.

Corral

You wake to freezing temperatures and a wintry mix notification. Heavy clouds blanket the mountains, but at least they tempered the fire smog. The flowers seem to have survived. My to do list runs long, but morning is quiet, and you let it take its time, stretching under warm covers, breathing through your ambitions, letting everything settle in the great jigsaw that is your inner machinery. A large deer walks past your window. You are determined to look back on this year and see at least one precious gift it offered, drifts past your line of vision. I remember being broken, but it is far away now, only an abstract thought, a theory. I put myself back together and I am better than before, what a strange feeling. 

Sometimes we expect jagged edges to be sharp forever. 

But even mountains soften into hills, eventually.

In Spire

This moving little word may be traced back to the Latin inspirare (“to breathe or blow into”), which itself is from the word spirare, meaning “to breathe.” Curiosity makes you read the pages upon pages about where a word comes from. Curiosity makes you listen to hours of new voices, breathing power into the world. Curiosity makes you dive head first into tedious busy work because you see a spark on the other side. I know they tell you to do the work, that the zeitgeist (from spirit, time) of the day tells you to put your queer shoulder to the wheel, but I believe there is still something to be said for magic, that you will know it when it comes and then you will not come up for air until you have expended yourself in its grasp. I will follow you to the ends of the earth, make no mistake, but you better be a unicorn when we get there. 

Do you hear me? 

I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light.

Try to keep up. There's an end to that rainbow and if we look for it, don't you know, we
just
might
find it. 

Particulate Matter

Fire sweeps across California, devastating the lands. Smoke reaches our valley by late afternoon, erasing the mountains from the skyline and subduing any sounds, any thoughts. It is unhealthy for sensitive groups to be outside, and you wonder if that is a scientist joke. We destroy our world one disaster at a time, or many disasters at a time, lately, like we can't help ourselves. The desert dries out your lungs, you wake with parched lips and papery skin, I sleep too late in the silence, stumble through the morning disoriented. What was I meant to be doing, again?

A manuscript lies at the side of your desk. A promise of a new story unfurls in the recesses of your mind. Ah yes, you think, that's what I'm meant to be doing. The answer settles along your spine, lets your shoulders relax, tethers your heart to your breaths. The answer connects you to yourself when you are flailing, reminds you:

Everything else is just means to an end. 

But you still have to do them, to reach it. 

Reinstall

The water is low in the last Great Lake, its saline banks stretching like colorful salt marshes around the mountains and you marvel that anything ever survived here. The flight is smooth, HEPA filtered, a ltitle kinder than usual. You think perhaps some good things come out of disaster. It's hard not to hug at airports, they hand you keys to a second car and you drive yourself through the mountain pass behind them, feeling that familiar dry heat on your tongue, sinking into waves of a different kind of life. We eat dinner outside, call out behind like a restaurant kitchen and season from different salt bowls, but it seems a small price to pay for everything else being predictable. I sit outside under the stars later, alone under a silent Milky Way, watching little asteroids go up in flame in the periphery and wonder if they'll grant your wishes even if you were not looking straight at them when they went out. My wishes are clearer now, I am no longer lost and grasping after straws, do you hear me? These straws are a jungle now, are great big baobab trees and there's no ignoring them where they grow. You send all your stars my way, I'll will them to shoot across the entire sky, I will dig where they land. I am ready for these treasures, now, leave it all up to me, I am ready.

In Flight

How a place can be at once so familiar and yet so foreign. The terminals look the same, the smooth currents of transit, the broad sunlight through wide windows. But the floors lie emptied, the hallways muted. Every masked smile is tinged with fear. It’s like returning to riding a bike, except suspecting that the vehicle has been taken apart entirely and reassembled in ways you cannot guess. We walk like testing the ice.

But the September sun was mild on JFK airport this morning, and I stood in its light basking. The American West awaits across the land, and I return to its light, expectant. Winter returns, yes, all the darknesses of a life return eventually but oh, what light there is yet in the world. I am determined to find it all, to stare into its promise and believe it till I burst.

I know I doubted the world, I know I doubted the healing of my scars, but here we are, in the middle of a world on fire, and somehow all I see is sunshine. You do not turn down such a gift, when it gives itself to you.

You say thank you, and you do everything you can to deserve it.

Miracle Workers

 I just want a house, he says, between mouthfuls of birthday cake and gulps of beer, as she sighs in longing. I just want somewhere to breathe. I tried telling them about Penn Station in the morning, of birdsong in Bryant Park and flying down 5th avenue on a creaky bike, tried explaining how these crooked old tenements fit against my joints, but their dreams lie elsewhere just now, there's no telling what mess we're in for yet. I left them early, went home and packed a strange collection of things into a small bag. In my headphones, your voice traveled across my synapses, reminded me there is something left to reach. There's a five-leaf clover and a desert full of shooting stars waiting to help you stretch your limbs.

There's no telling what we're in for yet. 

I'm ready for that to sound like a promise.

and the Hudson

Early morning on the river, a sun rises into the foliage, onto the still water, mirrors a silence invisible elsewhere. I wake early, pack the last of my bag and pour a cup of coffee to watch the creek wake from the back porch. Back to New York, like a promise, like a gift. 

The train ride is quiet, I pick through inbox chatter and watch the herons stretch their long necks at the river's edge. Arrival waits with a hundred demands to be done, tomorrow waits with one big ask, my nerves tingle and try out setting themselves on fire but my head is calm, determined. There is adventure yet to be had this year, there is joy to be felt, the thing about disaster is it gives you the chance to see what it is you really want with what little time you have. We started the year in blissful ignorance, yes, but now in its stead we have determination. Instead of free of care we are full of it. 

If you win hope with skinned knees and bloody knuckles,
you are not so likely to let it go.

Luck

 Today, in a field between rolling hills, where summer was still warm and the sky was still unending, I found a five-leaf clover. Like miracles can just appear, like the universe is ready to wink at you for a minute. 

This life is a blessing when you are ready for it. 

Fonda

It's only another day, you think as you stretch and extend yourself past your boundaries. You like to make people happy. The day is all rain and imminence of autumn, you squandered a whole summer to pandemic panic, what were we to do? You think about the open road, America under your soles and adventure ahead. There must be morsels of joy somewhere. There must be some sort of reason for any of this, why else would we carry on?

The cicadas are loud this side of the river. The night sounds foreign. I don't know the reason, really. 

But maybe I just don't stretch this thin. Maybe I only break.

Empire Service

First day of fall and already they're dressing for winter on the high plains, he writes with a snicker. Along the river, I ran past a woman in a fleece jacket, while I was drenched in sweat wearing nothing. It was early in the morning, the East Village still sleeping and my bike ride to the run like a gentle meditation, just a few quiet minutes of rolling eastward, thinking nothing. The train is familiar now, the quick weave through the West Village and descending into Penn Station right as the track is announced, remembering to pick a river view seat. September first and already the Hudson is dressed in a mysterious mist, the first tinge of yellow seeps through the foliage. After a summer that wasn't, somehow the change is welcome, like my body is ready to build its new life, like everything has disintegrated into dust anyway, why not build something that can last. 

I don't mean to say everything is over. 

I mean when we make the most of what we have, instead of what we don't, we may end up with miracles.