november air

this month always feels like a beginning. it’s the way fall tastes, i think, crisp on the breeze and how in the mornings i pull my blankets closer. if spring is the inhale and summer the long held breath, how wonderful it is to finally sigh. i discovered a door to my roof recently and laid up on the tar-paper watching the sunset light the sky orange, red, pink. it’s a thinking-place, where the world feels distant and small. is this all there is, now? hurts that never end, only growing smaller? i keep telling myself that grief will find its home inside me, but it hasn’t stopped feeling like some terrible misshapen thing taking up space where my lungs should be.

lately, i've been feeling like a visitor in my own skin. i can't help it, really, this feeling of transience that has come over me like a shroud. the days are flying by like birds. i've been thinking of buying some seed and scattering it across the roof to watch them flock around me. maybe if i hold my breath for long enough they'll pick me apart, too. i'm thinking of the spaces between things, now. between breaths. the blank page before the story starts and its gentle hesitance. things are always beginning and ending and beginning again. a ceaseless parade of things to be sad about, long-gone things to miss. will i ever get sick of it?

i'm sitting on the subway while i write this. pain is lancing itself hot-bright up my spine and there's always been something i love about the way it drowns out the rest of the world. my headphones are noise-cancelling like that, too. i think i spend too much of my time trying to run away from myself. there is a sense of temporality that i love about transit: nothing to do but wait as the stops and the minutes slide by unceasingly. there is a hazy, dreamlike quality that the world drifts sideways into here, turning my thoughts to kneaded dough. i am simultaneously outside myself and nestled intimately within. times like this, i am run through with the desire to disappear.

i am trying to capture a feeling that, like pain, exists in a place beyond words. it is both a distinct otherness and a finger to the pulse of the universe, a constant state of flux not quite unlike the dance of shore and tide. there is an overwhelming sense of peace about all of this, i think. the stairs down from the roof are curled in on themselves so tightly that when i hit the ground again my body wants to keep turning around and around, so i spin along the pavement until i find my front door.

it's getting cold, again. there's a split-lip bitterness about it, this sense of starting over. i'm swapping out my t-shirts for sweaters from the box underneath my bed knowing that in a few months i'll do it backwards, again. in a way, it's peaceful. an ebb and flow, the smooth drift of now into then. for now i sit shivering on the roof, watching the candle in my lantern throw flickering light across its dark expanse. i am always finding other places: aways and aboves and beneaths, somewhere else being the operative phrase. it's not running away, really, if i'm trying to find doorways to the place deep down where everything is still and quiet and gentle. there is a sort of duality to the worlds within and without, and lately i have been getting the creeping sense that one is always trailing just a bit behind the other.

eventually, someone will remember to lock the door to the roof, and i'll mourn this place, too. just another thing in the long march of inevitabilities, really, another abrupt goodbye. we all want grief to be beautiful, but i have found that most often it is just quiet. a passing-by of sorts, not entirely unlike the changing leaves. maybe one day i'll have something lovely to say about all of this, but for now i am just letting things begin again.

published november 22, 2021

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