Drown

Wake with a headache, like an unearned hangover dragging you out of increasingly strange dreams. The country night takes its tithing. Let the morning sunlight trickle across the thistles outside while the coffee brings me round again, the cabin now touched at every corner by the writer's messy madness. People are like goldfish, they grow to the size of their bowl, he wrote on a napkin at the subway station, new years eve turned to day in 2007, one day before you left New York for the first time. 

(That was the worst time. It got easier, as you did it again. And this last time was the easiest, because you didn't really leave it at all. You think your greatest gift was having your cake and eating it, too, it doesn't come without sacrifice, but it's not a bad way to build a life.)

I sat for hours watching the sun set over pineclad mountainsides tonight, watched the light linger on its green velvet, like quiet waves in the wilderness, the deer walked by me like I didn't exist and I thought, good, I am becoming one with this log cabin. When at last it realized its mistake and leapt away, I went back into the little house, looked at the piles of words scattered across the couches, the tables, the floor. I grew into this bowl, like a heavy-handed metaphor for growing into this life I'm building. It's a strange, messy collection of abandoned trinkets and well-loved but crumpled pieces of paper. It's a shambled mosaic and a trip without destination, but I think I am on the right track, on the right highway though I don't know where it goes, and when I find out,
oh all this mess
will make sense, 

will seem like a perfectly executed
plan.