In-Between

Her 15-year-old eyes beam with discovery, New York City all new and impossibly promising. She squeals when I point out the celebrity's home and asks me if I've ever spent New Year's Eve at Times Square. After I leave them at the Astor Place subway station, New York looks a little brighter again, a little new. Did I not arrive here once with stars in my eyes, too, and imagine a life beyond anything I had known before?

I go for a run along the river and instantly pull a muscle. There are always ways to be brought back down to earth.

Later, he looks at me and says You do not hate people, you only hate the risk of disappointing them, and all you can think is how long it's been since someone looked at you. You are not sure you are ready to be seen. A new year arrives, but they all look the same somehow, like promises of sunshine under forecasts of rain. A tarot reading would be just as useful. 

I am tired, now.
Wake me when it is over.

Pause

For days, you do not surface. Wade through mires of thousand-piece puzzles and hot chocolate, string lights turning on and off, bits of leftovers making their way from fridge shelves to countertops to crumbs on already muddled sweaters. The sun rises and sets, the temperatures plummet and climb back up again. My car freezes to a puddle that melts before I have to move it. At the back of my neck, little tendrils of thoughts begin to turn themsleves into words. On my river walk, they turn to tears, and I have no need to stop them. Let them work their way out, let them purge themselves from under my skin and create assertion instead. I begin looking at apartment listings. 

Something gets lost in poverty, in the constant ache of fear in your heart. The mind's ability to conjure joy becomes worn, dulled, it is not like it once was. She writes from behind metal bars and says the electricity they send through her synapses should make everything better, but when she comes out, the peaks and valleys are erased alike. You put on another movie, start another puzzle, hope that the joy will be pumped into your veins for you. It feels like the end of days, but perhaps humans always felt this way. Maslow's hierarchy of needs only reaches so far; eventually we will have actualized ourselves into oblivion. 

I write a to-do list for the new year. Everything seems possible when it lies ahead.

Jolly Rancher

Winter Solstice arrives like a dream: crisp, sunny Wednesday morning with white puffs billowing out of the smokestacks. I take deep breaths and warm my cheeks against my crepe paper hands, the tide is high but not for long, for every take there is a give. Familiar faces run past on their morning runs, their dog walks, their river fishing, you revel in a community that asks nothing from you in the early hours, as you drink your coffee until it turns cold. Every day after this one will be longer, now.

In the little writing space on 14th street, you wriggle into a new corner, try this perspective on for size. The pattern on the tin ceiling distracts you, the angles of the roof, the constriction of a restricted vision. Forty years of living has taught you to accept the traits that sit deep within yo, so you do. Tomorrow you will return to the place that is yours. 

Perhaps that's something to be said
for a lot of things.

Midwinter

(It’s cold, yes 

but you look at the tiny flame 

in your chest 

and it warms the blank pages 

of your calendar 

Makes the days ahead 

Thawed with hope.)

Woke Up New

Sunday mornings in the East Village are crisp, like brand new sheets of paper, like wind coming down a mountain. My car is parked near a fire hydrant, I walk past it anxiously, trying to weigh number of feet against the benevolence of the NYPD. There's no way to calculate it accurately. 

The L train is still, after Union Square there is only a handful of us left. I make my way up the stairs, up, up, up, this City is built into the sky, we dig our ways out of the ground to the top of walkup stairs. The writing nook is quiet, the coffee I make is too weak but there's a sense of peace in making it, a sort of routine that carries me into my cubicle. On a day when I could have my pick, I still sit down at my usual, and it says more about me than I can be bothered with. Here are a precious few hours of writing time: do not waste them on yourself. 

As the year comes to an end, you cannot help but look back over your shoulder and see what's become of the path behind you. Every year seems muddled and thorny at your fingertips, but at a distance, don't they begin to paint themselves in color, don't they look like favorite clothes in your closet eventually?

There is nothing wise to say about it yet. Everything is still grinding its way through your innards. Just wait patiently, remember to breathe in and then breathe out. 

You cannot find wisdom
if you are dead.

Tunnels

The silence speaks volumes. You know the sentiment without hearing the words. How the days and nights and hours get eaten up by your disappointing to do list, how there is no room for whims and creative flourishes. You stay up too late at night in revenge, sit in the magic of the dark, of the quiet, strings of Christmas lights wrapping themselves around your periphery. A car across the street blinks hazard lights into the night for hours, growing more dim and still persistent. The remains of a winter storm blanket the seaboard. You neighbor calls and asks if you have a very tall ladder. 

I recite a laundry list of occurences, no mention of the words I long to have fall from my lips. The silence speaks for you. 

You feel it stir in your belly, wait patiently.
In silence you hear what was not spoken before.

For the Rest of Us

Drive the 87 late at night, shake the last of the New Jersey drivers on the outskirts of Paramus and sail through the last ninety miles in peace. The little hamlet lies quiet, dark, stars shining and the Hudson River shivering at the end of the street. You wake hours later and do not remember where you are, the silence buries you. 

By late afternoon, we are shivering in the quaint holiday activities of town. Hot chocolate is free. The Christmas tree is lit, you want nothing but for time to drift into oblivion. The forecast calls for snow. 

She pours brandy into the egg nog, we stand on wide-grated heating vents in the Victorian house, everything is ridiculous and delightful and the flannel pajamas wait all year in the attic for this moment. 

That is all,
and that is plenty.

as the Sea

Return to the quiet space on 14th street, determined to try other pockets of placement for your writings but ending up again at the little back nook, nestled into the maze. The hive is full of writers today, escaping the foggy December afternoon, escaping whatever lies outside the walls that impedes the writing. Mary Oliver has wrestled with the angel, she is stained with light, but I am wrangling my demons, I am torn with dark. He writes to say you can join me, we begin before dawn, and you weigh your late nights against the thrill of adventure. 

Earlier, on the bridge back from Brooklyn, a book in my lap and a wet umbrella between my feet, I remembered for a brief, brief moment what it was like to live in New York, what a life in New York looked like before the walls came tumbling down. It wasn't grandiose, wasn't a persistent Times Square inside your eyelids. New York was crossing those bridges, on the way from somewhere, on the way to something. New York was the glitter of the Chrysler Building heading home from a good date, was saying yes to an unexpected moment, New York was going through motions of the mundane, but in a place that always buzzed with extraordinary. It was centuries of arriving with a dream in your pocket and a song for a bed. 

It was fifteen years of arriving on a grid and running out of questions. 

I got caught up later, in doing dishes and stringing Christmas lights, but the feeling didn't leave, not entirely. It's been three years lost without you New York. 

But I think you're coming home, at last.

in Disguise

You carrry mental illness in your bones like a family heirloom no one else wanted to take on and you were the last one holding it when the music stopped. The bartender remembers you now, asks if you want him to turn the lights up for your reading. You nestle into your regular seat in the corner and shake your head, prefer to let the darkness envelope you. This is the gift of the writing bar, a soft vacuum, an absence of time, you never want to do anything else. At the base of your spine, you begin to remember something about who it is you used to be, like a quiet but steady dial tone just outside your range of hearing, persistently vibrating against the inside of your skin. 

Everything returns. We went to the ends of the earth, to the edges of humanity, but we are still here, in one way or another. 

Take a deep breath. Get a firm grip on the hot potatoes you were given . 

And keep walking.

Do Not Hold

Time becomes irrelevant when you are doing the work. You are reminded again of the strange currents of your creative endeavors. You hold no resentment in the madness. An entire life, your father disappeared into his office for weeks on end, he wouldn't eat, the cups of coffee piled up around his desk, you tried to reach his attention but never could. Eventually he would resurface, gaunt, musty, but done. I have finished the manuscript, is all he would say, and you never knew if he was happy or not about it. 

The point of addictions is rarely to be happy, but to feel sated. 

You feel the whims of your mental illnesses melt away, the questions of purpose you never can seem to shake. A day passes, you do not remember to leave the apartment, to eat, to make your bed. Long after the city goes to sleep, you have not remembered to go to bed. Feel like you missed out on a day in the real world. 

You are not happy.
But you are sated. 

And so you carry on the legacy you have been given.

Intro

You begin a new story. 

(You cannot help yourself.)

Untold potential unfolds in front of you, little morsels of hope floating toward the sky like ash and you have to catch them in the precise moment between when they are too hot and when are no more. 

Everything that requires catching is too particular about the hows, and you feel your life wither from under you. I go for a long run in the biting wind and watch the sun beam over the East River. 

Everything that desires catching will come back for another round,

but
you still have to reach out to take it.

Never More

And this is where we write, she says, pointing at the closed wooden door. The hallway smells like coffee and radiator steam, beads of sweat creep down your back after mounting the long staircase. An editor at the kitchen table asks what I'm writing, and when I try to answer only joy spills out. I fill out the paperwork, she gives me a key. Opening the door feels like walking through a portal, like unwrapping the most intriguing present, my skin tingles. 

There's a silence in the space that holds you. 14th street lies somewhere not too far away but the distance feels immeasurable. You do not take out your ruler. For a short moment, time is your own again, like it used to be, not like you wielded it into submission but like you made friends with it. The street grows dark outside the window, you are oblivious to the changes of the world, and why shouldn't you be. 

There are too many worlds
still needing exploring.

Re:Cover

You're new, I say, before considering whether that's appropriate. The bar is empty, but for a quiet writer nursing a tea in the corner and a young pair on their first date by the window. Their animated body languages compete with each other for ultimate consent,  Can you tell that I like you? The bartender's name is Connor. Another regular comes in, and everything feels like home, like it used to, like there was a time before everything fell apart and we can still nestle into that feeling. We can still be who we meant to be. (Do you remember when they made toaster oven pizzas in the corner and you had to sneak in to use the bathroom when no one was watching? Sometimes we love in sickness and in health without even realizing until it's over.)

The corner bodega brings in the Christmas trees for the season, they steal an inch that becomes a football field and stretch their wires well past the green door on 6th street. When I walk out I stumble straight into the season, and there's no being mad about foliage in your eyes. My apartment is half a mile of string lights now, my nails are miles deep of dirt from digging out of the abyss, it never ends, it never ends, that is the lesson I forget in the deepest of darkness, that all is not over at the bottom, it's just you'll see it again. Reliable like transition. Lean in.

A large group of college students tumbles in, lingers in the back alcove, consdering their next steps, overjoyed at unexpected reunions. You wonder if it's okay to shush people in a bar. I've been coming here since you were in diapers. The snark seems a good sign that you are in recovery.  You gather whatever rosebuds make themselves available to you at the peak of the rollercoaster, cushion the fall in the descent. You cling to words like life rafts. 

You won't realize they are until it's over.

and I Say

The furniture giant feels like home only until it doesn't, only until its safe reprieve becomes a tangle of puzzle pieces not fitting according to instruction, with parts missing, with arguments built into the tapestry of its design, I stood in a corner of the closet organizing section trying to dispense with tears in a way that would give rise to no questions. In New York they let you cry on the subway without so much as a second glance, in the subway you are buffered by a quiet comfort, but underneath the glaring lights and white walls of inexpensive home goods I was unsure of the rules, unsure if I would be be left alone in the aisles of pillows as I contemplated self-worth against the price point at which I would permit purchases of duck down. Am I worth $24.99? $87? 

I walked out with neither, so you do the math. 

They say no couple comes into IKEA without a fight in their future, say the confined corridors create conflict, but I never recognized my own skin in those descriptions, knew only joy. It turns out sometimes when they say things, it comes out garbled, a riddle. It turns out when you fight in IKEA it is only with yourself. 

And she is a significant other
you have yet to figure out how to
leave behind.

Default

An island washed in sunshine, I turn my head and squint as I walk down the promenade. The calm of a holiday eve, of the deep breath before a tinseled madness, you let the joy build in your heart in the silence. Spend fifteen hours a day working to close up shop in time, how far you’ve come, how deeply entrenched in the rat race. 

You still believe you can get out. 

There’s a current along your spine, built from decades of contrarian influence, from generations of firestarters, that says stepping off is easy as scratching an itch, that says when everything burns you can build from scratch. 

The years pass, they mold you and knead you into unfamiliar shapes, 

but you don’t have to listen to them 

if you don’t want. 

Mildly

Suddenly the weather is mild, you peel layers off your skin along the river and stare straight into the sunlight. Remember again how much the sunlight carries you. What is lost in the dark. I find a penny heads up on the pavement and remember how I used to feel like the universe was winking at me  

A holiday races toward you, you scramble to prepare. Remember all the things good around you. 

Start there.  

Instant

Make your way across Tompkins Square Park, tears streaming in the bitter wind. Remember how it always was to run freezing down into a subway station and be caught up by beads of sweat trickling down your back, your sweater itching at the collar. Remember a lot of things about a life before the one of the odd Intermission. The city begins to look the same underneath the soles of your feet now, the same when you tuck yourself in at night and lie staring at it from out your window. 

In the little writing nook on 14th street, you snag a coveted window seat and remember why you're better off writing in a cave: The goings on of the street below capture all of your attention. A pigeon has snuggled in on your windowsill, feathers ruffled against the cold, conserving energy for sunnier days and stray bread crumbs. They make their living here, somehow, too.

Safely nestled into your cubicle, you dive down innumerable rabbit holes, discovering and rediscovering creative joys you have spent three years inadvertently beating out of yourself. That which is hidden in snow remains, you remind yourself, but not without losing some of its luster, not without partly turning to mulch. 

The first day I lived in New York City, our new landlord drove us to pick up a bunk bed we had found on craigslist. East 4th Street, between B and C. Some of the crew stayed behind to go to the grocery store on the Southeast corner. It is still there today. As I paid the nice young couple the cash for the bed, I could only ask how did you get this place? New York was new and impossible, so close I could touch it but entirely out of reach. The idea of an apartment in the East Village seemed absolutely preposterous. The idea of making a life, a real life not just a desperate clawing fleeing moment, seemed like something other people did, something I could never build myself up to deserve. 

Some days I think I have achieved no thing in life except making a life in New York City. 

Some days I think that is more than enough.

Booster

This may hurt a bit, she says, as she pricks me with the needle. I walk home on a Friday night in the city, the 20-somethings heading to their parties, and think about how tickling it felt to believe in the magic of an unknown evening. 

By morning, my skin aches and I spend 24 hours writhing in side effects, unable to leave bed or remember how to think at all. The reprieve was scheduled in my calendar. Nowadays everything is planned, even recovery. I see the years fall away from me but also return, old, unwanted garments I thought I had discarded which turned out only to gather dust in my closet waiting for the right time. I try them on for size, they cling to my skin and weigh me down, I fear they’ll suffocate me this is not what I wanted. 

Take a deep breath. Remember I know how to remove what I know longer want. Remember I know what it feels like when your skin fits the home you’ve created for yourself. 

Go to sleep in a fever dream. Determine your start over in the morning. 

Such a Taste for Flesh

The demons are back. How long they stayed away in years of sunshine, how strange to get a taste from a whole other life then have it all taken away again. You get nothing for free. 

The same cuts bleed across your skin, like old friends you hoped you’d never see again, and now you have to speak with them like your languages are the same. Your tongue is unwilling to form the words, but the demons drag them out of you regardless, they come out twisted and fumbled. You hate everything they say. 

A storm is brewing. You prepare your armor. Determine not to wait until it pulls the roof from off your house. Step straight into the maelstrom 

and pull out your sword. 

Do Less

Fourteen hours tethered to the little corner desk, I forget to check the time and float into the weighted blanket of a good deadline and creative works. The bank account says maybe that's fine, and the days fall out from under you. He tries to explain how the hollowness fills his entire inside and he's not sure quite how to smile if nothing reminds him to. Your soft heart hasn't fully hardened, you realize, and perhaps that is all for the better. 

I don't yet know what the point of all of this is. I'm still choosing to believe there is one.

Stannar Du

Too far from the path you’d finally found, spend your days weeding through thickets. The sky is gray above the Manhattan Bridge as you make your way out into the world. So familiar with this aversion to the light, with the layers folding in on themselves. You don’t know how to turn it around on your own, can’t get the wheels spinning in the right direction. You know there was joy here somewhere, a bearable lightness, you know now how it feels underneath your skin and it’s too hard to navigate a world without it. 

It’s been too many days with

to now suddenly be without. 

Hamlet

Too many days pass in silence: quiet sunrises, falling leaves along the river, Lincoln Center after dark when everything gleams of New York. The mourning doves line up along your windowsill, basking in the sunlight and escaped radiator heat. On a sunny Saturday, you pack the last of her potted plants and jewelry into the station wagon and drive a person who once was your home across the river to the settled life in suburbia. You absorb her smiles, then hold your breath until you are safely upended on the other side of the Holland tunnel. 

The temperature drops in the middle of your run along the river, you cannot be mad when November beams at you. You dream of London in the spring, 

Everything ties itself together somewhere. You are just not sure, yet, where.

Paragraphs

Step into a rickety walkup, countless staircases ahead and the promise of other dimensions hiding behind the door at their end. She shows me the kitchen, the unending supply of freshly brewed coffee, the creaking wood floors, while I glimpse at the closed door and wonder what lies inside. 

When at last she guides you to your cubicle, a cocoon punctured only by one skylight hinting at fire escapes and sunshine beyond, you feel a gratitude settle along your spine, a quiet humming like electrical lines spreading across your skin, an itch in your fingertips that has been sorely missing. 

We have been away for so long, have been absent from our own lives and suffering without remembering since the heavy blanket was draped across our town all those years ago. I have been half a life, half alive, I have been a weighted shadow, I have seen a face in the mirror but it has not been my own. Tears appear in my eyes that only make me smile. 

I have made it out of the valley of death again,
somehow, impossibly,
and it feels as if
the taste of life has never been
sweeter than
this.

Wasn’t True

Chelsea lies quiet on a Monday night in daylight saving times, the night darker somehow, the sidewalks empty in anticipation. A Freedom towers at the end of sixth avenue but I turn east on 10th street, ogling the foyers of west village townhouses with their high ceilings and refined silences. Somewhere near university place it occurs to me: I am smiling. Somewhere near university place it occurs to me there is a song in my step, a joy in my heart. I cross the east village in a hum, the avenues full of yellow cabs again, the asphalt buzzing, one could almost forget the years of death, of morgues in Central Park and careful whispers across window panes. 

I cut through Tompkins square park, a cop car trailing me in silence past the darkest corners, and I finally understand again the feeling in my chest. 

When I found myself breathing, after months of drowning, that was only the discovery of a survival. I was still heaving on the shoreline, still confusing tears for salt water. 

Now, suddenly, on a Monday night in lower Manhattan, I wasn’t only alive anymore. Now, suddenly, I am living. 

Different

Something chafes, and you end the sprouting tendrils before they attach properly. Once the words are spoken, you don’t look back for a second. New York swelters like an august afternoon, but we turn the clocks back, the streets dark in the afternoon and littered with leaves while you walk bare legged home down sixth street. 

You could feel weighed down by what might be seen as a failure, you could suffer under the pressure of your own ruminations. But they are no longer there. 

The dark is here, but all you feel is free. 

A Ware

The bar is around the corner, the walk short. The evening bursts around you like an open window, ajar to fireworks but quickly closed. You return home well before its time. 

There's an open loop in a quiet corner of your chest. You itch to close it. He says maybe Los Angeles. 

You think maybe you close your own loops. 

The forecast says sunshine and summer heat. Your station wagon is parked on the corner. 

Everything is better than it's ever been.

Remember, Remember

The bar is quiet when you first walk in, a few young boys and a scruffy regular lean against the dark wood. You haven't seen the bartender in ages, she pours your regular with a heavy hand and updates you on the latest. I've been sick so long, she says, I probably shouldn't even be here. But I can't stand to think about it anymore. You can commiserate. 

Your corner table is free, it waits for you, as it has waited for you for years now, ready when you are. The weather outside yells of summer despite the fallen leaves, and you get a hundred mosquito bites despite the early sunset. The clock behind the bar lies, it's been twenty to ten for as long as you can remember, it's an inside joke with people who probably aren't even here anymore. 

But you are here. Again, again, still, after all this time, you are still here. The city tried to wring you out like a sponge for years and you remained, then the the world tried to wring your city out and you clenched your fist at the Universe for allowing this heartache, but you remained. Now the illness has washed the last of your weariness away, you have only love now, you have only remain, you have only the bare bones of whatever madness drove you to this city, to the world, to this life.

You're ready to see that
it is more than enough.

Overwhelm

A writing day appears on your doorstep, quiet at first, unsure of its footing. A few stray jabs from a to-do list catch you off guard. You attempt to catch the opportunities afforded you, as the sky outside your window breaks into impossible shades of blue underneath a November sun. How you used to fear these days, thinking the dark would reach you so early. But escaping to the little island gave you the most precious gift of time, and you have months yet before the weight breeds in your chest. 

As the illness recedes off of you, and words begins to sift into the empty spaces it leaves behind, you feel that age-old itch in your spine again, feel that elusive longing for all the things in the world outside your window, feel the pieces within you fit again into a puzzle on Manhattan's grids. She asks why you moved here to begin with and all you have to tell her is It was meant to be. That time seems so long ago now, the moment when first you knew, when he lit a fire in you that you could not ignore. You said so often that he changed your life and for a while the words seemed to lose their meaning, but their content never truly did. 

One day in a late August of your youth, you landed on these New York City streets, and nothing would ever, ever be the same. If the moments you remember what that meant are few now, it never makes them any
less
precious.

Hallows

The illness returns, drapes your lungs in iron weights, drags your body across the room. You write your excuses into the ether and saunter slowly towards cauldrons if soup. Children in costume yell at you outside the window, it’s all laughs beyond the disease. 

I took a long slow walk along the river this morning in my daze, warm October sun drifting over Brooklyn, and a feeling so long gone I nearly didn’t recognize it sat itself at the bottom of my spine. Happiness keeps showing up, lately, keeps trying to make me believe it will stick around, I’m almost starting to listen. In the midst of all this darkness, in all this ache and falling leaf, I’m starting to think 

You are happy. 

Viral

The illness burns and burns through you, bursting into awareness in aching mornings, boring you into the boredom of confinement. At last, after years deepening isolation, you want out, you want the world again. We walk through Prospect Park closely peeled against each other like lovers, but your eyes are in the autumn leaves, your senses tickling across the perfect October days. In your fevered haze, you are not bothered with separating them, with making any hasty decision, but later, on your solitary morning walk along the East River, you are able to sift through the pieces, sort out your insights. 

The other day, in the quiet sunshine, I felt joy. In retrospect, for a minute, you feared it was a mirage, just a trick of the lights, but the feeling reminded itself to you again, again, quietly but certain, unwavering.

In a quiet October morning,  you decide to believe it. Decide to be unwavering in return  

Something Meaty

The illness leaves and returns with a vengeance. I walk breathless along an east river in its prime, New York beams in October, makes up for all its ills, kisses your bruised knees and tries to make you forget what has passed. Everything aches but I don't want to listen to it, I walk breathless along the east river and feel something new, something familiar but far away, like a distant memory. It takes you a moment to realize it is joy. Like you dragged your wasted heart, your weary soul through a thousand deserts and were landed suddenly on the banks of an oasis. Like you'd been a jumble of jigsaw for years and suddenly all the pieces sat neatly together, sat soft in your chest. 

I came back to the little shoebox on 6th street and everything looked different, clearer, crisp in its contrasts. It's been a long, cold, lonely winter. 

Maybe this is how it ends.

Raises

 The streets don’t look different, the air doesn’t vibrate with potential. You think perhaps you shouldn’t make mountains out of mole hills but you also long for mountains, so it’s hard not to look for them. When you leave him on the L train you are softer than before, but it may just be a trick of the lights, just the fog rolling in across the east river. You are different now, harder, carved in marble by apprentice hands. The east river remains as ever. 

You wonder what it is it’s trying to say. 

and the Fury

Labored breathing, heavy limbs, I make my way across the avenues to test my abilities for errands. When I get there I’ve forgotten to bring my wallet. The east village is all Saturday morning sunshine, stretching and yawning along St Marks as the restaurants sweep sidewalks and set up chairs for the day. 

Crossing through Tompkins, I find myself reluctant to leave it, the steady murmur of people in joy, an open park bench. I sit down and find an abandoned copy of the Sound and the Fury. Within its pages, someone has circled, “She smelled like trees.” A man sits down next to me and I realize too late it is a storyteller long admired. We sit in silence in the sunshine. I never get the chance to tell him. Dogs in costume swell into the park for the Halloween Parade, New York is sunshine and smiles, a perfect October Saturday in a city that adores its own narratives, it would have been perfect with my hand in yours. Instead I took a slow run along the river and thought about a time before everything broke in us.

The city gives its gifts when you well and truly need them. A book on a park bench. A storyteller silent by your side. A long slow stride in sunshine the kind you used to take before everything broke. Your lungs burn in illness but no matter. 

When the gifts are given to you, you take them. 

Now it's on you to make something of the treasures you've unwrapped.

All of the Time

Your pockets of time turn to large swaths of empty as the illness moves in and takes over your body. It will not name itself, will not disclose its intentions, just sits on your chest for days on end and tears you from your slow and steady build toward stability. He offers to bring you food, to make you laugh, to watch you sleep, and you don't know how to explain that your brief flirt with what it is to be human ended in collapsing bridges and boarded airports. It was too much work to get there once, how could I possibly do it again?

I sit in the open window, eating ramen and tapping out poetry, trawl my own words to find the key, to find the secret that unlocks a happiness I know I once carried. The words show up empty handed, show up without their usefulness in tow, I close the books and grasp at straws. The illness sits in your lungs like fire smoldering in the underbrush: quiet, insidious persistent. It's just that fear can be a little over-eager and misguided, says a Post-It on the wall, a gentle reminder from a kinder time. You finish another book, think I can do better.

Wonder if you really ever got back up and dusted yourself off,
or if everything before this was child's play. 

So Good

The Taconic on a Tuesday is easy, sunlight rolling over orange hills, out of state cars making their way toward the City in no hurry. Arrive at an east village unchanged by your absence, though you are perpetually changed by its presence. He asks for pockets of your time in unassumed corners, you forget to look at your calendar. It is late and you are anything but 

tired. 

Demand

By morning, the trees are slick with rain, cold October Monday cringing at commuters along Main street, on their way to Albany for another day of pushing paper. She writes of heartbreak, four decades of ache returning to their familiar swansongs, they arrange their fatal patterns and ready themselves to strike. You wish you could protect her body from the blows, but she opens her arms to welcome them, and it is not your maze to navigate. You vow to move differently on your own. 

Eventually the coffee sinks in, the quiet Victorian house stretches itself into action. You eye the to do-list, wonder what matters. Turn the heat up in the old iron vents, and think perhaps it will tell you on its own.

Sleep

The way up the mountain winds in familiar fashions, sunlight gleaming through hillsides on fire, maple leaves trilling in the breeze. The car ahead of you slows to a crawl; you know they are simply mesmerized. When we pass, an old man sits smiling in the driver's seat. We cannot possibly be angry. 

Hike past throngs of people, reach a quiet outcrop in the shade, the Catskill mountains billowing out around us and a great waterfall roaring at our side. We make jokes about the fresh air in our lungs, about how our familiarity with tenement walkups help us get up the steep steps to the mountaintop. Everything is a freedom. Later, we sit reading on quiet couches, red wine in our glasses and apple pie in our bellies, there is no panic the upstate cannot soothe, no noise it cannot silence. He writes convoluted soliloquies of longing, you try them out on your body to see how they may fit, but it's too soon to tell. You take warm baths and fall asleep in a town silent as death. 

Silent as a heart cleansed of darkness.

Chime

Familiar ripples along your skin remind you that something of you remains inside the stone monument you've become. You wonder if this is what it feels like to crawl out of the cave. Too many false starts to bring out the morsels of hope left in your pocket, but curiosity peeks around the corner. I was a person once. 

That's all this is about. 

We venture into the world to become human, stand face to face with others to see ourselves reflected in their eyes, try on someone else's voice in our ears and gauge if it sounds like home. 

You shake the dust off your aching shoulders, try to stretch your limbs toward the light. Let the taste of possibility sit on your tongue, try to see if you remember it. 

Try to remember what it's like to want something again.

Murray Street

A picture appeared on the screen, a reminder of days past, an unexpected punch in the gut. Didn't the sunlight look brighter, didn't your eyes seem clearer? Reminders of your strength, of how you built and dragged yourself across coals, across oceans. A whole life has come and gone between. When he looks at you with bright lights in his eyes you don't know how to tell him the bulbs seem to have gone out in yours. 

In the middle of the night, I wake to the sound of unexpected proximity. A man climbs the fire escape outside your open window, unfazed by your revolt. You lie awake for an hour, staring at the full moon and wondering at signs. The man climbs back down, jumps onto the street, walks away. I fall back asleep. 

You wonder where people find the switch
to turn the light back on.

Didn't Even KnowIt

Allen Ginsberg stares at you from the page, those cocker spaniel eyes but always an emphasis on the cock, it's a life of contradictions. Inside your apartment, the October sun beams warmth onto your skin but along the river the wind was bitingly cold. You read a children's book and compare notes, compare turns of phrase, compare daydreams, and somehow do not come up short, it's all surprising. In the early morning, the little dog jumps up on the bed and nestles in to a warm nook along my side, it's another day of silence, of forgetting about time, of sinking into whatever words concoct themselves at the nape of my neck. You tell her it's too soon to hope, but the gears warm up without your input, and you do not stop them. We all have to train so that one day when we need the muscle, it will do what it's supposed to. 

October stretches inside you. Says here is a moment that is not too hot, not too cold, here is a moment that is just right. You sit down at the typewriter and smile at its blank space. Feel invincible at the top of its page.

East Village Grieve

You spend a day in silence, in literature and thought and sunshine. Walk the little dog around the neighborhood and marvel at the East Village in October sunshine. The community parks are all abuzz with music and poetry, you add an extra block to your route and the dog delights. Soft jazz wafts in from your open windows, you know there has been a fall when you were happy, but it seems so long ago now, there's a time after this when you won't remember what a smile feels like, I've been in the dark for years.

One day I walked out of an office and I never walked back in. I know the road has been long, and tiring, and impossible to navigate, but you have not left it, I promise. You're stumbling, legs scratched from the bramble, but you are still moving along, you are still taking step after step. A little dog lies sleeping at your side. Your father goes on a book tour at 70. Every page that lies ahead is still unwritten. 

So write it.

Rear View

A small dog moves into the shoebox on 6th street. She is just the right size for what little floor space you have to spare. Just the right size for the hawks in Tompkins Square Park, a bearded old man reminds you as you pass him on a stoop. A pony arrives at the park and everyone is smiles, but later you learn that someone was stabbed on the corner not 15 minutes later. New York is strange that way. 

A friend arrives on a train from the South, months of separation disappear in the returns. The city is loud, and warm, and bubbling, something has returned, or is ready to, or is itching to and all it needs is for you to open the gate.

You stand with your hand fiddling with the lock, considering your options. Wonder if you're ready for what's to come.

Makes Right

In the early morning, remnants of a hangover remind themselves on your brow. A late walk home across the villages, the Empire State Building nestled in a swath of rainclouds, the October dread relentless. It only begins to lift when you have just given up hope, when you have dug your nails in at the shoreline and only just decided not to drown. Curiosity resuscitates your cat, it's a joke of words, I refill my cup and watch you unfurl little tendrils around my edges. My great-grandfather's gold watch ticks comfortably at my side, reminding me only of my own insignificance: the days will tick by even after I am gone. There is only what you will make of your time here, everything else will be lost on you. 

He says in real life it's more, and you think that's exactly what you've been trying to say, but haven't been able to. 

Tread carefully around the fires.
Remember how they keep you warm.

Poor Little Rich Boy

Avenue B remains, your flowers unmoved by your absence. Tompkins Square Park rests in the rain, remnants of a hurricane washing the streets. Everything is dirty, but you are happy. That is what New York is. He writes regrets across the time zones, but it is too late now, you are already somewhere else. That is what New York is. 

There's a moment in return, when your edges are still soft from the country, when you find your brows furrow, your jaw tighten, when you retrieve the rush of subway stairs, a transition that occurs before you've even reached your front door. They have Sunday dinner waiting when you arrive, and you forget you were ever away. 

Open the windows, let in fall. You have made all the space in the world
to take in whatever is ready to come.

And

The sun rises quietly, Saturday morning but it doesn't count the hours, only does what it is meant to do. A hot air balloon rises above the hillsides, quietly defying gravity like a deep breath to greet it. The tops of the mountains turn golden with autumn, a million quaking aspens leading the way into a new season. Do not be afraid, they whisper in the wind, here is light still. I get out of bed reluctantly, put the sheets in the washing machine, look at all I own and wonder how to fit it into such a small container. It is good practice for how to furnish one's heart. 

There is always room. 

The hot air balloon sinks, lowering itself gently back into the valley. There's a way to return home that feels
just
like love.

Without This

A month comes to a close, a journey with it. I tie up loose ends, bringing in the harvest from the yard and cutting down the flowers. Winter is coming. Wipe down the counters, trace the days across the crumbs they left behind. I take one last run on the mountainside, make it longer than before, feel how the altitude has arranged itself within my lungs, feel how my love for it has brought familiarity back into my steps. I'm sorry I left you, I didn't mean to hurt you when I meant to hurt myself. I feel healed. 

Sometimes we go into the desert not knowing what we are looking for, and sometimes we are given the answers despite forgetting to ask. I return to the little shoebox on Avenue B with a calm in my veins, an ache in my muscles, a lightness on my brow that has not been there since the before times. 

We are not back in the before times, You cannot step in the same river twice, at some point you let go of the house that burned to the ground. We have to build our castles out of the diamonds we unearth in the ashes.

I sat on the deck, watching the last sun set behind the mountains. The last sun of infinite, for it does not set for me alone. This little vessel of my body is broken, and scarred, and weary, but it has carried me all the way here. What gratitude would it be to leave it behind? We are enough.

Take your vessel, your diamonds, your lessons learned. Go home. Start again.

Main

The silence aches in you like thunder, like the opposite of its nothingness, it takes up more space than whatever was there before. She packs her bags and reminds you it is almost time for you to do the same. There's another life waiting for me at the other end of a red eye, and after all these years I still don't know how to meld the two (the three, the four). He walks you by the school bus that changed your life once, you still haven't figured out quite how to explain to him how the stars spoke to you, how your broken pieces were swept up in its embrace. I cannot focus on putting the words together with this current running across my skin. 

The sun rises in impossible beauty across the mountains. I stare at it again, again, every morning it's exactly the same and completely new, 30 years I have been coming to this sunrise and I still have not tired of marveling at it. The deer meander across the field, Nature is reliable in its habits, you wonder why you fight so hard to be the opposite. The vegetables in the garden are beginning to tire with the season. It's time to bring them in. 

It's time to move to the next step, whatever it may be.

Center

For days you do not breathe, only live. A body in motion, a valley in transition, the mountains tower over all your little questions, it is a comfort. Your ride the lift all the way to the summit, and it is not the altitude that takes your breath away. His hands are inside your skin until they are not. She says, I never knew this place existed. Everything is smoke and mirrors and you wonder what it’ll look like from the other side. Maybe we missed our shot. 

The nights are mild again. The shooting stars pierce you with their absence. 

The answers are never painless to come by. 

Like the Rain

This can't be real, she says, looking out at the view below. This can't be how they live. We sit in silence for hours, around the fire, under the stars, we sit breathing in the desert air like it has answers, they are always just on the tip of your tongue here, it's impossible not to think you could reach them. 

I wake slowly, reluctantly. The dreams are too comfortable, too inviting, reality too stark in contrast. 

The answer lies just beyond your outstretched fingertips. 

You vow to keep on trying for it. 

You didn't come all this way just to let it go.

Promise

The quiet country nestles itself into your bloodstream. You go on long runs, learn how to use power tools in an unwieldy garden, bake for the neighbors, and spend your evenings on the porch under the quiet stretch of the Milky Way. It is strange how quickly you adapt to space, stretch your limbs and your lungs across the rolling fields, make plans about a life so different than what happens in your Manhattan shoebox. You think there is some sort of secret in the desert, an answer nestled between the folds of the mountainside, and you wonder how long you would have to stay out here to find it. 

By morning, the frost has arrived for the season. It seems impossible under the scorching midday sun, but that doesn't make it any less true. There's something in religions that says your god sees you even when you don't see them, but I think this is what they meaning. Every state is fleeting, every moment will pass, this one, too.

The point is what you make of
how you remember it.

Feel, and Lose

Too many days you spend glued to your to-do list, staring out at perfect fall days on the mountain from behind a computer screen, this isn’t the way. I close the laptop lid, lace my sneakers, and set my sights on the trail. 

A few miles in, one garter snake, two steam trains, and a flock of pelicans at the shoreline below later, it was like something returned to me, something in the steps, in the miles, in the stories that appear when your body is too tired to do anything but continue. 

Later, the sun setting behind your open fire, the sun setting behind your glass of whiskey, the sun setting behind your better judgment, The words that make their way out creak from disuse and trample over your previous promises but they are out now.

You fall asleep under the Milky Way. All is as it should be. 

Re:surge

A storm pulls in across the mountains to the west, you see it drag itself over the summit and swallow the horizon in a great disappearing act. You know the trick, you're a master at disappearing, yourself. Another double rainbow stretches across the valley in the aftermath, the mountains reappear, crisp, bright, their lines all sharpened. You emerge from your fogs chipped at the side and hazy, like all your pieces have not yet been put back together. 

But no matter. 

Today I read a sentence that made me cry. Today, a story unfolded itself right before my eyes and I thought there's a magic here, and I know I've taken a lot of wrong turns in my life but I always find my way back to this right one and as long as I do, I still have a chance. I made my deal with the devil, well you know what? 

If he's going to take everything he'd better come around to pay up.

Shuffle

Wake with the remains of despair behind your temples, too much water loss for the desert to bear, it appears like a hangover, trying to sweep under the rug the darknesses that transpired in the late night. The stars silent, steady in the firmament, even the coyotes still. I dream of geographic solutions again, again, the blood of my ancestry forever trying to run, the roots of our family tree set neatly along the surface to easily be pulled up. Wherever you go, there you are, my old roommate used to always say. Life can be hacked, every piece of media trying to abscond with my attention yells over it. Perhaps there are no solutions. 

But a whole life without one seems too long.

Keep Moving

Stay up late into the starry night with only cicadas for company and sleep well into the morning, sunrise already flecking the mountains outside your window. Across the valley, majestic ranges tower with foliage on fire and golden light across the cliffsides. A storm front drags itself along the periphery, painting rainbows at regular intervals. The clouds lift, pulling two double rainbows behind it. They stretch from one end of the valley to the other and you think maybe this is where the treasure is, after all.

Coming out of the depths is always a strange reach back into reality. You peer out from behind a corner, cowering to see what mess you've made, clean up your wounds and look for bandages big enough to cover them. Paint a smile on top of the frail surface you've repaired. One step at a time. 

The word processor lies quiet in front of you, waiting. It knows your steps are cautious now, measured, no longer vivid and reckless, no longer as colorful as they were in the midst of the storm. But they move forward. They pick up the pieces and put the story back together again. You reach your fingers toward the keyboard. One step at a time. 

Start again.

But I Saved

The drugs don't work. The airplane tickets don't work. The drinks don't work. I sat in a panorama window with nothing but endless sky ahead, nothing but endless possibility at the tips of my finger and felt nothing but heavy cinderblocks tied around my chest. Wherever you go, there you are, and here I thought this illness was just a fleck of dust I could brush off my shoulder. Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste. 

A therapist tries to tell you that you approach each day in scarcity, that you scoop from a well of empty to fill your cup and wonder why your soul is dry. There was a time when I thought I deserved magic, but I don't know anymore. The report cards aren't adding up, I forgot to give the teacher an apple, I forgot my deals with the devil meant he takes his payment first and keeps you dangling for scraps of what you were promised.

The desert lies quiet outside the window. You can scream into it all you like, that is the blessing of the desert, it doesn't scream back. The desert has weathered the eons, it can wait you out and weather your bones too. Under the Milky Way, you are insignificant. 

You plead with the devil to give you a little more time.
Begin to claw at the bottom of the well. 

 

dig until you find a trickle.

Pasts

Prologue

Dark clouds rolled in over the valley, lightning bouncing against the mountains and pulling thunder behind it like a chariot; I slept like a baby. Before dawn, I woke again to the complete silence of the Great West, soft tendrils of sunlight sifting through the desert grass and turning the mountainside foliage to gently waking embers. Another day, another gift, I whispered into my coffee, unable to take in the magnitude of such an offer. All this, for me? I opened a window, let the morning breathe for me, as words and worlds stretched and danced around my head. All this, for me. I reached my hand into the envelope again, longing for every minute of the rest of the day to come:

If the Word isn't mean to be 
my salvation, 
why does it call me so?

End of Your Map

You wake early, it's dark still, your body unsure where it finds itself. A hint of light breathes itself across the mountains and in through your windows, you are not yet sure how to answer them. Your to-do list blisters and burns like a fire at the other end of the room, reluctant to leave you alone, and you squeeze your eyes tightly to ignore it. A manuscript lies closer, whispering to you of potential, breathes air into your lungs until you feel light, hopeful. Your maths aren't adding up, and you know it. 

Outside, the fields are washed in golden yellows, in September sun, the mountain shrugging into flecks of red, you ache with a melancholy that can only appear in emptiness, in missing. The answer eludes you, again, again, you are always a step behind, a step aside, you are always falling off at the shoulder, he says why make plans for a future we do not know we will have, and the idea looks different now than when we were in our 20s, because now it's possible we mean it. If you leave only one thing behind you, do you want it to be perfectly executed paper work, do you want it to be timely answered emails? 

Or do you want it to be fireworks?

Only in Poems (Remain)

The house is empty, suddenly, growing in every direction with newfound space, like a deep breath, like you live in a lung. You walk around the countless rooms, wonder how many times over your Manhattan shoebox could fit within these square feet, and the answer is staggering. I bring in barrels of tomatoes, cut them up for preserving, put them in jars for the long winter. The late summer sun beams its dry heat into my cold chest, you begin to dream of sabbaticals, begin to think that maybe the answer was buried here somewhere all along. When you tell her you could live in a shed in the woods, she doesn't believe you, but she's never seen the way your eyes light up in these mountains, has never heard you laugh in a hundred miles of silence. 

He says what'll it be: Kenya, Tokyo, next door? and you remember the world still lies at the tip of our fingers, at the other end of an airplane ticket, I said once the Road is life and I know know I meant it. 

I only have to make you believe it.

Rise

It rains in the desert, the late night violent with thunder, the valley lit by lightning. The earth floor turns green in a flourish; it will be brief, but a breath is still a breath. The reservoirs are still empty. The desert giveth, the desert taketh back. This was not yours to begin with. 

I sit at the desk in the early morning, the valley ahead dark and quiet again. Soft tendrils of pink light begin to stretch their way above the ridge to the east. House lights flicker in the distance. Thirty years ago I lay jet lagged looking out at the valley at night, counted headlights, followed streetlights turn from green to red to green, I knew something had changed within me, and I could never go back to who I was before. 

We break and bend in the storms along the way, they leave their mark, every step forward means we will never again be who we were. This is the meaning. 

Keep going.

Former

Early in the morning, drive through the mountain pass. Mist rising off the valley, fairies dancing across the water, in your youth you knew there was something otherworldly about that brief glimpse into the beyond. Nothing is as silent as daybreak. Farewells at the airport, nostalgic drives through old haunts, arrive back at the turn in the road when the sun is high - miss the house and have to reverse - dive back into a rhythm that reminds itself of home. 

The American West aches in me, calls me back, woos me with its dark wood and high mountain air, drags the desert across my skin, whispers love songs at the nape of my neck. I thought this was a place I visited. 

Instead it is a place that never leaves me.

Silence

Every step is familiar, even though the memory of it lies deep, struggles to resurface, groans with disuse. Schlep the bag down subway stairs, transfer at Jay Street and make sure you're catching the right A train. The storm left a flood in its wake and the first train runs local, so you wait. Take your shoes off and your laptop out in one smooth flick of your wrist, arrive later than usual but just as they call your boarding group, it is perfect. For a brief moment, right at takeoff, remember the surge in your chest, the roar of the machine, the impossible act of weightlessness. Manhattan appears in the distance, a stonehenge of its own making, a silent wave goodbye from the ground, before you launch into the billowing clouds above, ignorant of the chaos and destruction they cause on the ground, it is a gift. 

Return to a familiar valley, a familiar color palette, a familiar quiet in your chest and you wonder if it will call you home one day, too, if you will be just like every other person who only feels settled in the return. When I wake, it is still dark out, quiet the kind that permeates your bones, the short space before the world begins like an urgent ball of potential in your hand. What will you make with it?

Watch dawn sift across the mountains, slow clouds meandering like snakes along the valley floor. 

Decide that whatever you make had better be magic.

Try Try Again

You emerge as if from under rubble, as if from out of disaster, survivors guilt and doubt all wrapped in one, the knife comfortable in my hand, like it is part of the body, ready to slice again through old wounds, ready to dig into thick scars, you know you make the recovery harder but it is impossibly hard to resist, impossible to evade the satisfying relief at the other end of harm. 

We run and run in this life

But it’s hard to feel like we don’t just end up right who we started. 

Eleven eleven

A rain falls again, after months of drought it makes itself a habit, the Manhattan streets slick with it. The sun sets so early now, have you noticed? Like it flipped a switch and suddenly everything is dark before dinner. Winter is coming. We spend a warm afternoon on an east village rooftop, rolling our eyes at the youth, and then I have to spend a full Sunday within the four walls of my apartment, scrubbing agony out of the corners with a manic obsession. The darkness waxes and wanes, takes different shapes, waits behind corners to surprise you. 

But you have a few new tricks yourself now. Your back a little more limber, you do cartwheels around the illnesses. Not well, but at least you are not constantly drowning like once you were. 

At least the air still reaches your lungs. 

Flexor

When I get to the car, the back right tire is flat, slowly seeping out air in silence, nothing dramatic. We don’t do drama, the two of us, we just slowly exhale ourselves into nothing. The spare tire is soft, but it tries its hardest. Late at night, inside the track along the river, I stretch out an aching body and turn the tight lug nuts of my limbs to malleable tools, aids through a life. 

September is achingly beautiful, the uncoupled furiously running around to find someone to hold again after a summer of freedom. You watch the frenzy in amusement, wonder if you’re ready to throw your heart into fire again, if it could take one more beating. In my dream, a bus careens toward Las Vegas in the desert at night, and all I could think was how it looked like New York, and smiled. We dive into a tunnel and reappear at a gas station parking lot near an underground hotel. 

Even in dreams, we are always trying to make our way home. 

Back to School

A group of NYU cross country runners pours out of the side track, and if there is any sign of fall it is this. Everything returns: the river is busy, the dating app is busy, the subway is busy, my muscles are busy, it’s been two and a half years of hibernation and now we are coming back to whatever life was meant to be but wasn’t. I don’t know where to start so I revert to working too many hours. For the first time in such a long time I think I am okay. It’s a strange feeling when your bones don’t recognize it. 

Another ticket lies in my back pocket. It’s time to pack again. It’s time to arrive again. 

It’s time to live

again. 

Change

You return to the city humid, warm, it all feels the same and you revel in the much-needed rain. By morning, the change is here: a chill in the air, a sun reluctant to rise. There’s a lump in your throat you try hard to ignore. 

In the car, driving down, I took deep breaths and tested their flavor on the tip of my tongue: it’s just that I feel like myself again. Crawling out of mental illness messes with your senses, with your intuition, and you can’t believe anything you see. The deeper you fall, the longer it takes just to return to that place where you started. 

But you’ve been here before. You are wise with the years now. 

Dust yourself off. Begin again. It’s time to move forward, at last. 

Brooklyn Heights

You woke in someone else's bed this morning, and you don't want to pretend otherwise anymore. Secrets weave themselves around these city streets but they burn off with the morning sun, drifting like the remains of ghosts out the New York Bay. 

I return to the desk in the attic, try to will myself to work, try to will myself into the panic that feeds the capitalist machinery, that keeps the hamster wheel running. Instead, the return of a long-lost friend: the creative swirls that appear in procrastination, that only appear when you are reluctant to walk the wide and straight. In your spine, the feeling of sitting for hours on a back porch, dreaming into the foliage, the feeling of sitting in a window, firing salvos into a typewriter and coming up with symphonies. 

You woke in someone else's bed this morning, and perhaps that is just as well. 

September is here,
and now we choose which battles we want to fight,

which weapons we want to bring when we do.

Furnish

The thunderstorm rolls in but thinks better of it, leaves a few showers, cools the air. By the time I go up to the attic to sleep, there's a chill to the evening. They close up the village pool for the summer, neighbors say See you in winter, there's a return to whatever comes next. You are not sure if you are ready. You tell the children stories at bedtime and think there has to be an answer in all the tales you weave. There has to be an end to this yarn. You feel full of the summer nights, of coming back from a pandemic, of gathering rosebuds. 

September is here now. It's time to decide what to make of the flowers you've picked.

40

I want so much joy for you. 

You'll have these demons forever, you know - maybe they are with you even today - but there always comes a moment again, when things feel Good, and that is worth 

Everything. 

How Many Days?

The words appear. You were never really in charge of when they would beging to churn, weave strange curlicues in your chest and make the skin of your scalp tingle. September is here, your heart is full of summer sunshine, your brain is clear from the darkest fog, the illness seeping slowly out of you like poison diluting in a river. You are ready for stories again, ready to be swept away in poetry and trying unsuccessfully to answer the Big Questions, what else is life if not digging your hands into the sand and trying to find a miracle?

The sun rises slowly over the Hudson River. The chill in the air races down from the mountains, for a brief moment you see again so clearly all of the treasures you believed could be yours. The path toward them is still there. Overgrown with the thorny thicket and deep with mud the kind that tries to drown you but it is still there. 

And as long as you keep walking it, it is not too late to make it through.

Snows

Dream of road trips in snow and restaurant bills I cannot pay. I’ve started to think too much about times that have passed, months of joy, a time when my skin buzzed, I know my skin knows how to buzz but I don’t know how to ask it to. There’s a lever somewhere, there’s a door to open, it’s an itch somewhere deep in me like an addiction but I cannot find the drug to scratch it. The morning is cool now, fall is coming, death is coming, you’re trying to reach the door before it closes for good, this panic runs 40 years deep and you have yet to find a solution. 

But the sun is shining still, the weekend is long. The answer is hiding here somewhere, and you’re still determined to find it. 40 years of questions. 

You just keep walking. 

Seventh

It is the first night I sleep with the window open. When I step into the street, there’s just the slightest hint of cool air: the season’s first crisp. The forecast still drones on about summer heat, but you know the difference when it arrives. 

Your brain kicks back into gear, firing up like a rusty old machine, oil sputtering and the ignition coughing. It is time for a change, you are ready. I imagine a death sentence, being given six months left to live. What would I do? 

The answers are simple, arrive quickly from my very depths. 

I would gather all my words, make sure the stories had a chance to survive without me. Then I would tell you I love you. 

That is really all there is. 

16

Sixteen years. An impossibly long love. A teenager, learning to drive but unwilling to ever go anywhere but here. We sit at the bar and catch up on the years. Have we really only known each other for four years? he says, his scruffy beard gray now like it wasn’t when we met. My heart mended now like it wasn’t then,  when it was tender and bleeding despite itself. When I tell him I am happy, I mean it, and it seems more like a gift to myself than anything else. 

Sixteen years I have lived here, but hasn’t New York been my home for much longer? Didn’t I dream of belonging here when I didn’t belong anywhere else? When I arrived here, late one Thursday night, and the bright lights of Times Square screamed at us in the airport shuttle, wasn’t it like seeing someone you truly loved after too much time apart? 

When I arrived here, wasn’t it like coming home? 

Elvira

Returns are an emptiness like hunger in your gut, like a space was carved into you insides by sparkling confetti only to be cleared out and left like a great balloon of longing. Monday mornings look bleak in comparison, the so called real world like a wet blanket on your spirit. Along the river, I listen to a musician in his youth, dreams of rockstar lifestyles in his eyes, and the innocent optimism is a sweet reminder. 

There is magic to be had in this life. You have piles of it in your rear view mirror, you forget sometimes but they already amount to mountains. 

There’s no reason to expect any less from the years ahead. 

Vändplats

I turn on an out of office message. Keep it neutral, don’t tell them all the wonders that swirl in your midst, there are too many to divulge, you wouldn’t know where to start. A whole life lies behind you, but a whole life lies ahead, you doubt it sometimes but it continues to be true. A hope appears on the horizon, like a gift. When I was eighteen years old, I dreamed of going to New York City, like an impossible dream but relentless. I do not set my mind to many things, but when I do, I hold on to it like a predator biting down until the bones crunch. New York held on until my bones crunched, and now I am soft to its hold. Life held on, too, and sometimes I don’t understand how I’ve been so lucky. 

The little station wagon is parked right outside the green door with the 1/2 address. I pack it up, head off to another wonder. Count my blessings, count my chickens, count the items left on my to do list and decide to just do them. 

I made it here. I can make it anywhere now. 

Swell

The heat continues without reprieve, beads of sweat perpetually parked along the frame of white baby hairs around my face. I reluctantly descend into the heavy heat of the subway, try to parse my travels with breaks in air conditioned spaces. Speak in dreamy tones about fall foliage while perpetually reluctant to let go of summer as it wanes. All goodbyes are equally hard. 

In a Brooklyn brownstone, we brainstorm avenues for a successful future, the one that lies just around the bend behind Labor Day, the one that requires a return to reality. You feel optimistic. 

That, alone, is a gift, and you feel grateful to know it. 

Lillet

Come morning, I wake late, head heavy. The air by the river is already warm, but clear now, the water blue, like a perfect summer day and you want to explain to your to do list that this is not a day for work. Maybe none of them are. The idea that one could spend ones days only writing, only going on long walks and dreaming, you remember now the delusions of your youth. In the bar, she speaks of not wanting to close herself off, not to be done growing. You want to agree with everything, want to loudly appreciate how she always paved the way for a future you envisioned. She asks if you have any thoughts on your upcoming day and you know you should. But your life was always a crisis, your life was always a step behind. More importantly, your life was always trying to figure out how to break free. 

You do not need a socially constructed milestone 

to want to live 

Better.

Clock In

The writer speaks in your ear about also being a psychologist. She calms your panic about how you got there. We all turn out to be human. In your dream, you carry a baby through a town you were supposed to recognize, next to a man you knew you were not meant to co-parent with. Someone spills the wine. Your subconscious works through what it needs to work through. I went for a short run along the river and tried to remind my muscles who we used to be. Your mother still wonders where she belongs and you realize it is never too late to change your mind. 

You used to think it meant you could never set your bags down and rest. 

But now you think perhaps it means you’re never dead until 

you are. 

Driftwood

The dive bar bartender connects with you over your shirt, as it calls back to a lower east side of yore: old New York recognizes old New York. By the time you’re making your way home, reeling north along a bubbling late summer city, your brain is tipsy and your heart cold. This is part of the deal, but you do not owe anyone anything but yourself. And the city, perhaps, you owe the city everything. 

When you wake, the slightest memory of a hangover rests across your temples, but the storm is coming, so you make your way out to the river before the torrent. Monday morning quiet and peacefully gray, the overcast sky fading imperceptibly into the east river. The precipice is far away again, the ground underneath you steady. You remind yourself that you know this ebb and flow. Stand back up, brush yourself off. 

Keep going. 

Mornings

I write in my half sleep, I am words even in dreams, they look laughable in the stark unmagic of mornings. There’s a brief moment each day when I am rational, there’s a short morning walk and a window of work, when I am not still dreams, a lifetime lived in the fantastical, I’m about to turn middle age and I am still full of childlike wonder, that is a gift. New York is sweltering even in mornings. I feel the precipice, too close, I feel the gaping darkness right beside me and if I only stumble, if I only relax for a moment, I will fall right in. 

There’s a path in another direction, there’s a path that leads away from the Illness, I know because I have walked it, I know now that I could find it familiar. At the edge of the canyon it feels impossible to reach, when the pebbles tumble from beneath your feet down the steep ravine, you don’t know how you’ll ever make it to safer shores, but you’ve done it before, don’t forget you’ve done it before, don’t forget you can reject punctuation and choose dreams, don’t forget as long as you are alive you still have a chance to make it home. 

Matter

The eye of the storm is eerily quiet, it pads you in a vacuum, in a hangover, the heat keeps you indoors with the windows closed, it’s a metaphor. You try to deduce meaning from your deflated balloon, from the swirls of your returning Darkness in the periphery, from the patterns you discover only by their contrast. There’s a fuzzy outline, but you can see it taking shape. There’s a 1,000 piece puzzle on the coffee table. You use it for practice. 

The doctor says the results will come in soon, the walk home from the bar says you are back in New York, the client asks if you live in a house, everything is a ridiculous detail if you ask it. Sixteen years ago I asked the universe for a gift and was given a miracle. I book a mansion in the upstate, tell my friends it’s the only thing I would want  we move forward in life in ine way another. And maybe another will be  brilliant, too.

Bells Ringing

You return in a whirlwind, persistent deadlines following you until a moment's break tosses you into apathy. It's not an unwelcome moment. Your apartment takes you back like a warm hug, you cannot be mad when you are loved. The river is the same in the early mornings, you walk out jet lag early, but the crowds are already there before you. You remember a time in New York before you were even there, a New York of long ago, you remember there was a magic lying in the gutters. 

It's still there, you know it. 

You vow to keep looking until forever.

and a Half

Return to a New York quiet with august Monday sentiment, Penn Station feels like it’s taking a vacation. There’s a breeze in Tompkins Square Park that wasn’t there when you left, and you feel lifted by the familiarity of a homecoming. Wake early, while it’s still dark, you have to remind yourself you are in a place that gets dark now. The air conditioner hums a steady hum. 

For a brief moment, you are suspended. Look at your feet. 

Be mindful where you choose to land. 

Gate A3

A journey ends. I wake to a full moon and collect the remains of my belongings. The dog moves up to the warm spot at my pillow, one sleepy eye following me around the room. As dawn begins its mild stretch onto the island, I drag my heavy suitcase across cobblestoned hills, Stockholm silent with rest, with peace. The airport is a familiar buzz, you hesitate to open your resting office, try to postpone returns as long as you can. Returns. My hair still smells of a hundred summer swims, my eyebrows are white with origin. Last night at sunset, we took the boat around the island and marveled at the things. May we always marvel at the things. 

I know a few new answers have bloomed in my spine now, know a few deep breaths have reached my lungs despite myself. Fall arrives, everything arrives, I have walked to the ends of the earth to find  solutions that were buried in where I came from, but the thing is, I wouldn't have seen them

if I hadn't gone away.

Reimers

Come straight here when the boat comes in, we’ll be here waiting with wine and cheese. You’ve never had a better welcome. 

The late summer sun sinks along the country roads, as the bus winds the last few miles back to the city. Suddenly you remember how to navigate the station, know where to stand before the train arrives. I took ten last dips in the ocean today, but when the wine is all drunk we still make our way down to the small dock by the city boats to jump into the blackness. The dog lies next to my bed, smelling of wet summer.

 I ran around the island and when I didn’t want to run any more, I took all my clothes off and slipped into the water. Nothing is complicated. You let them take care of you, when did you ever let anyone take care of you, you think no one passes until a decade in. You were always slow to warn, slower to let go. 

The point us you are now. 

What will you do about it?

Shoreline

 Early morning on the dock, before the island wakes, before the plans of a day begin. I sit in silence, contemplating cold water swims, what is becoming of my body, what has changed in my mind. Tell me about the pills she says and I realize they were only ever a way to get here, and I made it. 

Truths about a life swirl around my periphery, answers I barely knew I was looking for package themselves in a happy jumble around my ankles. I think there’s room for you here. 

He writes to ask if today is the day I’m coming home. What does one answer to a question like that?

Happier Than Ever

(I wanted you out, I wanted my veins clean, wanted every cell in this skin new, I went to the ends of the earth and here you are, still, and I cannot be angry for it. I carry you now as a heavy treasure in my side, such is life. 

We put our clothes in a pile and jumped naked off the dock in the light of the full moon. I feel a happiness in my very soul now, if you remain in this blood, at least I know you won’t be sorry.)

Blasieholmen

I wake early, well before the alarm. Don't know why I set it, the sun is a better start to any morning. A cool current of air moves in from the balcony, whispering of stability and safety. 

Safety. 

Make my way through an old part of town, a royal castle heavysat at the horizon, seagulls whispering of the proximity to an ocean. In the distant, on another island, lies the church that was once my beacon home, but it's been so many years now, although some things never feel like too long ago. 

Some people don't either. 

The boat makes its way through the archipelago, out to the open sea. Three hours to an island at the ends of the earth, she laughs when you ask if there is Wi-Fi to work. Your doctor writes to check in on you and you have nothing to say but smiles, you are nothing now but poetry, in your snail shell lies only bathing suits that haven't dried yet, you've worked so hard to find the meaning of life only to realize it was all 

so

simple.

Oh no, god damn

Move on to another borough, another way to reach water with your deep held breath. Remember how two weeks ago she said fall is here and you shivered, now the sunshine is all summer, is all flushed cheeks and neglected duties. Goodbyes don’t get easier just because you’ve survived them before. 

This will all end in tears, you whisper to yourself in the solitary quiet moment of the transfer. Wonder at how many years can fit in a life. How many lives can fit in the years.

The city that once was your home glitters at your feet. You don’t know how to build a life that appears only once for a whole year. 

String

I’m halfway across the park before I realize the key is missing from my hand, music pounding in my ears and the sweet ache of a run in my limbs. An ephemeral emptiness in my palm, a slowly creeping awareness of consequence. Stockholm lies in the periphery, all green grass and postcard views and whispers of what you should be missing. 

For now you’re only missing a key. 

Perhaps that’s the message. 

By the time you recover it, hours later, and the tears arrive in a surprise, he has to hold you for them to subside. You haven’t the composure to hide your inner workings. Explain, there is only perfection. 

He takes you to the water because it is the thing that always heals you, and you only briefly have time to think how long a year. Thank goodness you cannot dwell on it. 

You take the wrong subway line to your next destination. 

Bakom Västerbron

You arrive in the last town you called home on a sunny Sunday afternoon, roll into the central station flags waving and stately buildings on parade. You forget yourself. 

The subways are the same as before, a muscle memory sits in your spine, sputtering back into action and almost remembering. You ride the bus past the house of a man you once thought you might care for. Nothing stirs. In the late evening, you go back to the dock for another swim, nothing else has ever mattered, the sun doesn’t set over Stockholm because it is summer yet, because it is alive yet, you wonder if you could live here when November comes but the question is irrelevant. He stays longer than intended. When your heart is heavy, you return to those who love even your darkest corners.  

In the morning, I pack my swimsuit into a purse. You never know. It sounds like a metaphor, 

but maybe it’s just an itch to scratch. 

Do Us Part

Another day, another sorrowful goodbye. I drag my heavy suitcase toward the bus, only to run into a man who loved me once. He drives me to the train station. I say, tell me everything that is new with you in seven minutes, but we don’t know which words are the right ones. I say, next year we will make more time. The spaces in between are eons. 

In the early afternoon, the bride lost her words to say I do, but recovered later for a chaste kiss. The newly minted husband said she is the most impressive person he knows. Your old accent creeps back into the fold, but none of your old wounds open, none of the aches remind themselves in your bones. At the end of the night, just before the briefly dark August night turns, I swam out into the lake. Behind me, the twinkling lights of the dance floor, ahead only dark waves and bright stars. I don’t remember what was whispered into that moment, but I know I smiled despite myself. I know each wave was washed in gratitude. 

It is possible to feel joy, 

and only joy. 

Ack, Värmeland

A week passes in buses and trains, in dragging your suitcase through a meandering landscape of nostalgia. Babies are born, children grow up, the cities where you once were young feel distant underneath your feet. Do you remember how big that hill was when we were kids? You remember everything. 

But the distance doesn't ache in your chest like it used to do. The awkward tangle of how your limbs both fit and don't doesn't chafe like it once did, like it always did, like it cut slivers into your skin and you returned home bleeding in silence. Now you simply drink it in, rejoice in the late night conversations, the rainy day skinny dipping, the champagne soaked retreats with people who've known you in so many of the lives you've lived so far. You are all love and very little pain, is this what peace is? In the short silences just before you sleep, poetry whispers itself across your brow. You've been looking for answers in every corner of the world only to find that it makes itself within you. 

You hold on tight to the idea. Tight like a baby bird. Tight like being soft takes more strength than the fighting you have left behind. You hold on like it's love.

New

It's just a few steps, past the birch trees, at the end of the path. Warm cliffs, smoothed by the ice ages, sloping down to the salty waters of the west coast. We find a spot near the shoreline, arrange the day as it has been for decades: coffee thermoses, homemade sandwiches, store-bought biscuits. They brought you here because they know how much better you breathe when your eyebrows whiten, when your shoulders brown and your lips taste of the sea. They brought you here because they know how four years away ache in your very bones.

Somehow, four years are magically washed away with one dive into the ocean, one evening at their dinner table. Somehow, none of the empty days and quarantined miles remain in your spine, though they were lodged there like splinters every day that came before. I sleep so well at night, it's hard to believe the darkness was ever that close. 

Something new is coming, but not yet, not now. 

Now we rest.
Now, we breathe.

Land

Upon arrival, three years of absence are wiped from your slate. Nothing has changed. The fields still rolling, the industrial edges of the large town continue their brutalist boxes of utilitarianism. The weather is lagom: not good, not bad, it just is, unoffensive, gray skies and soft ripples of sunshine, you feel no certain way about it. Boulders of the countryside whisper of giants playing games, the woods speak of trolls, you believe all of it because what is not to believe. At the train station, the conductor is flustered, yelling into the crowds that we got the wrong train set and it's each person for themselves, grab a seat if you can find it. I find a window seat so that when jet lag invariably finds me, I do not lean on a neighbor. As a child I loved the trains - always this sense of adventure, always a suspension of rules and reality. I feel that way still. 

Three years of absence like they never were. Entire relationships, families, new children have appeared in the space between. You think you are the same, but it is not true. An entire earthquake has come and gone. Every cell in your body has been exchanged for a new one. Some of them dented, some of them stronger than the ones which came before. It is too soon yet to say who you are now. 

You are older.
You are entirely new.

Gate B68

At some point in the late morning, the system clicks into place. Old neural pathways spring to life, like there was just dust on the wires and it’s coming off. In a trance I finish work, undaunted by the unpleasant emails. I set up the OOO while I water the plants, clean out the fridge and weigh the suitcase. Rush to Penn station in a thunderstorm, could walk the steps to the terminal with your eyes closed, arrive much to early, recognize the skyline view from the window. 

How many years of coming and going, each time grateful that Most goodbyes are not forever. A strange few years lie behind us. We are not out of these woods yet. 

But oh, how sweet just the light where the forest parts. 

Packed

The thunder amasses in the distance, readies itself to pummel the coastline just as my itinerary fires up. The city lies beaten by the heat, unable to move, unwilling to smile the way it normally does. I wander around the apartment looking at pieces of clothing not touched in ages. Wonder is this who I am now? Is this someone I could be? before weighing the outfits against my own self-awareness. A suitcase fills up. A world that nearly feels post-pandemic rises up on the horizon. There's a hope in your chest you haven't felt in years. Years. The loss is inconceiveable. 

But there's nothing to say the revenge can't be
beyond your imagination.

Re:lax

I take the day off. Walk all the way around the little village early in the morning, before the heat swelters. The Hudson river looks like a fat snake, too hot to move. I sit on the back porch reading children's fantasy, think only I can do better (I have done better) and devour another hundred pages. The day slips between my fingers, rivulets of sweat coursing down my body, the summer escapes me, the life escapes me, I feel like the answer is here, right here somewhere just out of my reach, tip of my tongue, I know there is some sort of magic and we can touch it - I have touched it before - if only I could have one more moment, if only I could pause the world for just a little longer I think I could catch it again, I...

In my mind, I know the futility. 

But the promise of gold at the end of the rainbow is forever what moves us forward into the life.

Wild Woods

You arrive in the country. It is all rolling hills and unstoppable vines in overwhelming humidity. Something inside your brain clicks. A switch is turned. An inability to hustle appears, a reset, a lack of grit. You forget your computer three flights up and pick up a book instead. You see your email inbox twist and weave but figure out how to ignore it entirely. It turns out to be easier than you thought. 

One night we drink too much and stay up talking about obscure music and house hunting. Topics of no consequence, only delight. The next day I have to sleep half the day just to recover. It rains in torrents, as if forgiving the slight. There are no grand thoughts, no wild plans. Only still morning walks down to the river. Only silence inside my otherwise constantly humming body. Silence. What a concept. 

I close my computer again. Find a cup of coffee. Find the book again. Sit on porch steps and think absolutely nothing. 

Summer came for me at last.

Time

July races to its ends. Leaves that recently were bright sprouts darken, grow tired, I know how they feel. As you grow, you realize that you cannot go back again, you cannot start over, you will not have your entire future ahead of you. On the radio, a voice you know from your youth speaks of loss, of grasping at straws, of allowing every last vein within your skin to feel the immensity of the world. How we are insignificant. 

Once, years ago, when you felt you had everything left to live and all the immensity of the world ahead of you, you said

Nothing really matters

which means that everything does 

You get to choose what your life will have been about. Perhaps it doesn’t matter then how much time you have left to confirm it. 

Variety

The coffeeshop has a quiet hum to it, rising to a buzz by the time late Friday afternoon rolls around. The Gen Z barista tells me the payment system is down so it's cash only and he jots down the sales on the back of a brown paper bag. An enormous photo of Norm Macdonald graces the far wall and you wonder if we're still doing irony. Air conditioning makes you forget the dripping temperature outside. The report from the motherland is a chill and asks you to pack thermal underwear. Nowhere is perfect. There's a knot on the side of your neck that yells at you to slow down, to take a break, but new deadlines appear on the horizon and you chase whatever comes next. Your father says watch out, you got those broken genes from me, and you think how easy it is to recognize your flaws when it seems too late to do anything about them. 

You try to remember it is not too late for you to do anything
about anything. 

A slight break appears in the corner of your eye. 

You decide to catch the wave. Decide you aren't dead yet.
Despite how it seems, lately.

Reciprocity

The immense melancholy of summer evenings sets in. It enters you like setting sunrays across your chest, just below the clavicle, and then floats gently down through your belly, landing heavy. The way that the Manhattan skyline looks at twilight, when you're in Brooklyn watching a movie under the stars, fireflies in the bushes and children up past their bedtime. The idea that everything may just be starting, but you remember your mortality in the same breath. 

I walked ten miles around the island today. It told you there was time yet. 

Not a lot

but endless.

Sublimate

I wake early, too early, the hours of sleep under my belt wildly inadequate, this will backfire I have time to think before resigning to leaving the bed. There’s a slight breeze along the river, a break from the heatwave, you know it won’t last and take deep breaths into the morning waves. Week and a half until departure. Week and a half until a return to a world from before everything fell apart. I take the pill. The voice on the radio speaks of ailing parents, my landlord writes to say his mother passed. “She was one hell of a woman,” he says, and I tell him that’s the best legacy one could hope for. 

Life is short. You know better than to waste it on other money’s deadlines. The fog clears again. 

You get back up. 

Wouldn't That be Something

It's ten pm before you finally put the final period at the end of the last line. Months of work take a breath, you don't know how you did it. Find the tequila and make a drink, feel the pain in your body for the first time, feel yourself for the first time. Refill the prescription. 

Somewhere out there are answers. Reach them one step at a time.

Yours Now

Monday evening on 5th street, later than in the before times, but then isn't everything later now, slower somehow, not as successfully urgent. Your car is parked next to the writing bar, all the little joys gathered like family; if only they knew what we had gone through, if only they knew. 

 We barely know, ourselves. 

The bar smells of old beer on wood floors, of illicit cigarettes. The bartender is new, we regulars introduce ourselves, welcome her to a space that isn't ours but feels like it. The neighborhood blog says it's Manhattanhenge, you get all your relevant news from an old, cobbled Blogger template now, the rest of the world is too much to see. If only we knew. I fear every creative urge has died in me, that every imaginative whim has curled back into itself and hardened, forgetting what it is to dream, or delight, or discover something entirely unexpected. 

The second I sit down, far from the demands of my inbox, my fears fade to the sidelines. Little sprouts of hope make their way out of my heart, twist and climb toward the light, tender tendrils adhering to the inside of my skin as they grow, carrying new stories on their backs, carrying questions that demand answers. I am tired now, more tired than I maybe ever have been, but when the tendrils make their way into the light, you do not turn them down, you do not look the other way. 

We are coming out of the darkness, I just know it. 

We will make our way into the light.

Way to You

Brooklyn in an early Thursday evening, summer sunlight across the park slope streets, there’s a part where the subway goes above ground and you see the whole city spread out before you, nothing hurts in that breath, nothing can really get to you when the city lies at your feet, one late august evening I rolled into this city and since that moment I have never really left, never truly let go of its scintillating promise. I wrote a list today of how far we’ve come and all I can see is this life is worth living no matter how many times you let yourself believe it isn’t. 

It still breaks my heart that it comes as a surprise every time, but fuck it. 

Heartbreak hasn’t killed me once. 

My Newt

Panic seizes me and takes the productivity from out of my fingertips. A catatonic inclination leans me against the couch cushions, says it's already too late and the pages of my to do list bury me like a deck of cards in Wonderland.

My legs are sore but I will them to rise, will them not to drown in the dubious truths of my inner monologues. 

Nothing is over
until it is well and truly

Over.

Hour

The morning after lies like garbage along the East River, discarded fireworks and remains of picnics scattered along the sides of early bird runner paths. I send my mother real estate listings for the upstate and we drool over acreage, over a life spent with grass between your bare feet. Little inklings of story unearth themselves while I try desperately to dig through the quicksand of work around my neck, this is the great deceit of aging. It was never wrinkles, they just pretended it was to distract you. 

Everything is a ruse if you let it. 

You allow yourself to stare out of the window for just a brief moment, but it is enough for the whims to take hold. In the trees across the street you see fairied creatures come alive, watch the leaves unfurl into playgrounds, hear songs of unknown lands sing themselves against the backdrop of a Manhattan that doesn't feel real by comparison. 

Everything still lives under the leaves, under the snow. Everything is still in hibernation, waiting for a little attention, waiting for you to make the space for the unordinary to come alive again.