(post script)

I walked north in the dark rainy night, the evening mild but black in that way that Sundays can get in the fall and everything lies waiting, watching. The streets melted from under me, ten blocks, twenty blocks, I couldn't feel the miles so I kept going. Someone new moved in across the street, lights came on that have not been on in ten months and a young man hung in the window, in anticipation. Things are happening. 

The old apartment on Lexington lay dark. I wondered what my subconscious was trying to tell me, dragging me past this street corner as though I was looking for answers in my scraggly roots. By the time I reached 34th street, it seemed as well to just keep going, and I shuffled across the waiting hall of Grand Central station when only a few tired travelers remained. Remember people? 

That's all we do now, is say remember...? Remember travel? Remember fun? Remember rush hour? We paint old ills in romantic hues, try to make light of the fact that we've been buried for a year, maybe we're just trying to get through the day, what do I know? By the time I made my way south down Fifth Avenue the rain had picked up. I looked for answers in midtown streets while young proselytes hounded me about divinity. I told them good luck with that. 

At St Marks church I found daffodils and cherry blossoms, strange remains of a movie set feigning spring. Fake it till you make it. Remember making it?

The walk afforded more questions than answers. It's hard when all you want is not to want anymore. They speak of revenge narratives and the only vengeance I can think of is against my own indifference. The clock keeps ticking. My typewriter limps on its makeshift repairs. Tomorrow it is March. 

Try a new walk till something sticks. 

If you don't know where you want to go, then it doesn't really matter which road you take.

Brake/Break

There's a certain level of theatrics that come with crying over the bathroom sink. The inescapable reflection in the mirror, the years of watching protagonists break down on cinema screens, understanding the ritual and yet being unable to take it seriously, how it bubbles out from your deepest recesses. If the darkest month of the year ends now, it sure is going out with a bang. I sat down at the typewriter for solace but remembered the faulty ribbon feed and proceeded to take the whole thing apart until it wouldn't come together again. 

That's what I do. 

I break things and cannot fix them. 

The Universe presents me with gifts, and I squander them. February tries, tenderly, to offer little sprouts in the ground, a few mild days and sunshine, and all I do is dig myself deeper under the covers. The Word evades me, the Answer evades me, I am left with sand in my pockets and a weight in my chest, the years are rushing much too fast for me to walk this slow. 

The rain recedes. I venture out. Wonder if tomorrow will look different, under the banner of another month. 

Why would it, when I am just the same?

Open Mic

The modern world does another double take, swings around and picks up the remains of suffering souls, figures out a way to give us at least the closest possible proximation to what we've been starved of. We sit in a digital room full of strangers, rubbing sleep out of our eyes around an open mic on a Friday morning, do you remember when New York was New York and we would rub shoulders instead, when we would stumble home late in the night drunk on the buzz of what magic was plucked out of the air?

The thing is, we may think we have forgotten, but it's not true. New York is still New York and it'll shape shift again a thousand times, we take the buzz where we can get it, and we can get it. Spring returns, life returns, do you know we made it through the darkness, do you know we're getting to the end of these woods and we haven't lost one thing without gaining another. New York is still New York, but different, you are still you, but changed. 

Just hold on a little longer. Write all your stories. Pluck the magic out of the air, it's still there. 

You are still here.

Delirium

The sun returns for another day, you see the difference in the way the dust dances across your windowsill, feel it in the way your bones stretch in the early morning, there's an angle of the sunlight that has not been here in months. It is coming. I abandoned the pile of work at my desk and take another long run in the afternoon sun. All I can think is I made it. Suddenly, everything becomes clear again: the weeks of ineptitude, the days of doubt, all shape themselves against the outline of the Illness. My body twists itself differently; everything is still pale and wounded, but I know better things are coming. Feel a hunger in my belly that has not been there in weeks. Feel a hope in my heart like a child's. Every morning I wake early now, ripped from dreams and tossed into anxiety, but there's a different waking to a sunlight too bright. I look at apartment listings and care only about how many windows I can count. They ask about square feet and amenities, I tally minutes of light in the apartment. See change on the horizon and try to think of it not in fear, but in possibility. 

The only grace given us in life is our ability to forget our pains. Every year, April comes and wipes this darkness from my brow, it is how I go on.

I suppose there is gratitude to be found anywhere, if you look hard enough.

Resurrection

It's too hard, I think at myself in the early morning, 6 am and a deep hangover will not let me sleep. I don't know what I'm doing with anything. The to-do list spreads its cloak around me, the headache refuses to subside, everything is smoke and mirrors but terrible. I remain in bed, trying to will out the days. 

But a spring sun makes its way across the firmament, the dirty snow thaws into sparkling rivulets, I cannot help but go out and run into it. My legs heavy, my head heavy, but something in my chest tingles in that magic way it does come sunlight. 

I fall down. Again, again, I forget that it's the same thing every year, I think this year's despair is unique but the thing is. In the same way I fall down, every year there is a magic that gets me up again. 

If we just hold on a little longer,
I think things might just turn out alright.

Drip

It seeps into you in that way it always does, February: cruelly, heavily, relentlessly. Your brief glimpses above the surface refill your lungs but in a panic, there's never enough air before you are mercilessly flung back into the depths, rolling wave after rolling wave holding you to the ocean floor, scraping your skin against the corals who do not care if you bleed. I don't recognize my body under these bruises, under 11 months of inertia, I don't recognize my spirit under these weights of ineffectivity, and yet isn't that always the way with February? Carrying an unloveable burden that doesn't even feel like your kin. 

I turn up the therapy lamp to max. 

In a silence, little answers whisper themselves to me, they all weave themselves around the word, they tell you there must be salvation there because if not then there may be none to be had. And you are not ready for no salvation to be had. 

I decided long ago I'd live this life entire, I decided to keep going even in the face of all manner of good arguments not to. I promised to ignore the good arguments, I promised to put pen to paper instead, if Bukowski can live a whole life despite himself then dammit so can you. 

Count your pennies. Put one foot in front of the other. This, too, shall pass. 

Every wave reaches the shore
eventually.

Disrupt

I tumble down the stairs, weeks full of laundry in enormous blue IKEA bags on my shoulders. I step blinking into the sleeting avenue, a strange mild day with a midwinter dialect. All your anxious tics bleed out of you in rivulets toward the gutter, it's a cruel reminder of 30 years worth of defense mechanisms. Your turrets are so sharp, your fortress wall so many feet deep, it's a wonder sunlight ever gets anywhere near you. Your pallid skin raises an eyebrow at the sentiment. 

We ran on steam for so many months and now the steam has run out of us. She returns from her family yelling and you no longer remember how to say no, realize you always forget to say no when you need it most, realize under pressure you revert to crumbling brickwork and shards of stained glass in your eyes. I return from the laundromat with that warm, clean smell and surely one day this will all be behind us, will it not? Surely one day we can remember who we were, remember the bone in our backs, surely one day again I will be happy, right?

Tell me we will be happy again. 

Tell me we will not bleed forever.

Fire

The silence remains. I wake early, agitated, but by mid--morning it begins to wear off as the pot of coffee nears its glassy bottom. You step away from the demands you began to take for granted, hear again your own voice direct the traffic inside your head. Remember that you always knew what you wanted, what you were doing. How easy it is to get led astray. 

I walk past the empty apartment, try to imagine my face in the window. Take a long run along the river, try to imagine your lips on my eyelids. 2021 is still going to arrive, I swear it's going to arrive, I know our feelings and our hope are all buried in snow but spring will return, and when it does, oh lord will we be ready to step into it. 

Just because it is easy to be led astray
doesn't mean it's not easier to come back
home.

(Pause)

When the stillness comes, you find an unease in the weight of your body. You try to fill the silence with all manner of nervous tics, with nonsense and noise, but the weight is patient, has nowhere else to be, the weight is ready to wait you out. Do you remember that early morning in the quiet hotel room, the trembling reassurance in the warm space beween us? That was the last time I was happy,  I think. But I'm still here, and I have to make that count for something. 

We have survived eleven months now of standing on a ground that constantly gives way beneath our feet, surely that counts for something. 

You hav another quiet day waiting in the wings. Get your pen and paper ready, get your to do lists and check marks and stories lines up. You cannot outrun the weight in your body. 

The only way out is through.

Rest

When everything has been sent away for scrutiny, when everything meant to be created has been, and you at last have that moment to sink into the quiet softness of the afters.. 

it will never be as sweet in reality as in dreams. 

Everything we hope for looks better in our minds. I try to remember that, when the pain of your afters tears at my chest again. You were never as sweet in reality as I wanted you to be. 

I am a long projection of unfulfilled potential myself. 

There’s a secret to uncover here, if you can bear it. 

Edit

You say you’re coming home next month, that paradise is over and reality returns with the spring flowers. I want you here, did I mention I want you here, but you escaped the storms and the darkness and I don’t know if I can forgive that absence. Must everyone suffer to win my praise? Could it not be enough penance if you let me run my fingers through your wavy disheveled hair?

The deadlines arrive at last in a fire. I emerge charred from the rubble, more questions than answers, more uncertainty than poise. It’s only February, was this how the year was meant to go? They’re only growing pains, she says, but how are we not to cry with the breaking of our bones? There isn’t enough bourbon on the isle of manhattan to quell this despair, it doesn’t mean we won’t keep trying. 

It’s only February. It’s only winter storms in a pandemic, it’s only a world at the edge of crumbling don’t worry. You come back when you’re good and ready, see if I won’t be here still. 

See if I won’t be spring flowers and a house on fire, all at once before you’ve even landed. 

Window

My father collapses and cannot understand why. All around me, everyone collapses, it's a cruel season and hell freezes over in the south, everyone suffers. Are we just frogs in boiling water, not understanding when we are in the apocalypse entirely? They cancel street sweeping again for the snow, you buy yourself a morning's freedom, but then you sorely need it because another deadline looms. The deadlines are always looming. 

You wonder what it would be like to have a job and a house in Ohio. 

(You try to remind yourself that you always wonder what it's like to have a job and a house in Ohio when the world comes crashing down and that really what you want is a closet sized studio on avenue B with dirty windows in three directions but it's hard to get your priorities straight when all of the world is out of focus.)

It's only February, you tell him. Do not draw any conclusions about the state of your mind just now. He hesitates to believe you, but you know what a winter under the weight of the world feels like, this one is only that but worse. The deadline mutters at you from a corner again. 

You remind yourself that you've been through fire before. You've been through the long, unending darkness and seen it end before you did. It is dark now. 

But it will not be dark forever. 

Just be here when it's over
and we can begin to build where we stand.

Spent

We're hanging on by a thin thread as it is, she says into the cloudy space of our apartment, the tired, last dregs of a space that has nothing left to give. We are running on empty. The to do list runs long, the inbox bursting at the seams and a hundred different countdown clocks ticking, why do they all feel like bombs about to go off? From every direction come cries of despair, everyone is at the end of their rope, looking for any morsel of hope, or light, or joy, and no one has any to give. 

What a beyond crazy year. What strange, dark magic roils around this year, what absolute tar we have had to drag ourselves through. Is it any wonder we are barely still here?

(but we are here. in some shape, however beat up and beat down, we are here. just hold on a little longer, just put one foot in front of the other. spring will come, as it always does. be here then, and we'll take it from there.)

to Cheek

 Life comes to you in little miracles. 

Sometimes so small you don’t even see them. 

But look behind you, now and again. Look at how far you’ve come. 

You’ll see miracles where before you could have sworn you saw only sorrow. 

You’ll hear music where before the silence drowned it out. 

Worth Writing About

Your appointment is confirmed. Be here in an hour. You throw on clothes strewn around the floor, drag the car out of its icy cradle, make your way to unknown corners of the Bronx. It's quick, so quick you do not have time to catch up with the moment as it passes, aren't people taking selfies? 

Are we supposed to be taking selfies?

The nurse asks if I have any questions. But I am all out of questions now, it's been a year of torment, I drove out to the Bronx at the turn of a dime, what questions could possibly bother me now?

He calls, later, to explain the winding turns of a life, and you wonder when the snow will thaw at last. The car is parked in a new snowdrift, my arm hurts a little but not more than the alternative, as we said. All the alternatives have been hurting so much, for so long. 

The hurt isn't over. 

But oh there's a chance it's working its way out.

Against the Dying of the Light

The waves come and go. Sometimes we drown, sometimes we surf all the way to shore. Snow waxes and wanes across the island. February always seemed never ending, promising sunshine and the tiniest peeks of new sprouts but buried in freezing winds at every turn. They say today is the day Sylvia put her head in the oven but my oven is warmer than my bed by the window, how can I blame her for searching the reprieve?

Soon it will be March and all this will be behind us. Soon it will be March and all this will be a thing of the past, a strange mirage, a bad dream. My teeth hurt in the mornings but even the demons look smaller in daylight. 

Leave the oven door closed, my dear. Another layer of clothes ought to do it. 

Keep you warm till the ice melts again.

70

You can call now, she's awake. My father texts from two hours earlier, their morning still dark and the first hints of blue just creeping above the mountains. I call to sing rusty voiced congratulations into her breakfast. Seventy years old. It seems an impossibility. I remember my grandparents at 70, remember my own parents at 40, barely understand how we got to where we are today. Time keeps running even when we stand still. 

I wake with anxiety these days, fall asleep with a racing heart and barrel through my days trying not to think, really, at all if I can help it. February strangles what little life we have left, everyone is struggling, I try to remind myself that spring comes if we just wait for it. And all you have to do is survive. At last, a task that seems achieavable, amid a mountain of unsurmountable asks. 

At last I make it out to the river. It's been a week, it's been since before the last storm buried us, my bones ached then, too, but now I think my lungs are giving out. I am almost alone in the cold, gray afternoon, little flecks of sleet teasing in the margins, but oh. How the long steps and pounding breath release me. How my body collapses but at last, at lasts my mind rests. I walk back home in peace, with just a moment's gift tucked under my arm, I am alive. The inbox lies waiting, bursting at the seams, angry, and the wheel spins again. 

But I had a moment with New York, I had a brief reminder of the straight in my spine and I will remember it now. I will take it to bed with me and it will keep the nightmares at bay. My mother turns 70 and we all have our health, we all have another day. 

Set the bar where you can hit it.

LIV

We're so many bottles in when it's time to go, bring the shovels and unearth a car from the piles of unretrieved garbage. It starts on the first try, it has never failed you, how you long to drive off and not return until you are tired and ready to be home. 

You are always tired and home seems forever a construct. 

It's only February, a small voice inside you whispers. February always brought you to your knees, but you outlasted it every time. This month will pass, this cold, dark, isolated raft in the middle of the ocean will at last reach shore and you will step out alive, a little worse for the wear, perhaps, but alive and that's all that matters. Three weeks left, when will the snow thaw? When will the buds begin to bloom? 

You will be ready

You will be ready

You will be here when it's time.

Squeeze of Lime

Poverty skews you like a vice, you come out twisted with hollows in all the wrong places. Old frailties creak in the silence, ill-healed fractures go sore with the weather, they say another snow storm is on its way and I haven't yet dug out my car from the last, my shovel broke in the middle of a snowbank. 

I unravel like confetti, lost and tumbling in the whirlwinds, forgetting who I am and why, I always needed so much more time to wrap my head around other peoples' words and if there is one thing I have less of than money it is, indeed, hours. I'm trying to keep my feet on the ground, you know, but I think I have never been closer to driving off into the sunset. If you pulled up with a van and a plan right now, I'd get in without asking a single question. 

Hell, if you pulled up with a 9-5, a pile of laundry and a front porch mortgage, I might be just as glad. 

It's hard to choose the right path when your body's too hungry to walk.

Breath

Another walk up Broadway, stretching legs and lungs and trying to settle the myriad of ants in my system. Nearly a year I’ve been making this trek, grounded by Manhattan in my spine. Everything inside my skin is trying to get out, trying to escape, how many years have a free rather than fought, this is not the hero’s journey we’ve find to aspire to. Everything interesting grows out of failure, he says, but you wish it didn’t mean you were so long relegated to six feet under. 

The sun returns, the snow melts, spring may lie around the bend. You know the grass isn’t greener up close, but oh, how tempting it looks compared to the mud at your feet. 

of Winter

The rodent comes out and sees his shadow, apparently we are doomed for more winter. I walk past my car to find it buried in an igloo of snow, perhaps this year he is right. We wrap ourselves in absurd layers of clothing and ask the bartender to bring us all the hot drinks she can find, there is still something magical about making it work despite the relentless obstacles built against us. Do you think in Florida they know what it's like to make it work like this? My telephone shows me pictures of previously on this day and you wish for once the machinery would have the good sense to read the room. 

It is cold now, but it will not always be. It is dark now, but one day things will be better. 

One day you will look back on this time and laugh and pat yourself on the back for making it through. Man that was crazy, wasn't it? It'll sound jolly in recollection, it'll be a badge of honor or a fun story at cocktail parties. 

One day when you have everything you ever dreamed, you will look back on this time in acceptance. 

For now it's enough to just make it work.

Watch For

All night it snows, I stare at the sky without glasses and see hazy cream colored light. The radiator trips over itself to stay ahead of the freezing temperatures, steam clicking and hissing by the side of the bed as I drift out in and out of consciousness. For a brief second after the alarm rings, I remain in dreams and the notion that all is well. When I wake, I remember. 

We are in a blizzard.
In a pandemic.
We are locked into our bubbles in a world on fire. 

But babies are still made, lovers are still finding the secrets on each other's skin, the poets still wax from their messy nooks about the state of things and none of us are rendered immune, not yet. 

And if you can't be one of the first two, at least make sure you are the third. 

Sometimes,
even the poets make it out alive.