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.