Last Saw You Laughing

The country is quiet, dark, the stars come out and your breath billows like clouds from your mouth. I wander through Victorian hallways, glide my finger along banisters a hundred and fifty years in the making: how small we are on this earth, how insignificant, and yet to us how much this brief moment in times matters because it is ours. What do you wish you had done with your sliver? Remember most things will outlive you.

The little hamlet prepares for Christmas and you get a brief respite, a moment of hot chocolate and familial small-town innocence, it’s a blessing. I know New York couldn’t protect me against all the pain of a life, I knew that, didn’t I know? Maybe I was just hoping it could soften the blow. You recognize the person in the mirror again, you got your brief upstate respite, got your fresh country air and your weeks or months or however long (it was hard to keep time, then, and didn’t seem necessary) in someone else’s shoes and oh didn’t you like how they fit after all.

You wonder what the bottom looks like and if you’ll know when you hit it.

How many times you have to hit it before you allow yourself to get back up.

Marcy Ave

They put something in those chicken sandwiches that make the fear run right out of you. They put something in that beer to make your smile start at the very bottom of your belly, make you believe in the possibility of your own future, make you remember your name even when the cold wind tries so hard to blow it away.

I came home later, threw clothing in a bag like a crapshoot, there’s no telling what you’ll find when you open it again. If that doesn’t work out, something else will, he says, and you start to remember that freedom in your blood again, how right it is. I decided one day I was done with the fear of the unknown, sometimes I forget, but no matter. The road is always there when you’re ready to find your way to it again.

Mire

How you recognize it like an old friend when it arrives. For days it circles you, on the horizon, at your doorstep, just outside your line of vision, you know it is there but when you turn around the sun appears to be shining. Your steps slow, your head falls heavy on the pillow each night, you think you could sleep forever and curse how tempting the thought. And then one day it stands there, straight in front of you, unabashedly real, reaching out its hands as if to shake yours but instead plunging straight into your chest and wringing the last pulse from your cold, leaden heart. You recognize its fingerprints along your membranes, revel almost in the calm comfort of giving up, giving in, being swept away and drowned by its heavy, thick treacle, it is here at last now I needn't run from it any longer.

Winter lies dark and impossibly long ahead. You know there was something you were meant to do with your days, but you cannot for the life of you remember it now. Perhaps the secret was you were never meant to do that at all. You sit yourself down in the deep, dark, sticky mess of your convictions.

Wonder who you'll decide to be when it's time to step out.

I’ll Be Gone

Early morning along the river, it really is winter now but how beautiful it is in its cold sunrise and twirling smokestacks, the sharp contrast of glass buildings and the way pain reminds you you are alive. I sat on the train, later, and felt melancholy sink its tired teeth into my lungs. There is too much to this life, for every pour of joy there’s a tidal wave of the opposite behind it to overwhelm you.

I have to remind myself to take deep breaths now, where they used to happen on their own. I know this vise around my rib cage will let up eventually. This train is so long, is all, and I never seem to arrive where I meant to.

Oh Dear

Mild, sunny afternoon, I climb onto the fire escape to wash windows still playing at Industrial Revolution colors; dirt and grime runs in rivers down the side of the building. How quickly the money runs out when you are not paying attention. For a short moment, I wonder what the hell I'm doing, but my inner defenses shoot into formation and distract me. I dreamed last night of unexpected baby birds; today I hung Christmas lights and imagined what the season would be like with a little family braided around my sentiments, what a peculiar idea, I found myself surprised at the prospect.

The Mystery swirls and builds. The sun rises and sets. You hold on for dear life, marvel at the sharp turns.

Try to remember only the bits where you laugh.

Impostor

Some words come too easily, some sleights of hand seem natural when they fall out of your muscles, you sit in a dark bar and wonder at your own poker face. She sits on a couch in your own home, speaking of hospital staff and assault procedure, of the secondary trauma in taking your experience seriously, I started crying in the shower today so maybe I'm not ready to leave my room yet. Voices come from across the ocean, weaving tapestries of the pain of being alive. All you can think is that if it was to be so often this hard, shouldn't the good have been easy to hold on to? There's an answer in there somewhere, you weren't meant to find it yet.

We spent the day 40 floors up, looking at the skyline of a skyscraping metropolis and dancing our feelings into reality.

It's been too many nights with
to now suddenly be without

Easy

Navigate the trains like you knew them, navigate the streets like you want them in your bloodstream. The bourbon sinks deep but none of it mattered, at the base of my spins sits only a whisper, sits only the secret knowledge that a story moves on, moves out of my hands and into the world. I tried to tell him what the Universe had shown me but the world is too large, the life too beautiful. When I say I love you it cannot possibly mean all the things I want it to, but please know that my veins flow differently now because of all the things we are, and all the things we have yet to be, that must mean something in the great Mystery. A story moves on, moves through me and that is the secret after all; we are the river, and all things that are to come will flow through us even as we move. I had the answer once but this drink will do for now, I squander my tips on the F train, all roads lead you home
if you let them.