to Sleep

She had a good last day, she writes from across the river in suburbia. She passed on Thursday and I got on a flight the next day, I couldn't be home. 

Lives pass underneath us. A favorite singer of my youth says here's a classic and you realize it's coming up on 17 years since she wrote it. A classic from first trembling steps on Manhattan grid, a song that will forever make me happy when I am here and sad when I am not. Your voice was in my ears this morning again, but it doesn'ts sound the same, you don't mean the same, I grew and you stayed behind in another time, it's alright. 

I ran into a friend on Second Avenue, chatted briefly in the street like in days before the great explosion. Went for a run along the river and it felt like spring might not be far, like maybe there will be a time when it feels like it did then. When I walk up to the bar, the bartender just looks at me and mouths the usual? across somebody else's Guinness order, and something in my heart warms that has not thawed in years. 

Lives return in little steps, little heartbeats, the snowdrops have broken through the ground in the community garden across the street and I think perhaps this is how it happens. We die in gunshots but recover in rehabilitation wings, painstakingly relearning how to take our first steps all over again, how to make our lips form the words we are so desperate to put into the air. I woke up this morning with the blinds drawn up, I cannot help myself. Sunrise creeping across the 6th street treetops, a flock of birds relaying hte morning news on the roof and a mourning dove warming up in the escaping heat on my windowsill. We stood on a rooftop smoking one night, but it's not the same, I greet the dawn feet first now, greet the dawn by myself, but that's not how it's different. 

I fell to the bottom of the barrel, but
how it's different is
this time I'll be climbing back up again.