Friday

Spring undulates outside your window, washes the view in greens,  tells you over and over and over
to hope, soon it is May, soon it is more of this, I spend ten minutes every morning breathing life back into my lungs through sheer will I do not know what else to do but keep

going.

I Came Here to Tell You Something

(There was a time
when you believed
your love for the word
would be what carried you across
the seas

After the war
you find
that you must rely on sheer
stubbornness
on your own refusal
to drown
to get you to shore.)

Games

I've never written so little. Walt Whitman sits on the bookshelf above my desk and weeps for my wasted years. I finish work early, at last, after all this time, but my insides are empty. I run along the river, in a park that money has eradicated, and try to pound purpose back into my limbs. It works, to the extent that wearing oneself out always worked, to the extent that air in my lungs leaves no room for the demons to grow. I want to go back out as soon as I return home. 

In the morning, I try to read, but the writer is off on her own journey, digging through the rubbles of reality when all I want is escape. It's been too many years of real, now. 

Give us a dream. I am ready for the dream. 

I am ready for magic
again.

Bellmawr, NJ

I found the year's first four-leaf clover today, catching up over quarantine phone lines and trying to let the blue skies heal me: eventually it appeared, like they do, if you look close enough, like they do if you look long enough, because there is always magic to be found in the details. He says your friends are a blessing, and my skin tingles. The dandelions in the grass look like bursts of sunshine.

In the car down, she says I prayed for him every day, why was it not enough? and I don't know what to tell her. I want to tell her that God doesn't meddle in the affairs of mortals, I want to tell her that death eats its way into one's soul like a fire, that it burns everything and leaves nothing but its one singular solution that it takes a flood to extinguish. 

I want to tell her how you opened a window hoping you could fly, and on that day the earth shifted on its axis. It's been 18 years and I haven't been the same since. Back on the phone, I make him promise never to leave me this way. I've been making everyone promise it since you did. I don't believe in prayer so I have to rely on contractual obligation. 

When we were teenagers, we used the word dandelion as something sublimely happy, we used it as a feeling, as a bright light inside of us. Are you feeling dandelion today, we would ask each other in the intricately folded notes we passed between classes, a carefully choreographed dance in five minutes and that is how I learned what it is to love.

So do not chastize me for spending spring looking for flowers. 

Every flower I see helps me close a window. And closing windows, is how I tell you
I love you.

Futures

The writer writes about being a writer. She sits on the rooftop of that old factory, the same rooftop on the same factory where we spent so many nights, staring out over Manhattan and wondering what possibilities lay in our hands. 

The factory is dwarfed by a hundred shiny new skyscrapers now. It is not symbolism, only time. 

Maybe that is the symbolism. 

I lie in bed reading, late night, legs climbing against the wall, because I always did my rightest reading in the wrongest angles, and I think of New York in 2002. I think of being a poor and solitary writer, of leaving the city behind, of all the things we sacrifice for the one flame to fan. 

I only think. I do not reach any answers. 

By morning, my head is full of strange dreams, missed flights and responsibilities. My face is unrecognizable in the mirror. 

Familiar. 

But from a time you thought you could put behind you and never have to face again. 

No one ever said the possibilities had to be good. 

Gloria

For a short moment, I felt like myself, she says from across the state. Just a short moment, and then she was gone again. These years steal the very marrow from our souls, turn us into spectres of our old selves, those people we worked so hard to build. I wasn't perfect, I know, but oh, if I didn't believe in all the treasures to come. 

Turns out the treasures were a wildfire.

I rummage through the debris left behind, try to find scribbles of my own handwriting, try to find signs of myself in the wreckage, but it's too hard, there's too little remaining of my blood in these veins, there's too little left of what looked like hope behind my eyelids, there was a Sunday morning one November when I woke to your goodbye kisses on my eyelids but I don't even know how to paint fireworks in the sky anymore. 

They cut down the cherry trees along the river this week. 

And all I had left was looking the other way.

Risen

A full weekend passes with your shingle tucked away. You scrub corners unseen by the long, dark winter, spend hours in a turn of phrase, a storm arrives and you fear so much that the blossoms will not endure, how long can you fear destruction in the face of adversity despite seeing time and again how life will not be stymied. In the east, a country fights for its survival. This world breaks and breaks. Spring believes. 

The storm continues, unabated. 

We are still alive.

Circadia

Digging yourself out of the snow is a repeat process. One day of air in your lungs is always followed by another one drowning, and so on. You make your apologies to abandoned friendships, crawl toward absolution, try to clear the cobwebs from the corners of the little shoebox. Early on a Friday morning, I drive up into the mountain and look at spring becoming. We sit on a cliff face and wonder what the future holds, while racer snakes fall in love in the sunshine. I forget how to look people in the eye. 

Get back up again. 

You have no choice. 

One day it's going to stick. 

Fire Escape

The depths come and go on their own accord, no thought to your availability. A sunny Saturday night drowns itself in thunderstorms, a hesitant Sunday morning jogs slowly along the river, willing the spring blooms to erase the demons from your dark corners. I write to do-lists for the institutionalized: brush teeth, put on clothes, wash the cup in the sink. I look around for padded walls and find none, but perhaps I'm not looking closely enough. 

The trees outside my fourth floor window itch with knobby buds, each rain shower coaxes them another step closer to bursting forth, each day we do not die we have the chance to live, do you hear me?

Take each step
until you get there.

Like Glue

Emerging from the throes of mental illness looks the same each time, what novel news is there to  tell, what new stories could one possibly weave from such frayed, old thread? You wake light one morning, that is all, you wake with a nearly satisfying breath in your lungs, you wake able to move your weary limbs through the piles of despair cluttering your apartment: no home looks quite so unloved as one forgotten in illness. The plants on my window sill reach ever higher toward the sky, exploding in little blooms with the spring sunshine, ignorant of the destruction from the landslide behind them. 

 Would that I could join them.

Would that we could leave these wretched years behind us, turn our eyes from the wreckage and start simply anew. Prune these dead branches from our hearts and pretend their rot has not spread to our every root. 

Set a new bud and dare to set your sights

on hope.

Fools

Before we leave, the bartender leans in close, looks us both intently in the eyes, and whispered, Are you not going to have a shot of tequila before you go? New York winks at you in unexpected moments, a quick nod with a stranger, a dear friend running out of a restaurant to say hello, cherry blossoms refusing to be stopped by your own stubborn heart. Spring arrives, New York arrives, sprouts grow even out of the broken shards. We must believe that we, too, can turn toward the light, that we, too, can be better than we have been made to believe we are. 

It is April now. It is April now and the world reappears before you. You made it this far. 

Why not just keep going?