Project

She appears in the door like the months apart had never happened. You know so well the curve of her smirk, the soft way each last consonant lingers in her mouth as though each sentence she says makes itself thoughtful. We wax poetic, laugh too loud into the wooden walls and order more rounds of wine, west village restaurants always magically small enough to know your every whisper but large enough to contain them forever. I think I need to shake things up, she says, and you adore the morsels of adventure slipping off her tongue. The Universe conspires to launch you into orbit, it's leaving virtual pennies for you to pick up, it's winking at you through the diamonds of your friendships and you see it now, you feel it vibrate just behind your eyelids. Here are the fruits of your labor,  and they are not what you thought they would be, isn't that what all the wise ones always said?

The journey is the goal. 

Every day you win.

Monday

The rush of spring floods stirs around the back of my head, swirling past my ear drums, takes up space like a wind might, it is soothing and exhausting all at once. I go to sleep early, like a child before her birthday, thinking the sooner I sleep the sooner it will be here. Wake before alarms, quiet sunrise over water towers, it is colder than it looks, what a gift. A day spreads out before me, a week, in nothing but creative brackets and literary swirls. My head continues to swim, a constant hushing like I had forgotten what peace sounded like and have to compensate for the silence. You were in my dreams one night, I woke with a smile, stretching my limbs and remembering my skin. My bones are bruised; I stand in the street and run my fingers over sore spots but they are invisible. There is so much you cannot see from the outside. All this to say I am sand, now, I am chaos in a dust devil, but I will settle eventually. All this to say even chaos glitters at the right angle, and I wouldn’t do this any differently even if given the chance.

Tire

Your words disappear 
in piles of your tired
Here is a kind reminder
What you were doing
   was actually right. 

Lemonade

Hold up
They don't love you like I
love
you.

The night ran too long, the wine list ran too long, bottles overturned and conversation a mile a minute to catch up on a year's friendship lost to social norms and silence. How sweet a honeymoon, how sweet a pat on the head, how sweet this drink at what should have been the end of the evening and why don't we have another. My mother calls and says I'm leaving my country and you've been putting off the process for 26 years so maybe it's just as well to scrape the last of this bandaid off and move on. Fill a suitcase with your grandmother's heirlooms and coffee beans, things you don't know if they'll have in the new land, a hundred years ago a million of your people left and never came back, left to make a better life, how are you any different? You've had stars in your eyes since you were a child, why would you settle for anything less than a
fairytale.

Risen

(You get a moment’s reprieve. News is good from the various ends of your outstretched fingertips. The pulsating heart in your chest, which for days has lied splayed open to the elements, gathering dirt and stinging with the open air on its sticky blood, covers itself, if only a little. You remember to breathe, to rest. It is too soon yet to know what you learned from this moment. Tonight, simply close your eyes, let yourself sleep the sleep that calls no names in the night. Leave it be.)

Process

Waking up after disaster is to relive the blow to your gut. The short moment of lightness, of a day's potential, instantly smothered and suffocating. The news trickle in and nothing is good, I stare in apathy at the street below. Something automated in me begins to fold laundry, to repot plants. The physical act of doing something useful is a better anodyne than wailing, this is why there is never a shortage of food at funerals. Helplessness is a treason against our beings.

I rage at the Universe. Why would you leave me all these pennies if only to pull the rug out from under all those I love? Why should I be given gifts when people around me are pummeled by each breaking wave rushing to the shore? My imagined mountains look like mole hills in an instant. I wonder what deals I've been making and if I can draw up new terms. He says you owe them to live a good life, and I'm trying to remember what that is. My heart is a thousand pounds of love, it doesn't fit in my chest, it floods my edges and swells onto the sidewalk. How life makes us so little, just as it makes us so large. I bought armfuls of flowers yesterday, before I knew anything, they grow and beam everywhere I turn, and isn't that the thing?

Life can be so beautiful it's painful.
Life can be so painful it's beautiful.
Too.

Strike III

She was found unresponsive this morning, the text said. I thought you'd want to know. Tragic details emerge, sorted from lesser points, sifted through fingers that would rather cover ears. Twenty-five years of love sit like a weight in your chest, running scenarios, cobbling solutions. In the back of your head, again the thought, when are we beyond help. You want the answer to be never, every time. You want to call everyone you know and tell them you love them. One night, years ago, I drove too fast through the valley, and really I was chasing your life, one day I held your babies in my arms and didn't know if you ever would again, one night in a cold, dark city far across the waters, I listened to you tell me this was the final straw because you were determined to survive, and I don't know how we ended up here. Weren't you just standing at the precipice of bliss?

How close both sides of the coin sit, after all. How quickly we may fall from one side to the next. The Universe has been leaving me pennies again, I find them everywhere: in the street, on the subway, my pockets are lined with lucky copper and I will take all the luck I can get. This morning I stood in front of a blossoming cherry tree crying, life is overwhelming, and it is short.

We do not have time to fuck around. Make the most of every morsel. And don't ever forget that I love you.