Hibernation.

And writing cannot do these days justice, but my words, they try their best. My lack of writing cannot do my words or grammar justice but they try their best.

The snow engulfed the street ahead. We walked in silence, both too tired, knowing that things weren't going our way and that-- and maybe now we could face those facts all there in the fine print-- things won't be going our way for a while yet. Not until this blizzard is a memory. Not until the sparkle and shine fade away down the street drains, and the streets are all reduced to slush, revealing the shattered bottles beneath its glaze. But for now, the white covered everything we didn't want to see. All the ugly parts. All the things about these roads we walk that we can't change, until we learn to chose between our left and our right, instead of considering the forks and divets ahead. Instead the flowing white keeps all the facts quiet, keeps our feet numb, and the miles forever stretching, even if the West Side Highway keeps us from crossing rivers. Even if the wind mixed our hair and the snow and icicles hung from our faces, we trudged on, laughing at the fact of all our facts and at the blank canvas being lain before us, our only job to dirty it with our feet. We lay in the streets, almost anyway, setting down our wings and halos in the snow where cars passed dangerously close.

I lay in the snow thinking about my size and shape: large and all masonry. My corners reaching across the quiet avenues: an empty cathedral, hoping for piety from the religious that walk through her doors, with no religion of her own to fill all the guts. Only the weeping of a sole cellist and the lonesome song of a whale are heard, all wrapped in their velvet depths, all swimming and playing in my echoing cavern. Only the sounds reaching up through the years, echoing down my halls, all ancestral and guiding, ascending and mixing with the metaphysical, could comfort me buried under my dusting of snow under those lit Christmas trees. I lay in the snow, thinking about how under all these layers, be they socks and leggings and jacket and hat or logic, there is love lodged there for you: boy. Something complex and not all at once certain, but it is there nonetheless, it is warm, and it is for you. Lodged where snow glitters under the streetlights and dances around the ribbons all tied up in the hope that this year, that this time, things would work and things would be difference and for Christ's sake we could have faith in something. Love all tied up in trees and the wind whisking our souls around from place to place, our heads all in the clouds and our bodies never once forgetting that we were never of this earth.

But for once, the love for myself is at greater value, and so your love will stay lodged there, all discontent in my ignorance for it, all shriveled and annoyed. I will revel in the cool dissonance in my own voice, in the warmth of my own hand holding my own hand, my own eyes all starry and mystic in their reach for something beyond all of this. In this shining landscape, I find myself all over the place. I am a structure who, for now, will chose to stand ignored. Who will, yes, feel the pangs of loneliness when passersbyes don't stop to take pictures; who all wonder why I am so quiet and such a far walk from the main drag. But these bells will not be forever hushed. One day they will chime, and my love will burst from the doors, leap from the stairs, and my stained glass will light every street, all at once. The time needing to be taken for that instance is now, so that I may open those bronze, heavy doors, one day, when I am ready.

I touched my cheek to the cold of the ice, and breathed myself in, all icy and distant, all happy in my emptiness. I smiled in the beauty of my exactness. For once, no grey.
Only white.

Give Me My Words Back, That's All I Ask.

It was two summers back that I dug my fingers into the thick blades of grass of your backyard, when that rabbit hopped by. The rabbit that I always told you wasn’t wild. His ears were too long, and his comfort around people was too strong for any sort of natural tendencies. You rolled on your back, donned with your headlamp and raincoat for no reason and claimed that you were ready for jungle exploration. I looked at the grass and asked you why domestic rabbits weren’t enough, but you laughed instead of answering. Two summers. It was two summers ago when I had no job, and you had too many, so that when I came to visit, I would spend hours out on your back lawn, reading books until I fell asleep on the warm concrete, or waiting around on your living room with the thick carpet in-between my toes.

Your house. We were in love, back then, in your house. I never told you, but in the beginning, your house scared me. I watched it from the corner of my eye. Filled with family photographs and other normal things like sewing rooms and toys from when you were six. Boxes of car magazines and assurance that one day you would amount to something. But sometime shortly after we began snapping photographs on the boardwalk of southern New Jersey, I started to love your house. The way your mother’s rocking chair still swung minutes after she got up to cook dinner. The way the house’s floors muffled the sound of a hard walker’s feet. Your room was where I felt I fit into one of the only niches I could find in your life. In the room where the grey walls showed off photographs of bikers, trucks, trains speeding to this country or that. Boxes upon boxes piled up to the sides of your bed, filled with vintage tinker toys; that particular box of old keys you kept on your bedside dresser. Right over the drawer you used to keep our scrapbook, my letters, and my picture inside of. To the right of the corkboard you kept magazine cutouts and photographs of family and friends. Your clothes spewed forth from your closet that was never cleaned, and your bureau vomited t-shirts and dirty shorts from hiking trips. Bike chains and gear parts covered the floor, tripping me every time I walked in the room.

In that room, one night, you pulled out your box of keys and I asked you to tell me which one would be the key to your heart, if it existed. You pulled out the smallest, most ornate one. This one, you said. I put it on the chain around my neck. You always wanted to close two locks around one another, to show the rest of the town we were in love, closed and set. We used padlocks, but combinations for its release were always there. You attach it to the side of a bridge, you would tell me, and then we’d be just as romantic and hopeful as young couples are in Florence: where that mass of locks, all huddled around and among one another, keep people holding hands. We both visited Florence, with different people, different years, before we knew each other. We both wanted to carve our initials into tree trunks, but you wanted to on our college campus and I thought that juvenile. Meaningless. I wanted to carve hearts all over Keene Valley, but you feared for the natural surroundings hikers craved to be unmarked, so in a huff I let it be. And so our initials exist only a bridge in Connecticut somewhere, the same day I told you to pull the car over on the side of the highway: I had lied about something. We could only do things on the run; but serious conversations couldn’t be helped when nothing was meant to matter, and so the sides of roads became stomping grounds for things amiss. Blinking caution lights reflecting tearful conversations, serious misunderstandings, or unzipped jeans.

But that is where it all ended, wasn’t it? Pulled over on the side of the highway, our tears spilling over the gravel. The words were meant to come flooding back, and instead that was where they stayed. Next to your car, on the side of the highway.

With your headlamp on your forehead, you smiled, that day, two summers ago. "Maybe I'll get to go to Iceland this year. Or Prague, or Africa." You smiled at the sky, and even then, two summers ago, you were already gone.