Against the Dying of the Light

The waves come and go. Sometimes we drown, sometimes we surf all the way to shore. Snow waxes and wanes across the island. February always seemed never ending, promising sunshine and the tiniest peeks of new sprouts but buried in freezing winds at every turn. They say today is the day Sylvia put her head in the oven but my oven is warmer than my bed by the window, how can I blame her for searching the reprieve?

Soon it will be March and all this will be behind us. Soon it will be March and all this will be a thing of the past, a strange mirage, a bad dream. My teeth hurt in the mornings but even the demons look smaller in daylight. 

Leave the oven door closed, my dear. Another layer of clothes ought to do it. 

Keep you warm till the ice melts again.

70

You can call now, she's awake. My father texts from two hours earlier, their morning still dark and the first hints of blue just creeping above the mountains. I call to sing rusty voiced congratulations into her breakfast. Seventy years old. It seems an impossibility. I remember my grandparents at 70, remember my own parents at 40, barely understand how we got to where we are today. Time keeps running even when we stand still. 

I wake with anxiety these days, fall asleep with a racing heart and barrel through my days trying not to think, really, at all if I can help it. February strangles what little life we have left, everyone is struggling, I try to remind myself that spring comes if we just wait for it. And all you have to do is survive. At last, a task that seems achieavable, amid a mountain of unsurmountable asks. 

At last I make it out to the river. It's been a week, it's been since before the last storm buried us, my bones ached then, too, but now I think my lungs are giving out. I am almost alone in the cold, gray afternoon, little flecks of sleet teasing in the margins, but oh. How the long steps and pounding breath release me. How my body collapses but at last, at lasts my mind rests. I walk back home in peace, with just a moment's gift tucked under my arm, I am alive. The inbox lies waiting, bursting at the seams, angry, and the wheel spins again. 

But I had a moment with New York, I had a brief reminder of the straight in my spine and I will remember it now. I will take it to bed with me and it will keep the nightmares at bay. My mother turns 70 and we all have our health, we all have another day. 

Set the bar where you can hit it.

LIV

We're so many bottles in when it's time to go, bring the shovels and unearth a car from the piles of unretrieved garbage. It starts on the first try, it has never failed you, how you long to drive off and not return until you are tired and ready to be home. 

You are always tired and home seems forever a construct. 

It's only February, a small voice inside you whispers. February always brought you to your knees, but you outlasted it every time. This month will pass, this cold, dark, isolated raft in the middle of the ocean will at last reach shore and you will step out alive, a little worse for the wear, perhaps, but alive and that's all that matters. Three weeks left, when will the snow thaw? When will the buds begin to bloom? 

You will be ready

You will be ready

You will be here when it's time.

Squeeze of Lime

Poverty skews you like a vice, you come out twisted with hollows in all the wrong places. Old frailties creak in the silence, ill-healed fractures go sore with the weather, they say another snow storm is on its way and I haven't yet dug out my car from the last, my shovel broke in the middle of a snowbank. 

I unravel like confetti, lost and tumbling in the whirlwinds, forgetting who I am and why, I always needed so much more time to wrap my head around other peoples' words and if there is one thing I have less of than money it is, indeed, hours. I'm trying to keep my feet on the ground, you know, but I think I have never been closer to driving off into the sunset. If you pulled up with a van and a plan right now, I'd get in without asking a single question. 

Hell, if you pulled up with a 9-5, a pile of laundry and a front porch mortgage, I might be just as glad. 

It's hard to choose the right path when your body's too hungry to walk.

Breath

Another walk up Broadway, stretching legs and lungs and trying to settle the myriad of ants in my system. Nearly a year I’ve been making this trek, grounded by Manhattan in my spine. Everything inside my skin is trying to get out, trying to escape, how many years have a free rather than fought, this is not the hero’s journey we’ve find to aspire to. Everything interesting grows out of failure, he says, but you wish it didn’t mean you were so long relegated to six feet under. 

The sun returns, the snow melts, spring may lie around the bend. You know the grass isn’t greener up close, but oh, how tempting it looks compared to the mud at your feet. 

of Winter

The rodent comes out and sees his shadow, apparently we are doomed for more winter. I walk past my car to find it buried in an igloo of snow, perhaps this year he is right. We wrap ourselves in absurd layers of clothing and ask the bartender to bring us all the hot drinks she can find, there is still something magical about making it work despite the relentless obstacles built against us. Do you think in Florida they know what it's like to make it work like this? My telephone shows me pictures of previously on this day and you wish for once the machinery would have the good sense to read the room. 

It is cold now, but it will not always be. It is dark now, but one day things will be better. 

One day you will look back on this time and laugh and pat yourself on the back for making it through. Man that was crazy, wasn't it? It'll sound jolly in recollection, it'll be a badge of honor or a fun story at cocktail parties. 

One day when you have everything you ever dreamed, you will look back on this time in acceptance. 

For now it's enough to just make it work.

Watch For

All night it snows, I stare at the sky without glasses and see hazy cream colored light. The radiator trips over itself to stay ahead of the freezing temperatures, steam clicking and hissing by the side of the bed as I drift out in and out of consciousness. For a brief second after the alarm rings, I remain in dreams and the notion that all is well. When I wake, I remember. 

We are in a blizzard.
In a pandemic.
We are locked into our bubbles in a world on fire. 

But babies are still made, lovers are still finding the secrets on each other's skin, the poets still wax from their messy nooks about the state of things and none of us are rendered immune, not yet. 

And if you can't be one of the first two, at least make sure you are the third. 

Sometimes,
even the poets make it out alive.