Habit

A month ends, you pack it up and label the contents. Winter. Scour the Photo reels, looking for signs of spring in each date. Grateful that previous iterations of yourself have documented obsessively, adding slide for slide of proof, little buds, proper sprouts, signs of life in the snow banks. This year we saw daffodils in March. This year the sun shone in February. I cling to the signs like life rafts, like promises, he writes to say will I see you tomorrow and I'm too busy thinking of petals to consider what that means. I go through the car wash and the droplets freeze before I'm even stopped at the next light, I wake in the middle of the night in shivers. These years have been long and cruel beyond belief. 

But you only find the sprouts
by looking.

Breaking Up with Jesus

I wake in the middle of the night, blinds up and the night sky light with snow, disoriented by the hour, strange dreams still in lungs. By morning, I pull out onto the FDR before the nor'easter really picks up, light flecks of snow clinging to the Bronx Expressway for mere moments before melting into the morning trickle of traffic. I spend two hours on the Taconic, going over his words in my head again, seeing a life evolve in layers, each fold taking over the other, building but also erasing, how the paths we walk make a life and cannot be erased. 

I used to think everything could be erased. 

By evening, the snow reaches the little villlage up north. The attic windows freeze from the inside, I tuck in under four covers and a heated blanket, wool socks my mother knitted on my feet. She sent them with a sweet handwritten note, scratched in a hurry, I put in on the fridge like a child’s painting. It says I was loved. 

The trick is sewing that

into the seam of every layer in the fold. 

Warmth

Another January freeze, the radiator falling over itself to create a tropical balm. You open all the windows. 

The mourning doves align themselves along the sills, sunny south facing brick walls with the slow and steady wafts of warm air through open windows, how peacefully they rest, I am reticent to leave my seat lest it scare them away. We build a peaceful co-working space, learning trust, learning slow, conscious movements. There's a gentle grace to adapting to another. 

We squeezed into the busy bookstore, listened to a new writer announce her life to the world, but really it was the moment that lingered, more than the story. We sat on the edge of a table after, heavy pours in stemless glasses, the space smelling of new books and old New York, of roasted coffee and the way things were. The walk home was short, and cold, the neighborhood sizzling with itself. 

Spring is coming. 

I mean it as a metaphor.

Milagros

It's too sunny to focus, too many songs in my head too
much chatter about nonsense that
only serves to delight too
many snapshots of those curls
around your forehead a
brief moment of
suspecting a future and
they say another winter
storm is coming but I
looked out the windows
of my little shoebox and
all I see is sunshine and
the radiator is beside itself
in efficiency I
haven't worn real clothes in days. 

Little tendrils make their way out of the
earth,
testing the waters,
reaching toward the sky still
full of hope and
longing. 

This pandemic has taken
so much from out of us. 

It has not taken
all.

Fuel

There's a moment at the bottom, when you have all but resigned to being washed over by the sludge and are determined to simply set the bar at holding your breath until it passes, when the last reserve of neurons inevitably fire, setting you off in cascading sparkles, reviving your hope for yet another dawn. At the bottom of the barrel, suddenly whispers of your highest high; it is an enchanting drug, promise. 

I stay up all night, crafting words, singing songs, wondering at all that lies around us. When she says she doesn't want this life anymore, you do not understand her, does she not see dawn on the horizon? Like bread for the starving, like fountains in the desert, does she not feel the warmth in the snow drift?

I know it is too soon. I know we have been here before and many weeks of destruction lie before us yet, that the Darkness can bury me a hundred times over and the woods are deep. 

But when you are handed butterflies in winter, when you feel the madness tickle your lungs like it used to before everything fell apart, 

you simply take it,
you rise with the swell
just as long as you can.

OT

It's only January

It's only January

It's only January

You hear yourself whisper

as if the more times you say it, 

the more dirt you will dig out of this old river bed,

the closer you will get to the words' meaning

at the bottom. 

Every year
the same thing

Same
surprise at drowning

Forgetting that the spring floods
will clear your vision
will wash the silt away

It's only January and this
face in the mirror
is not
it not
forever.

Signora

In the morning, it snows, lazy snowflakes converging in the tree tops, barely making it all the way to the ground. The city suspends alternate street parking for "snow removal," even though the snow seems to be removing itself, and you take the break as a wink from the city. How it beamed at you yesterday, driving back in the late afternoon, watching golden hour settle on the skyscrapers, going to sleep with the slight but constant hum of the East Village outside your open window (the radiators still running their own race to the tropics). Returning to the city is a cure for whatever ails you, it's a sweet burst of joy in your chest when you had grown accustomed to doldrums, I thought I could stay in the creaky house forever but it isn't true, eventually I always itch to walk avenue B until it jumbles the jagged pieces right, until it closes the circuit and sends my limbs humming again. 

Brooklyn is grey even after the snow passes, is cold like January can get in your bones, is humbled by the winds and the season and the life. But you feel the seeds in your lungs, sense them vibrate to the approaching spring, know that you have made it through a hundred winters before and your limbs are weathered with survival. 

Your eyes opened in hopeful anticipation.

Cohotate

You know this hibernation carries its risks. You know retreat means retreat into the deep folds that keep you away from the things you fought so hard to reach. I stood staring at the Hudson river today, cracks of ice along syrupy serpetine shores, bright winter sunlight dancing across the snow. Waves of childhood imagination swept across my brow, reminders of how easily fantasy came when I stepped into the woods as a child, how the silence of nature still paints curlicues into the air. I watch movies of New York of old: a reminder that I need to come back - New York needs to come back, there are veins to fill with incessant pulse, whatever we have had lately is not life, we have been back in the folds we were trying to escape. 

There's a magic in the peace of January, in letting myself take the slow steps forward and focus only on making it out alive, but it grows old. I pack up the Victorian house at the top of the hill. It is time to return to something that is my own. 

It is time to come home.

Restart

The snowstorm sweeps in, patient, while the world sleeps. I wake early and watch it lie untouched down main street, the yawns later are worth it. The house empties by early afternoon, I wander the rooms and consider what I am doing with this January. Winter pauses everything. 

Maybe that's exactly how it should be.

Flake

The snow picks up, silent, you do not realize until there is a thick coating on the ground, heavy flakes racing toward their community, heavy with warming temperatures. The Victorian house on the hill still creaks with the cold. My knees creak, too, propelling my body up the rickety stairs, but I try not to think of it. We go to bed early, a penetrating peace like a heavy blanket across the floorboards, all is well. 

How I itched, in the city, longed to get in the car and just get away, how all the sameness felt tiresome and useless, she said come up and I was on the highway before I had closed the door. Upstate is all timeless Sundays, is all red wine and crackling fires, I could while away a whole life here and forget to be sorry. I wear layers upon layers and still wake with ice on the inside of my window, cold the kind that gets stuck in your lungs, cold the kind that doesn't leave your bones until spring. 

I could while away a whole life here
with my books and words and unending whimsy
emerge on the other side in surprise at the passing of time
but utterly,
utterly happy.

Blank Page

A deadline looms, sits like an illness at the base of my spine, aches like a reminder of my avoidance. The blank page stares at me, darker than it should be, angrier in its silence than any words it could procure. I pace the apartment, create imagined tasks on my to-do lists, they say it takes 10,000 hours to become and expert and aren't you decades into this mastery by now, doesn't it feel like perhaps this is your best skill? 

The weeks of solitude tug at you, they flinch at the sunlight when it is offered, you snarl at the demands on your attention. The country falls apart, you sense the precipice just outside your line of vision, it's a familiar fall, tempting, even, as yet another task on your to-do list. Better drown in the abyss for a few days before I can get to this blank page.

You don't know why the monster moves to your chest, don't understand how it grabs a hold of you even as you politely decline. Your hands drip with tar, they stick to every surface, you are treacle. She says come upstate this weekend, just get in your car and go, and you sense the freedom at the end of her invitation, long to grab it like the tail of a kite, we are halfway through January and you haven't succumbed yet, 

just keep your head above the surface,
keep kicking till the ocean floor comes up
to meet you.

Alternate Side

Another day, another dance of the sweeping curbsides, of seasoned New Yorkers jig sawing themselves together in a strange mosaic that shouldn't work but just, does. She asks you to send a few of your words about the city for an art piece and as you look ack over chapters and chapters of archives, you feel every word you ever wrote comes up short. This doesn't do it justice, you think. 

But what justice can be done to love in words? There is only action. 

There is only showing up every day, the magical ones and the ones that make you question your every commitment. There is only in good days and bad. There is only trying each day to raise the other a little high toward the sky and say Look at this miracle, in my hands.  It will not always look how you imagined, 

but that's the thing about miracles. 

They're always magic on the inside. 

Wintering

How do you change with the seasons? she says in a quiet moment of the coworking space. How are you like the present? I see the slow, deliberate moves of my limbs, feel the quiet, steady beat of blood in my veins, wonder at how much stillness one racing life can offer. It is not like me to be this calm in the face of an entire life to live, an entire life rushing towards its inevitable end, too soon whenever it may come. 

But it is January. Awake, but perhaps I hibernate. Alive, but perhaps I am resting, gathering strength, perhaps every month does not have to look like the last, the sun still rises in winter only later, only slower. I see things more clearly in the silence. Take a breath. 

Step up.

Sub Zero

The afternoon drones on in that comatose state that January pulls across your eyelids, but by evening my veins are on fire, neurons racing down their highways and you lose track of time. Is this what it is to live on your own schedule? Soon the doors will open again, and you'll lose track. But you cannot live in this shoebox forever. The temperatures plummet, and finally the apartment gets by without windows open. Winter is here, just as you are ready to break out. 

Magic appears when you run this rope to the end of the line, emptiness is a hell of a hallucinogenic, you discover things when you walk the high wire. Let it all steep for a while before putting it to paper. There's a dream at the end of this curiosity, there's a shimmer in this cold January, winter is catching up to you but the Darkness is running behind, your legs are burning but they hold up, there's a

light at the end of this night and you are
going to reach it.

Convenience

In the early morning, I carefully lift the last strands of light from the Christmas tree. Watch it crack and crumble as I drag it down the narrow stairwell. We spend a short block together in the brisk Sunday air, I feel reluctant to let it go. Put it on the evergreen pile in the middle of the park and take a long walk around the neighborhood before returning home to a somber apartment. Something feels like a great emptiness inside me, a muted hollow, a silent gasp. I walk back the steps and see what's smarting: sorrow is not the flipside of joy but of love. It is love that makes us build these little altars of appreciation, wrap these moments in string lights and shimmer, it is love that encourages us to mark the moment and make the darkness a little more bearable. So sorrow is only the loss of a bit of that love. 

The rest of the day itches in emptiness. 

It's okay to wait for aches
to pass.

Flea Circus

Winter arrives, cold air and crisp afternoon sunsets, a hundred doves line up along my windowsills to catch the 6th street sun and sprinkles of heat escaping from my open windows. I begin to undress the Christmas tree - reluctantly, but tomorrow they turn the trees to mulch in Tompkins Square Park - begin to pack up the delights of a holiday season. How long until next time - is this what we say every year? Thank heavens for cycles. I drink my silly little teas and stay home, everyone is either sick or about to be, it's a strange, zen way to begin a new year as an introvert but the keys feel more familiar than the outside world again, wasn't I living through my own pandemics in my youth, haven't I been here before?

It's one thing to know you can survive through the end of the world. 

I just wanted so much more than surviving.

Blizzard

The snow begins to melt by midday. The sun peeks out between passing clouds, I see the hours disappear under my keyboard, but no day is wasted that saw the pages amass. She writes to say she's landed in New Jersey and everything is already horrible. It takes a certain sort of armor to live here, you both know this, and sometimes vacation distorts our vision to think there's an easier life out there.  The super arrives in a huff, shoveling the sidewalk long after the ticket's been issued. Your friend with the rent-controlled apartment on the edges of Chinatown paints the walls. Thirty-five years of New York in that walk-up, it takes
a certain sort of armor. 

Avenue B is silent on a cold Friday night in the pandemic. 

Hold on little rosebud,
Spring is coming, yet.

Unknown

You wrap up early, putting away dishes and rolling up yoga mats before the night even settles properly. Eagerly awaiting. The weather forecasters fall over themselves to announce the mayhem approaching. You are tempted to set your alarms. 

Do you remember, there was a Sunday morning when we woke up to the sound of snowflakes falling on the red brick building, on the treelined street, on our eyelids if we wanted it? We stayed in bed until it got dark again and each lingering hour was a gift we gave each other. Everything was quiet then too, but not from the street, only from inside, a settled peace that draped itself across our lungs, undulated in our veins, I loved you with an understated assurance, I have worn many winter coats since then and never felt it spark that same way. He writes me now, and I think I prefer to greet the snow in solitude. 

The winters are long and the life is short. My super yells in the street as he pours salt on the sidewalk. I go to bed early. 

What else is there to do?

Poetic

A year passes in the wake of an insurrection, only a year though it seems like pages of a textbook now, were we really there to see it? and the truth is we saw it, but we also had to be at work because Real Americans work through a coup, always have. I wake in the middle of the night with unknown aches, what else is new, I lie staring at the darkness while the pills kick in, and find comfort in the dark stillness - I have reverted to my country roots, have forgotten how the constant buzz of the city used to soothe me. In April 2020 I walked to midtown and heard birdsong, it was a strange time, it was a fairytale the kind where you haven't yet gotten to the happy ending. 

When morning comes, I wake late, linger in bed. Read my stories, read other stories, remember what it is that awakens when I have stillness. Of course this cannot last, if we must work through a coup then we must work through a stillness, at some point rent will need to be paid, but there's a sprout here that demands watering, there's a sign of life here that has made it through every fire you've thrown at it, when you look back on your life you will look only for signs that you cared for what grew in you, only that which brought you light. 

Everything else is only padding for the flowerbed.

Tyre

The year begins in isolation, pandemic-weary New Yorkers wrapping their coats tighter around themselves, wrapping their houses tighter around themselves, the winter winds arrive at last. They say when a bird poops on you it brings you good luck, and I have to remind myself on repeat after two birds bring me good luck within a minute's time. I spent half an hour looking for clover along the river but this is how the Universe chooses to wink at me, what can we do but shrug and smile. I pore over strange powders in the Indian store downstairs, consider roots and peppers, converse with my body about how we want to embrace this year. All these strange years where we can barely believe in another day, how dare we hold hope in our hands still? 

I take another long bath and find the tenement water tank won't fill a tub, I lie shivering beneath the open window. This is not an omen, nor a metaphor. The new year is upon us. 

For a moment: no more, no less.

Set

The season winds to a close, candycane stripes and twinkling lights suddenly feeling out of place, and still we have months left until spring. You know the great darkness lies ahead, but you turn the page of your calendar and find it wiped clean, all the creases ironed out. Here we go, you think through years of cynical buildup, it's hard to see the forest for the trees, it's hard to see the clearing for all the evidence against its existence. I lie in bed for hours, trying to remember how to read, how to disappear, how to be silent, but the years have taken the ease from me. One day when we come out of this we will not understand all the hurt it's caused us. 

The point is not to escape unscathed. 

It's to see the hurt,
and choose to go on despite it.