Wrapped

The last day of the month feels like a strange precipice, like an edge you've been looking at in the approach but which now you hesitate to leap from. What is behind door number one? You know only the mayhem through which you wade, the sense of control is the payoff you're reluctant to give up.

I send a 300-page manuscript to the editor, and the fear doesn't grip me until it's too late to take it back. What if they pull back the curtain and see me with my wizard strings, see me with no clothes, see that it's all smoke and mirrors, what was I thinking? 

At the edge of the cursor is another manuscript entirely, a young girl stands waiting, patient. She has many obstacles yet to face, many journeys yet to wander, but she waits there, knowing that soon you will return to her and only her. Soon you will find your place again, and it will make all the wait worth it. 

You take a deep breath, count down the wild list of things remaining to do. At the end of the tunnel waits a young girl on a blinking cursor, and soon you may reach her, soon you can take her and and walk her to the ends of the earth.

November

A month comes to an end,
the days tumble from your open palms. 

There is a light beyond this tunnel. 

No good work was done in vain.

Bury

Fourteen hours per day you sit digging through the deadlines, trying to prioritize in a pile that will not allow itself to be sorted. The hours are only so many, the life is only so long, you have been given this brief moment back in your City and you are squandering it to the yoke. 

Winter is here, the holidays are here, your brief respite on morning walks turns your cheeks rosy and you regret not yet unearthing your winter clothes from their storage. Life arrives much quicker than you expect, always, always. But when he asks if you are free for coffee, you shuffle the piles, you clear a little space in the middle of the room, you think, Life arrives much quicker than you expect, whether you are there for it or not.

So you might as well be there for it, after all. 

Time

It sways and swerves in waves all its own, reminders of times past, friendships entwine into the present and build on memories future, you laugh into the space created among yourselves. She asks how it feels to be back in New York and when you say it feels like home, she smiles, satisfied with an answer she was afraid to request. You are never fully sure if answers you give are merely the ones you read in other people's pleading eyes. 

Navigating unknown street corners, you make your way to the river. Here is the park where we met halfway during the pandemic, floats past your consciousness, memories of strange accomodations to unreliable gameday rules. You see the river in the distance, November gray, an entrance only half-familiar from days before they closed the promenade. Your steps are heavier than they've been, slower, but you take them, and after only a few minutes do you not feel different? Do you not feel exactly the same? Joy returns to you in strange pushes and pulls, it, too, twisted into time so that the two are indistinguishable and though you don't know which end to untangle, you are not bothered of the work. 

To have joy, and the time to find it, is a better gift than you could have known to ask for.

Gratitude

At last a moment comes when nothing presses on you, when nothing is asked of you. You spend the day writing, spend the day thinking of stories and myths, of how people become who they are, spend the day rewriting your own history in someone else's journey because you know no other way to repair what has been broken, but today you are not unhappy about it. Midtown carries on outside my window and I ignore it. I feel a step behind again, like I haven't quite gotten my bearings yet, but I'm working on it. 

I'm working on it. 

One of these days you'll catch up to the Red Queen, have a nice cup of tea in her presence, talk about the things you've seen on your travels, but not yet, not today. Today you're just catching your breath, before you can try to reach her
again.

Lineage

The story swifts and swerves around you, appears at the most unconvenient moments, burns the back of your eyes until rivers come out, I stood crying in the middle of a workout class and couldn't get it to stop, is this what they mean when they say face your fears? I write kindness into children's stories when what they really need is to see death and know someone will get them out alive. On holidays you're allowed to drink bourbon at lunch. 

So you do.

Organize

The last few hours are like pushing through boulders. You steel yourself and ignore how your muscles ache. Completing the last items on your to do list and closing up shop gives you no satisfaction, this is the great cruelty of life. You read a story that sounds like it was written at you, it knocks the air out of your lungs.

Leave the cavern for the first time in days, deposited into the middle of a transit day unlike any other, Midtown Manhattan like the eye of the anthill. I find bourbon, find fresh air, I wasn't meant for skyscraper living and it shows. The doorman remembers me, says he's put packages aside for me, I pick up the bread crumbs where they're strewn and remark at the insight.

A day to give thanks arrives, to celebrate a bountiful harvest, to take stock of the year that's been. You don't know where to start. But whatever it's been, it's putting some of that air back inside your lungs.

Tumble

Another day comes and goes at the desk, I do not leave the room, do not see the world. My body contracts into itself, is made shorter by the oppression of a sweatshop, is made compact by compression. My neck creaks. I take a personality test that tells me I was broken early and am a jagged patchwork of a person, but it says it in an empathetic tone. I do not fault it for my own makeshift casts and splints. No wonder it hurts so to move through this world. 

For a brief moment, I stumble, get distracted by the one thousand bees stinging my insides, by the jellyfish tentacles wrapped around my throat. Midtown grows dark outside my window, a rainstorm drenches the city, the Thanksgiving travelers. I know I will be able to breathe, soon, will be able to step blinking into the light again, know I have made myself free. 

I am the adult in the room now.
I'm in charge of keeping the time.

Trigger

You spend twelve hours at a desk, plowing through the mounds of work that need finishing before you can turn your shingle to holiday mode. By the time you are set free, you feel like a wrung out rag, like sea foam, and like you've nothing left to write into the ether. 

But you made a promise, so you turn on the soundtrack, set the lighting. You made a promise so you open the word processor, pull out your proverbial piece of paper. And as you sink into the rituals you have created, the weariness wears off, the ache in your arm seems less volatile, the pressing and oppressing monoliths of midtown outside your window don't feel quite so close around your lungs.

There is one thing I am meant to do, and it is this. There is one thing that grants me peace at the end of a day, and it is this. No day was spent in vain that was spent writing. We are already nearing November, we are already racing toward the end of a year and all the things you thought you had meant to do with it. 

But you are writing now, and so you are not as worried. You are chipping away, bit by bit, at the creative mountain you fought so long to make your own. Forty-sixth street is a lonely endeavor, but you are not alone. Stories unfold at your fingertips, you adore them. 

You adore them. 

No day spent writing
was spent
in vain.

Tremble

(returns to words after unwanted absence is an exercise in trust, a timid stepping up to the plate, to your lover's front door, asking will you still have me, will we still have each other, is treading softly on floors that once were yours to see if if the same boards still creak, is a soft embrace in a freshly made bed and resting your head against their shoulder, saying it's good to be home.)

Grow

A long-awaited wedding comes and goes, a late night with a view of lower Manhattan sparkling across the waters. For the first time in a long time, you feel no emptiness, no twinge of unanswerable questions. You return to the island at peace, make your way through throngs of tourists and let yourself catch up in a strange midtown apartment. It feels bare, until you walk past a window and see the Chrysler Building reflected in a building across the street. This beacon you've loved since you first set foot on these shores, this reminder of all you've done to be here. 

You spend the weekend recovering, a whirlwind of a week behind you and impossible to grasp how much can fit into just a few hours. A holiday season awaits, now, a time of joy and closeness with people you chose.

When you look back on this year one day, I hope you will remember its joy. How you chose a hundred adventures and each one felt only like choosing something and not like losing something else. One day you will have to close doors in order to walk through another, but not now, not yet. For now, you are picking cherries and running away with the star trail. 

For now you are a dream
come true.

Grand Central Station

You arrive in New York City before dawn, the first oranges and pinks of sunrise just starting to climb over the horizon. You feel different, your steps lighter, your back straighter, but everything else is the same: the quick steps down the subway stairs to make a closing door, the quick reparte with the barista who tries to get you to move to Texas with him, the breathless way Grand Central Station feels in the early afternoon, like the ceiling is as high as the sky. She shows you around the apartment and you think, anywhere can be home if you bring your own sunshine, and you have your bags full.

New York envelopes you not like a new lover but like an old friend, you sink into its arms like you had been holding your breath the whole time you were away. It's a gift every time to find that you belong as much now as the first night you set foot on Manhattan shores. You do not take it for granted. 

All day you get no work done, no writing done. You try to hold yourself accountable to the degrees that feel inspiring, but less to the ones that feel too much a part of the real world. These are the dream days now, this is the dream life, what use have I for tangible deadlines. I sat in a second floor window on Union Square and looked at the foliage remain, at the Empire State building exactly where I left it, exactly where I found it. 

These are the dream days,
now.
I won't forget that.

Depart

Monday evening at the brand new airport, the great hall is quiet, save for regular boarding announcements and lost umbrellas at security. You are three hours early, a flight to Albuquerque sits at the end of your gate, but you are not concerned. For years you've been coming to this red eye, been tired and impatient but ready to greet New York at sunrise, it feels like home, still. 

Adrenaline coursing through my veins, a room emptied, a season changed. Goodbyes always were your weakest spot, they tear and ache in you and make you think that you never want to set yourself up for goodbyes again. But you know you don't mean it, you know you will keep digging and digging at the things that hurt because don't they also give you the chance to bloom? 

One day, I think, one day I will build a life without goodbyes, will be all have and no have-not, but I know I don't mean that either, because at the end of that dark night sky is a bevy of stars, and to leap to one means to leap from another. At the other end of this flight lies a city that feels like stars and that makes you feel weightless, at the other end of this flight lies a hello that is worth more goodbyes than you can count, and you know it is true,

because of all
the goodbyes you've said
to reach it.

Bogus

Saturday morning in the mountains, a final weekend on this part of the journey and its end worries you, this lightness requires muscle to hold on to. But you have closed books on journeys before and been able to open them again, there's no reason this should be any different, because though you are different now you are only closer to always having a ticket in your back pocket. The minutes tumble from your outstretched arms, but at the end of them, don't you see the glittering lights of Manhattan? Don't you see that tingle in your chest that says you are home? 

It is only another step on your journey.

Is only another day closer
to all the places you have yet
to go.

Vendredi

What is it you would like to have said? When the curtain comes down, what are you leaving to reverberate in the great hall? Another day races from under your fingertips, when you look in the rear view mirror will you see the exits you missed, will you know the debris that still needs cleaning up?

You have the tingling sensation that you're on the right track, and you nearly don't know what to do with that kind of joy. It's been so long since you thought you could take it for granted. 

Perhaps the best we can hope for in life
is to assume we can take joy
for granted.

Alibi

Hours run out quicker when a deadline looms. You schedule things for next week and have to remember next week is a different timer zone, that next week is a different life entirely. You're not sorry. Do you hear me? I regret none of this. 

What is it you were trying to say? What story were you trying to tell? He writes you from across the ocean and says this is all your fault, but he doesn't realize you are older now than when first you were tangled in each others' sheets. I'm not here to be your manic pixie dream girl, not here to be an escape from the humdrum picket fence you built around yourself, that is not my story but yours. 

Suitcases lie open, clothes and coffee presses strewn around your bedroom. What life would you choose to bring, if you only had 50 pounds and a carryon to fit it in? The thing is I'm not worried, the thing is I am weightless these days, the thing is I was born in transit and transit was borne of me, the hydrangea on the windowsill has survived at least three lovers but now I think it is ready to give in, now I think it is time to leave space on the windowsill for something new to come. It's not that I don't love you,

It's that poetry gets so tricky in twilight, it
pulls the rug from under me it,
tells me carpets were made

to fly. 

Sprint

He tells me he needs to fire the gardener. Says maybe it's time I learn how to prune the roses myself. You google climate zones of Kenya and consider Karen Blixen's lilies and lovers. You itch to book a ticket. 

But then, that is all you do nowadays. Itch, book tickets, revel. The new book is coming along wonderfully, November always was a dreamy month to write a novel after all. My muscles ache from long runs, my head spins with new ideas, my heart simmers with peace. For one brief, wondrous moment on earth, we are in balance. 

You hold on tight, dig in deep. Book a ticket, as long as it will let you.

Sleet

Winter arrives in a huff, draping the mountains in low cloud cover and shaking off slushy snowflakes onto the ground. I raise the thermostat, add another level, keep freezing. It's not a day for business as usual, it's not a day for keeping your shoulder to your wheel or your nose to the grindstone, it's a day for curling up with a dear old book, a day for keeping a drink in hand, for long baths, the season of rest is here. 

You feel like the answers are persistently at the tip of your tongue, feel like they are a dream that you almost have but cannot quite catch, but they linger like a delicious memory, a conviction. And maybe that's a hint in itself, the timelessness of dreams, the sweet mindfulness of watching smoke curl from a cup of tea or the cloud cover tumling down from a mountain. The answers may lie in time being irrelevant, in creating a bubble wherein your spirit may rest. I feel it settle somewhere in my bones, and attempt to make itself at home.

We do not need much. A comfortable place to rest, sunshine when it is offered, companionship when it is apt to make life better than without. Beyond this, but a lung full of creativity, but a fingertip on fire. The stories weave themselves, when the seamstress is lost in song.

Season

When at last a quiet night comes, you do not know how to receive it. Pace anxiously around the kitchen, looking for countertops that need wiping down. Take one more look at your finished to do-list. Stress sits like a nervous rodent in one's chest, only calm when furiously at work, forever trembling in the calm. It takes you over an hour to settle. Make a drink, the kind with bourbon that you like so much. Turn down the lights, turn on the fire. Absorb the minutes, they are not infinite. A week from now, you'll be on your way again, and you don't know when you'll be back here. What a strange life, what a wondrous life. 

The thing is, you said you wanted freedom, and then you got it. You said you wanted the road, and then you followed it. You said you wanted country, and fresh air, and one foot in each realm, and the city as home, and the mountains at sunrise, you said you wanted all these things and now here they are, there are not words for the feeling in your chest when you remember it. 

The path may be lonely, yes, it may be dotted with sorrowful flowers of opportunities lost or lovers squandered, may be reminders of the boxes you did not tick inside the white picket fence, but oh, when you sit by that fire, writing stories into existence, speaking wonder into the Universe, are you not far richer than any bank account you neglected? 

You forget sometimes, that is your flaw as human, but there is always the chance to be reminded again. You are not, without the word, and now you are not without the word. 

And so your existence is, at this moment, complete.

Chill

The day starts mild, a quiet sunrise on the daylight unsaved earth, but soon turns to darkness under heavy November skies. You know the winter is coming, you know the darkness is only gathering strength. You wonder how long you will keep your head above water this time, but for the first time in many years, you think it may actually be a while. 

There was a time, before this virus took our entire lives away, that I raced into winters with reckless abandon. There was a time when I let the warm skin of strangers envelop me into the dark, when I let my dreams of the future carry me on pink clouds across the dirtied snow banks. You have to understand, that was a very long time ago, and none of us are who we were then. That is the only truth. 

Nothing ever stays the same.

Zephyr

You spend a day reading Greek Mythology, so sure there is something there in a story already told which will open your own like a present or a flower's petals. In the end, it's in speaking the words out loud to a friend that solves it. The story of Eurydice winks at you in a margin, and you see how the years build in layers, your life builds in layers, you are not ungrateful. 

The weekend races past you, the life races past you, how do you not have a minute's rest even as you determine so much to find it. You wonder what other people do with their days, you wonder how quickly a life can pass from beneath your fingers. In a week, I return to New York, and yet somehow it feels like there is adventure neverending at the other end of each one-way ticket. One way to many.

And yet I spend a day writing, and none of the rest of it matters. Spend the day writing, and even the fastest falling grains of sand in the hour glass feel heavy as gold, feel worthy of gift wrap. 

So that if I spent an entire lifetime endeavoring only to do this, I will go to my death bed, one day,
in peace.

Wedding dresses

The last night before daylight saving time ends, you steel yourself with big gulps of air at sunset, remembering how the pinks and oranges feel when they arrive late, when they feel like evening. Tomorrow, the darkness will feel like an unwelcome friend, rushing in long before you are ready, catching you unawares. You fear it less these days, resting as you are in the brightly lit mountains, the elevation bringing you nearer the sun, an appropriate worship. 

Remembering still that there were years when this season scared me like nightmares and monsters under the bed. 

I look at train tickets across America, consider contents in suitcases. Wonder when I will begin to miss what I have left behind. I assumed I would have by now, but the idea of my own house keys still sits like a shrug on my shoulder blades. How the road beckons me yet, a new view, another thousand miles of speaking with the Universe and asking it for answers. Where would I be if I could ask all the questions I wanted, read all the stories I could find and write all the answers in song form, in fantasy? Is this not what I am trying to do, but subversively, but failingly? It's like I am one baby step there, but the next step is diving, and I fear I don't yet know how to swim.

I will ask all the questions, I will
read all the stories, and then
write all the answers in a 

song. 

Just give me a moment to find my bearings.
Just give me a moment to hear my voice.

Dawn

The room is still dark when I wake, no telling why my body at last decides to return to its stirring before dawn. I decide to  take advantage, carry my laptop up to the kichen without turning on the lights, make coffee in silence. As the shapes of camouflaged deer come into relief on the field outside the window, I scrounge around cupboards and cabinets to find candlesticks and candles, light them while the coffee brews.

I am taking deep swims into nostalgia lately, getting cozy in warm moments and flickers of delight. On the page, a new character absorbs the insights, builds herself a personality where the outside world may have its dangers, but her spine was given everything it needed to withstand. We try to give our children everything we did not get. We try to be the parents we needed. 

The sun rises at last, bathes the field in a quiet November yellow, dots the mountain tops in pink swaths and puffy clouds. Cars cross the field on their way to work, the distant valley hums with traffic, with people starting their day. I finish my coffee, reluctantly look at my own to-do list. How many layers do you think one would need for a quick morning walk before reality really needs to make its entrance? 

There are dustings of snow on the mountains. The sunlight at last breaches the ridges. You wonder what the morning looks like on your old pistachio farm, in your cabin in the mountains. This life contains multitudes. You've space yet to add more.

Ode

Day two, I bake bread. Wake the sleeping sourdough from its chilly slumber, a starter that has crossed oceans and continents, expanded and contracted in breaths through the decades, give it life anew with nothing more than a soft, sandy flour and the warmth of water. Borrow my father's mixer, cherry pick milled grains from his collection, carefully balance ingredients, and time. Return to the dough through out the day, pulling and twisting at it, folding it into versions of itself that rise and fall over the course of an afternoon. Heat cast iron pots until they glow, fill the oven with steam, cut a most delicate arc into the boule and sprinkle it with monochrome seeds. A careful wait, an impatient gaze, the bread comes out of the oven smelling like what you've been told safety smells like, what comfort smells like, what home smells like. Wait yet again, counting minutes till the loaf is cool enough to touch, to set serrated teeth to its golden crust and slice through the airy innards. 

I paint the slice with a thick slab of yellow butter, sprinkle salt flakes from an ancient ocean, lay a thin layer of cheese on the top. Eating bread is something sacred, is something to reconnect you with a child you once were, reconnect you with ancestors who paved this way for you. I remember being five years old and getting freshly baked bread even though it was past bed time because these were the rules of freshly baked bread and your family didn't make them but your parents sure did abide by them. A softness on the tongue, a lowering of shoulders, a slowing of heart rate. 

With age we become so immune to wonder. 

But it is still there. You just have to open your eyes more, to see it.

Account

A new month begins, mild in the morning, gentle in ignorance. You feel poetry sitting just at the flutter of your eyelids, reminders of times past you are ready to usher in anew. Freedom tastes sweeter when you remember what it truly entails. The new leaf on your calendar whispers to you it might be possible, and you cling desperately to the words. 

It's November now. What will you do with all the gifts you've been given?