Departure

You have only a few hours to sleep, so you don't. Lie awake with the radiator pulsating, sounds of East Village Friday nights beaming through the incessant rain. In the early morning, the city is still dark, still slick, I close the door behind me and race across the Williamsburg Bridge. The tingle of travel evades me, but then the tingles of all things evade me lately. I look for light switches in the dark, look for sparks against the flint, anything to start this dead engine again. My landlord raises the rent, says I could've made it so much higher but I like you, and I wonder if there is room left in New York for struggling writers looking for magic. 

At the airport, a young man next to me looks at my bag and says, "Do they have particularly good eggs in New York?" An empty egg carton that doesn't fit anywhere else sticks out of an open pocket. "No," I reply. "But my parents' valley does." Illness eats at you like dry rot, quietly at first, inconscpicous, and suddenly one day you find that your entire insides have turned to mulch, have turned useless beneath your finger. The seat next to you on the flight is empty. You think,

We must find gratitude in even the smallest
of moments.