Turns

For hours I procrastinate: finding new work, washing more dishes, anything to not lace the sneakers and leave the house. But at last there is nothing left to be done. Along the river, my steps are slow, painstaking. I cross the FDR, reluctantly, and then it happens. 

The turning point. 

A familiar bounce in the step, the softest inkling of having been there before, recognizing it in joy. Lightness. I ran faster then, remembering how to have long meandering conversations along the miles, how hope builds upon itself if only it gets a foothold, how it feels to have blood coursing through you like you are alive, after months of inertia in your veins. 

I've seen this exit before, felt what it's like to drag a heavy weight up the ramp, how impossible it seems to make it out. I know the weeks and months after, when you think you are only just at the edge and could tumble back down at any moment, until enough days pass and the Darkness seems like wistful memory of your past, a scar you don't mind showing at parties. 

Being here is much like falling in love at first sight - you cannot actually be sure it's happened until speaking of it in hindsight. It's just a tickle. It's just the air reaching the bottom of your lung instead of merely the top of your throat. It's just potential along South Street, that bend between the bridges where you remember where you are. 

On the way home, Avenue B lay warm and green and inviting. I thought I love this place still like it's the first day we met, and I hadn't remembered that in a while. 

The Darkness takes so much of what you remembered. But the turning point is here now. The light will remind you,
again.