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.