Here

It snows again, a thin layer of white spread across the ice of yesterday's melt. Treacherous, inviting, disheartening. February grinds, it's only doing its job, two years ago you fell asleep to the sound of hippos trudging around the Masai Mara but you're stuck somehow, you haven't stretched your limbs properly since. Wriggling inside the safe spaces only gets you so much further. But spring will come, spring will come, and the itch will return to you. He writes to ask if you'd come with him, write a story or two, you'll barely break even but you weren't here to make money, clearly. 

It's snowing now, but it will not always. It's winter now, but one day you'll itch for the road, and the most beautiful gift you've ever been given 

is that the road always rises up 
to meet you

if only you take the step.  

Post

The day after the storm always feels the same, always this first hesitant step blinking into the morning, navigating the remains of what's been. The sun is bright, the crosswalks a minefield. Your body sore in strange places from shoveling and shuffling, yet you feel brand new. Talk to strangers in the street, someone warns you about an icy spot, someone laughs about the joy of their dog in the snow drifts. You do not take this air for granted. A year ago you were trying to die; two years ago you were looking at giraffes on a mountain slope in Kenya. 

There is no way to predict your life before it happens. 

 

Blizzard

It's the first blizzard in ten years, the mayor says. You look back to remember but find that you'd escaped the city for unpronounceable upstate hamlets, remember how the floor creaked as you considered the distance between hearts. It feels like so many lifetimes ago. 

You wake up early, too early, the radiators heaving with responsibility, you have to open all the windows, turn on the fan, throw your covers aside. An old routine. Your windows are bright white, a wall of snow, you can't be mad about such a blissful reminder that we are only very small in the face of something very big. The snow rises as it falls, a delicate dance of giant flakes, accompanied by the soundtrack of shovels in the street. We are reduced to our physical bodies. Late last night, I trekked out into it, couldn't miss the chance at feeling myself dissolved into tha air. A perfect crunch under my feet, a stillness that only arrives with snow, the sudden droppping of masks between strangers. Like recharging a self that grew up in this, that's been too urbanized to seek it out but that knows deep down this is what made you. 

I cannot help but think it's time for the country again.  

Endure

For a moment, the sun breaks through. It stops you in the tracks of a gravel parking lot near the warehouses on the water, you close your eyes and let it beam in through your skin. Like you're nothing more than a machine, recharging. They say a snowstorm is on its way. Say it'll bury the city. You feel your battery draining. Say it's only February quietly in your head, hoping the mantra will ward off the evils. 

You're so close to sunshine, now, to spring and sprouts and life the kind that grows from within. Just hold out a little longer, just put one foot in front of the other. Soon, all will be well. 

All you have to do is be alive to see it.  

Precipitate

A day slips through your fingers, they feel useless at the end of your arms, you had so much to prove and instead proved nothing. The notion makes you shrink inside yourself, like plastic wrap under heat, you wrinkle and contort and end up unrecognizable to yourself. My head hurts. Outside the window, it rains all day, the heat is off and you feel a chill for the first time all winter. There's a gratitude in it if you will. 

(and you have to, you have to. What else can you do with useless days but fill them with gratitude, but allow yourself grace. It is only February, it is only this rain, tomorrow there will be sunshine anew and you can make up for what you broke here. The sun sets so much later each day now, have you noticed?

Tomorrow there will be sunshine. Come back to me then.) 

OtherWorldly

Promise to read a script, remembering how hard it is for you to focus on anything these days. Pages upon pages, I have to leave the phone in another room, have to set a timer, turn off anything distracting. Have to say you are allowed, repeat it into the atmosphere, there is nothing else you are meant to be doing but this. 

Emerge, later, as out of a cave, eyes blinking, blinded by the life that goes on around you. All you ever wanted to do was be swept up by the currents, by the imaginations, all you ever wanted was to live in Wonderland, weave your own ribbons of the ridiculous. Work beckons, a week beckons, you groan and strain to shapechange to fit its needs. This is not what you're meant to be doing. 

There's a dusting of snow on the land outside your window. Winter lingers, remains, reminds you it is still time to hibernate, to mull over the thoughts in your chest. 

There's time yet. But you might as well start now.  

And On

Struggle. An uneven wheel on a scraggly road. Everything turns rusty if you leave it long enough in the cold. You see no new mice, even though the edge of your vision constantly teems with ghosts, scurrying around the edges of your floorboards. You say your, but none of this belongs to you. You own nothing, nothing but a storage unit on the 5th floor of a Brooklyn behemoth, holding as it does any remaining trickles of your life, of who you've been. You live forever in tatters, in ephemera, like you hold cotton candy in your hands and wash it in the stream. 

It feels like a lot of waiting now, but it'll come together. You won't see the path until you've walked it. 

The only way out is 
through.  

Re:turns

February disappears in a whirlwind, how is it mid-month when you haven't even left January behind? You try to look at your to-do lists, see what can be salvaged. Returning to Brooklyn is a gift, a parking spot in front of the door, no sign of the mice in your abscence. By late morning, you spot one in the kitchen, like it waited for your return, for warmth, for life. You set another trap and hear it snap while you're in the next room. A tiny mouse hangs from the edge of the counter, held by a firm noose, it's such a definite end to such a small creature, you are humbled by it every time. 

The sun beams outside your window, but the East River is still thick with ice, and the country still lies in tatters, sometimes it's hard to hold all the truths of a life in your hands at once. 

But maybe that's what life is,
and maybe you have to do it 
without knowing how.  

Canyon

You start the climb into the mountains like so many times before, hairpin turns you could do blindfolded, traffic unusually heavy on the other side of the railing. As your elevation builds, the rain turns to sleet turns to snow, how was it spring just days ago? You played baseball in a t-shirt, you're sure of it, but that memory is gone now. In Texas, they close the airspace and open it again, another memory made questionable. What you think you saw, you did not see, move along. 

By morning, the finest layer of white lingers across the fields, while raindrops dance in puddles around it, the mountains obscured by lingering cloud cover. It's not enough to save the desert come summer. 

It turns out to be too hard, as we age, to know what's the right move. Stay in the boiling pot, hope the waters recede? Cut your losses and build something new? They didn't teach you this in school. Your parents never told you all your dreams might one day be quashed. 

The cloud cover descends into the valley. The Answers are hard to come by. It isn't over till it's over. 

West

Early morning flight, all your habits and routines fly out the window. Stand shivering at a shuttle stop in New Jersey, how different the world at an hour when everything is still. I fall asleep as soon as the plane takes off, wake up in another realm, life is strange and comes to you in unexpected turns sometimes. There's still no update from the immigration officer, still no new stamps in your certificate of existence. You wonder what it'll mean. You try not to wonder too much or it would be all you'd do. 

After days of mild sunshine, a snow storm moves into the mountains. The world is upside down. The temperature drops, you wrap yourself in extra layers. It's only February. 

There's much work left to till Spring. 

Stranger

The afternoon disappears in a haze. I find myself at the old bookstore, in a neighborhood where I used to live, find myself sinking into a thick leather armchair that reminds me that if I am not allowed in this country, I am always right in this town. 

A woman next to me offers to give me a tarot reading, like she can sense the electricity buzzing around my head. I say no. The attractive man across from me looks terrified, but processes slowly before declining. The last girl at the table says yes; we all listen in to the promises of her future. I'm getting the strong feeling that you should go for it, says the woman. 

I wonder if nonsense of this moment could lead to a meet-cute with the attractive man, his squinting eyes like a secret to unwrap. But he doesn't see the electricity either, doesn't pick up the tendrils I'm letting out into the Universe. I wonder how loud I have to vibrate for the Universe to catch up, for people to catch on, and then I hear him ask me if he's seen me here before. The Universe giggles in my direction. 

At last I walk out of the bookstore, a giggle and a half but no number in my pocket, reminded that attractive doesn't make up for a brain you don't want to unwrap, that a sense of humor would have made him look good not just today but in 50 years. My friend awaits. A cocktail awaits. Don't you understand I have pockets full of magic, I cannot wait for you

to catch up. 

Ellis Island

So many doors, so many mazes to get where you are going. You wait for longer than you thought you would before you are led into the little room. It all happens so fast you barely have time to be scared anymore. When it’s over, she smiles and says it all went so well and you breathe a sigh of relief until she says But I cannot make a decision right now. In 1999 you drove too fast and there’s no way to prove that that’s all it was. 

Back outside all the doors, in the cold winter wind, a cop says I see you smilin all the way up the block, and you don’t know if you should tell him all tha passed in the moments before you met him. 

Life is strange, and long, and short all at once. One step at a time. A friend calls and asks if you’ll meet for lunch. Says we’ll go somewhere with strong drinks. At the end of the day, your pockets are full of gifts. 

Snap

I'm deep in shivasana when I hear it. Slow breaths, muscles settling and letting go of the day, a peaceful winding down to sleep. Silence. 

And then, for just a second, a sharp sound not afforded the padding of traveling in through the windows. Something from within the walls. Just that quick snap, nothing else, no lingering sensation. Something was here, now it is not. 

I close out my reverie, gather my being inside my body again. Walk to the kitchen, unthinking. 

In the corner of the room, in the little gap between the kitchen counter and the crooked wall, a mouse trap lies sideways, released. The trespasser perfectly captured in a square, its soft body draped across the pad, eyes wide, pleading, its long tail still. A New Yorker is forever at war with the mouse, but it is no less of a life, no less of a heartache to witness the results of battle. The death quiets me. 

As it should. 

Cygnes

A quiet day passes. Not even the mouses stirs, and you wonder what else you should be doing. The appointment in the calendar continues to wave its flags in your direction, you weave around it like a cat on a hot tin roof, never not aware it's there. 

The story begins to fall apart at your fingertips, you question your abilities, the youth in your veins. It's been too many years since everything seemed possible. 

You've reached a point where all you aim to do is 
survive. 

Slush

A page turns in the almanac, a new month, a step closer to spring. The snow recedes from the flower pot on the fire escape, the small body of a dead mouse resurfacing, reminding itself to you. Life is so frail, so fleeting, when you see it on the other side. Death doesn't scare you so much as soften you. There's a gift in there, perhaps, but it is hard to look directly at it. 

The week ahead intimidates you. There's a date in the calendar, an appointment in the books, and you cannot look away from it, cannot distract yourself with tasks closer at hand. There may be no way around it. The only way out is through. 

You were raised to know right from wrong, and to do the right. That doesn't go away just because the woods get dark. You were raised in the woods, raised to know there was always a way out. You see a new year open up before you, see opportunity and potential in the paperweights of the world, see the sheets of paper unravel and fly around you. There's a surrealist air to the brush strokes, a Daliesque quality to your tumble down the rabbit hole. All your best stories were written in madness, in wonder. Why should this year be any different? 

The remaining mouse scampers across the kitchen floor while you sleep. 

If you didn't know better, you'd think he was inviting you along.