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.