Don't Lose (Your Nerve)

I dreamed of trains. The night was restless; I awoke in the early hours and lay awake too long, considering the alcohol still spinning in my head. When I finally fell asleep again, we were chasing imminent departures. She got on the train as I followed along on the platform, but when the doors closed and the wheels started turning, didn't I have her keys in my hand and it was too late to send them with her. Her panicked face barely registered as the train thundered away into the distance, and I glanced up at the display to see when my train would depart, only to realize the doors were closing.

There's a strange rush that takes place in dreams. When everything happens so quickly and yet so slowly. So that I could leap onto the last step and catch the door, but still have time to look down and see that I would lose my bag in the process. So that I could try to grasp it as it fell, and still think of all the things in it I would have to do without as it slipped through my fingers. In the end, having to choose between making the train, reaching the destination (not remembering, now, what it was), and holding onto the keys, the ID cards, whatever it is in a purse that gives you access to your own life. It seemed an impossible choice, and when I woke with a start, mid-leap, I was grateful not to have had to make the decision.

But the dream stuck with me all day. Of missed trains rushing into invisible distances, of indecisiveness and knowing which path to choose. There was something in the dream about you, too, and maybe, if I were to be completely honest, that's the reason any of it stuck at all.

Maybe you're the thing I'm running after, even long after the game has been lost. And even waking won't still the storm in my chest.

Thaw

I left their apartment later than I had planned, isn't that always the way with red wine and lingering conversation, and when I stepped onto 48th street, the evening was still mild. Remnants of dinner lay strewn over a sidewalk cafe table, and the smell of cigarette smoke mingled with that certain scent concrete has in spring. 

Spring. 

Like in a moment, everything was different. Like overnight, your heart leaps a hundred pirouettes in your chest and erases any memory of the dark winter that came before. Union square looks like another world entirely and you buy dollar daffodils for everyone you know. 

On paper everything still reads the same. But all you want to do is tear up the paper in a million pieces, throw it in the air like confetti, and laugh. 

the Luckiest

Something magic happens, on the first day of Daylight Saving. I forget it every year, thinking it could not possibly be as rose-colored as my memory paints it, but when the day arrives, it blows my delighted memories right out of their frames.

We walked around the snowy fields of the Brooklyn botanic garden, chilly in the afternoon and desperately searching for signs of life, finding little. It was when our legs were finally growing tired, our steps slowing along with our breaths, that we saw the thawing spaces near a sun-drenched wall, the budding flowers bubbling from out of the wet earth. We sat on a park bench and stared into the sun, letting its mild rays warm our skin, as life seeped back into the steeled parts of our beings that had long been neglected in the dark of winter. By the time I returned to the city, the West Village streets bathed in such an overwhelming warm sunlight, even as the evening was growing late, it was not night. People loitered on street corners, didn't seem to have any particular place to be, and I looked them all straight in the eye as I walked down the middle of Bedford Street.

And maybe everything has fallen apart with the incessant cold, maybe the future has been buried under snow and I have slept too many frozen, wretched sleeps, but today none of what has come before could harm me. Today was the very first step of a hundred, thousand, giddy leaps, of bright futures and mad energy coursing through our veins, was the first brick of the life you again set to building for yourself and you know something glorious will come of it.

Today, was something magic.

Saving Daylight

I dreamed of a large airplane, even the windows were unusually wide and the heavens stretched out beyond us. His anger turned quickly to a sense of urgency, and I felt it rush through my skin's nerve endings and into my spine. Like something missing had been found, and I woke with the most delicious feeling in my stretching muscles, even as a massive hangover tumbled across the bed.

I stayed under the covers until late in the day, waiting for the blood to stop pounding my temples so terribly. By the time I got outside in the early afternoon, the air was mild, the sky had a certain glow. The promenade was full of people, and as I made my way back up from Battery Park, I realized what was different: the ice floes, that had been so tightly seared together with the frost along the piers, had all melted down, broken up and drifted off to sea. The tide was low, and there was a musty scent, of decay or of life it was hard to tell. Suddenly it seemed everything had a different light about it, the barren trees, the walls of snow, even the buildings had a hum about them that hasn't been there in many months. 

Later, as the sun began to set over Brooklyn and cover Smith Street in a peachy magic glow, I dared to believe it at last. Spring will return. Soon, you will breathe again. 

She Looks Like the Real Thing

Another massive snow storm drags its heavy feet across the South and tumbles like a newly awakened yeti into the City, covering everything in cold, wet, icy, angry snow and a bumbling loud silence. All day, the mass of clouds hangs on my brow and pushes my muscles into a frown. My body buckles under the pressure.

It's only winter, I repeat to myself a hundred times an hour, hoping to eventually believe it is true. I want to believe that I can grow wise with the years, to see patterns in my steps across the earth and not fear monsters under the bed if they don't actually reside there. It's only winter. Soon it will pass, and you are not the person staring at you from across the mirror today. 

Under the cover of snow, in the dark of the night, the words aren't very convincing.

It wears her out.

It wears her out. 

I Told You So

(For all the time
you spent building that pyramid
perfecting its shine
in the early morning sun
and polishing its rough
edges
till it sang

it only took
a minute
to tear the whole thing
to the ground
and to bury yourself
in the rubble of your own
self-destruction.)

Connect

My computer charger lies abandoned in a corner of the office. All weekend I intend to go pick it up, to connect me again to the digital world where I spend so much time, but as the hours pass, a quiet calm sinks into my nerve endings. I leave it be. Instead, the days fill with books, with the steady beat of the typewriter as steam comes on in regular cycles. I thumb through collections of poetry, pages hot and dried from standing on top of the radiator. I am, as ever, shamed by the comparison of my lousy words to theirs, but the camaraderie of being so madly in love with words warms me. Outside, it begins to snow. We have a place for you here, they whisper from across the oceans, and you know they mean it. We'll take care of you. 

But I ran along the river late last night, when no one else was out, and the water was perfectly still and the air completely quiet, the night so black above the skyscrapers that you could see the stars, and I thought, I'm fine. 

 I'm already taken care of, you see.