but Fuck it we need some Ends

Hours pass underneath your fingertips and you don't know how to count them when they aren't made of money. The end of March is sunny outside your shoebox but the wind that crosses through your window whispers of winters in your bones. You are unafraid of the cold now, watch it dying like a defeated villain that you weren't the one to slay. See a familiar face along the river and wonder how to explain the call of the Road beneath your nails. Keep it a secret a little longer. 

Back on the page, your heroine trips and falls, looking back at you with her accusations. You wish you could apologize in a way that meant you'd make it right. But parents are flaws, we can only do the best we can. 

And for the first time in years, there's an ember in you that says you can do better.

Your Own Way

Early in the morning, the glass doors to the little book shop are half open, as if expecting spring. You settle into a deep leather armchair, try to forget time. The gears of your imagination are rusty, too many years of illness and fear getting in the way of your ease. You think instead of road maps across the country, of tracing veins to some sort of heart beat, trying to find ease there instead, if it’ll have you. 

A strange stillness sits across your brow. You don’t want to scare it away, try not to make any swift movements. 

But maybe there’s more than stillness lying underneath. Maybe there’s more to life than surviving. 

And you won’t find out until you dare to dig for it. 

Scratch

By the time you reach the bar, the rain has just started. The bartender is running around outside, setting up the curbside space and smiling at you with a sheepish grin. I got here late today, he admits before you've even said hi. There was a line at the door. You laugh - no one is ever at this bar as early as you, of course today is the day it happens. A woman sits right at the edge of your habitual corner. As the bartender pours your usual, you say, I guess it's a different corner for me today. He laughs. A little too awkward when there are so many tables to choose from? You adore the easy familiarity, this little nugget of home that you fought so hard to get back. 

Earlier, on an east village stoop, she says, You know, Brooklyn isn't cheaper, between bites of her own fear. She isn't really talking to you, but to herself. You feel like you have one foot out the door. For a while I thought this neighborhood would be my final destination, but I should have known better. I have gathered enough moss.

Nothing is final until you die
or it dies in you.

March rains

April thunders towards you on the horizon, the years disappear from under us, an entire life racing with the Red Queen and getting nowhere, but fast. I wake too early, strange dreams of a changing timeline lingering on my lips, but the rainy air cold beyond the safety of the duvet. You look around and wonder if this bedroom still feels like safety. 

By mid day, I have begun the purge. How spring always itches in me, tells me to burn everything and bring only a typewriter to the next blank page, it's a tempting ruse. I weigh every post-it on the wall, wonder if I could live without it. Remember I lived decades with barely anything at all and can't tell if that's triumph or tragedy. 

Return to the bed with a book and some blinders. Think maybe safety was only ever hypothetical, anyway. 

Little Boxes

A writing day squanders itself around your shoulder blades. Work saunters in, a life saunters in, you spend precious minutes looking at apartment listings in parts of Brooklyn you thought you'd never age into. Spring has broken itself into the community garden across sixth street, suddenly it bathes in hues of green and sunshine. You wonder if you are counting down minutes until farewells, if you would do best to absorb every blossoming bud like it is the last. You are too dulled inside to give in to your own nostalgic tendencies. 

Look at each object in your home and wonder what could be thrown away. The West beckons you, the change beckons you, until one night you stand hunched over dishes, suds in your hair and pink dish gloves on your hand, thinking I would miss this plate if I went. You are an addict to change, but not all of the molecules work in tandem.

The feelings that will catch us are not always immediately clear.

Nowruz

Please sign the lease at your earliest convenience, he writes without a whiff of emotion, without so much as an ounce of shame for the numbers by the dollar sign he has just offered you. Without so much as a thought to how he pulls the rug out from under you. 

For a brief moment you were given a dream. You knew it couldn't last, but you hadn't quite thought about what you'd do when it didn't. The only vision that paints itself inside your eyelids is putting everything in storage, is getting in the old station wagon on Avenue B and driving off into the sunset. 

The only reaction you ever have to adversity
is freedom. 

I walked home from the little writing bar on 5th street reeling in the twilight, drunk on happy hour beer and just as drunk on the idea of adventure. Look at each individual trinket in the little shoebox, try to calculate if I'd miss it were it no longer mine. Look at the spring sunshine and feel a familiar itch grow in my chest. Today is the start of a new year.

See my Phoenix wings begin to singe at the edges,
prepare for the flame.

Lifeline

Monday afternoon, you return to the bar that never leaves you completely, find the corner comfortably empty. The bartender har turned up the light just over your table, he knows how you like to read and put little scribbles in your notebook. You hear him tell a patron about their new puppy, how it sleeps in the bed with them. You read old journals, see a life made up of equal parts darkness and words. Everything else is irrelevant. Everything else is minutiae, little pebbles of life, it it not what you will remember. You remember words, and you remember darkness. 

Spring arrives along the river, despite the weight in your chest. Sunlight beams on the park, daffodils growing before your eyes, little popcorn buds on the flowering trees aching for their turn to explode, you stop and stare at them. Wonder at the world. Was it always like this to emerge? It's been so long since you came out of wherever it is you've been spending your years. The windows look dirty, you hadn't seen. Your whole burrow is dirty, you haven't opened your eyes properly since you don't know when. When you tell her you've forgotten what it feels like to long for anything at all she calls it a symtom, not a sign that this is all you can expect out of life. When you tell her you don't remember what joy feels like in your chest, she tells you there's a name for that. 

But spring arrives along the river, sunshine digs its way into even the darkest burrow, leaves no stone unturned, doesn't care about the diagnoses on your chart. It carries on unperturbed, nudges you against your will, like a puppy who will not give up trying to sleep in the bed with you. You wake up in the middle of the night, sense it breathing along your spine, wake early to its careful attempts to coax you back into the world. You don't know what it means to long for anything anymore. 

But maybe there's a way spring can succeed
at reminding you.

Night Owl

Twist and turn the days and nights, forget to eat, forget to check the time. This is what happens when you let the Word lead. It's been so long, you had forgotten how it moves. Make more coffee, pour more wine, draw maps on the backs of old scraps of paper, drag your typewriter back to the window where it belongs, take long, slow breaths that do not remember the decay in your soul. Sylvia Plath beckons to me from the bookshelf. What camaraderie in understanding. A life is passing. A thousand times I've fallen away from the path I thought was mine. 

But I have returned a thousand and one,
and so far, that'll do.

Sticks

I'll dream each night of some version of you, but the secret is I actually mean me. There was a time when I'd run down Brooklyn avenues in a giggle, was a time when I'd marvel at the Manhattan skyline until it shook in my chest, but I feel nothing now, I stare at trees made blurry by emerging buds until I am blind but I feel nothing. It's too far, too impossible, I am a thousand layers of cotton inside the pale skin of March, something in the back of my mind says I was happy once but I cannot imagine now the shape of happiness and I forget to try. Flip through decades of March, see the same incredulous despair. See it change with the weeks. Wonder if I can wish for the same miracle another year. On 6th street, I find a penny on the ground but it is face down, I do not take it. The Universe scoffs at my pleas. Like a fool I keep trying. 

Think,
We have far to go.
But at least, at last, we're walking.

Just Where You're Going

The last lashes of winter try to cut you at the ankles, a death rattle full of poison even as you divine sunlight at the end of the tunnel. Spend hours staring into the void at the other end of the mirror, try to glean signs of life behind the whites of your eyes. See your own eyes from years past echo the lessons you refuse to learn. March buries me yet again. 

I suppose this was always the way. Each year the same disbelief. One foot in front of the other until the daffodils bloom. The first cherries have bloomed in Brooklyn, two little buds on the lifeline of a map. You take shallow breaths, will the oxygen in your lungs to last just a little longer. Outside, it pretends to snow, the boiler in your building running rampant to keep up. One day it will be just a story you tell, but not today,
not yet.

Father

The genetic test tells her she is not at risk for breast cancer. Tells her she probably doesn't have dandruff. 

Tells her she has a half brother she doesn't know on the west coast. 

Tells her the man she called dad for an entire life is not the one who made her. 

She calls you staring into nothing, with no answers and not sure what her questions. On 6th street, I walk past a man shooting up outside a Dunkin Donuts, a shopping bag with a plastic toy gun sticking out. The ice rain makes the buds hide again, three years ago today the lights were dark on Broadway, the plans we had made were quickly quelled, three years it's been since last I knew hope. 

Three years since last we thought good things can come out of adversity. 

She says, now I have to go find this man I never knew existed and call him dad. You tell her she doesn't have to do anything, but you know what she means. Everything is different now. 

You asked the Universe for a challenge out of your control. Do you feel you got your fill? Do you think you've had enough? 

Sometimes I think making it out alive is a real low bar to set.

of a Rising Sun

Days pass, flow, tumble and turn, we turn the clocks like we can will spring to come but I wake with the weight back on my chest, like an uninvited guest I cannot scrape off the underside of the table. The weight tells me to stay put, tells me I don't really know how to breathe even though I thought I did, tells me everything I ever disliked about my place in the world is, in fact, true, and everyone else is just too nice to admit it. 

I fall asleep late and wake while it is still dark, convinced the turning clocks have made me late. Instead it is black of night, the brief breath when avenue B lies silent, a Nor'easter dragging its heavy limbs across the Hudson River. I have strange dreams where you kiss me but it isn't you, it isn't right, I know it's all poison on that side of your lips, by the time it was morning I had slept too late and the weight was firmly planted on my brow. 

The therapist says to acknowledge the good things the disease brings with it, to find gratitude in its swells. I click my tongue in response. The decades I have spent sifting the darkness for poetry, late nights in solitude mining my blood for the slightest sign of light. I'm starting to think the chips I take home don't add up. 

I'm starting to think the house always wins.

Midnights

full moon across the zenith
grazing the tops of your impossibly tall windows
it is cold out, yet,
but it will not be cold forever

it is dark out, now,
but the sky is impossibly high
too
and the air in your lungs is full
of stardust.

LIRR

Long Island Rail Road to Long Island, the suburbs itch on your neck, but you find your old car safely nestled in its conformity. The best part of the city continues to be the coming back. I drive across the Williamsburg Bridge at twilight, the twisting and growing midtown skyline simmering in the sunset, an animal molting old versions of itself. When I reached the top of the bridge, I burst out laughing. This is my home, this place is mine, I thought, the busy, noisy, ridiculous streets of the city approaching to greet me like a trust fall. How could I ever think of leaving, when a feeling like this exists?

At the Monday writing bar, the music silences when the bartender has to call the owner for troubleshooting. The cash register has lived a lifetime already, but it'll make it another three. The clock is perpetually stuck at 9:41, he moves it to fix the machine and you are temporarily disoriented by the change. Suspicious Minds comes back on, the din resumes. A new story digs its way out of your limbs,  scratching and tumbling. You are molting, too, leaving old versions of your stories behind you, coming out brand new to greet the spring, the dawn, the day that follows whatever darkness has cloaked you all these years. 

New York is not for the faint of heart, it's true. 

But it will always be there,
when you are ready to beat your heart in it.

Wall

Crocus flowers break through along the river, dotting the tired winter grass with purples and yellows, beaming in the Sunday morning sunshine. I walk eyes closed, face turned toward the sun, breaths deep in my lungs. An entire city lies in wait around me, perpetually moving on, perpetually a step ahead, I stand on the edge and try to decide when I am ready to jump back into its whirlpool. The wind is cold, but the mornings bright, somewhere deep, deep underneath the heavy cloaks of your mental illness, a little sprout begins to wiggle its limbs, the idea that maybe there is life left to live, that maybe, maybe you are the luckiest girl in the world, you forgot to breathe, for years your lungs were shallow, but now, 

but now,

everything you could ever want is still waiting at the end of your fingertips. 

On

The swelling tide of emotional turmoil suits the March weather perfectly; one day there is snow, another is all birdsong and budding daffodils along the river. She says seven snows after the starling returns, that's how you know it's spring. You count the winds, count the minutes until Daylight Savings, it's so close now, you no longer despair, it is coming.Your therapist cancels an appointment and you spend the day on a tenth street couch full of California sunshine instead, somehow you think the day was better spent. Wake early in the mornings now, it's so close you can
almost
believe it.

March On

You walk around the apartment, back bent, eyes squinting. Try gathering whatever crumbs of hope spilled out, were left over, survived the dark months of winter, collect them to see if it's enough to make a breath. It is March now, you whisper, anxiously staring out at the 5 PM skies to see them change, anxiously counting minutes and daffodil bulbs and pennies in the street, you've been coming up short lately, been buying your survival on layaway but
it is March now
and soon you will be a pocketful of money

soon your lungs will remember how
to breathe on their own.