Straight No Chaser

Spreading my fingers out over the keyboard, I feel certain this is where I belong even if it doesn’t come out right. I’ve cracked a window open and the air coming in smells like the slightest touch of spring. It dares me to imagine warmer weather moving closer and I almost do.

It’s that time in winter when you are desperate for even just a lick of spring. The trees are dead and the sky is cold in a way that numbs your heart and hardens your skin.

And yet something inside will not loosen its hold around the hope that we just may come through unscathed, alive.

It is, of course, too late for that. Some winters leave scars.

How do you destroy a world? First you lie about it. Then you convince everyone, including yourself, that the lie is the truth. You take reality by the hair and force her face into the dirt. You value money more than people and some people more than others.

We try to live in the space between terror and trust. Our hands tremble when we touch. We reach for a pill, we reach for a gun, but the threat is invisible and it’s found its way inside. It has already multiplied and cannot be undone.

He used to stroke my ego and I used to like it. Told me how beautiful I was, how he could gaze into my eyes for all eternity and stay inside my body forever. For a while I tucked my entire being underneath the promise of that.

But beauty fades and he faded even faster, into the nothingness that is the randomness of a brief encounter with a stranger.

We grasp at straws while praying for wings. We can’t shake the feeling that everything we ever wanted is just around the corner if only we could figure out which corner. But the whispers are only the wind. We circle the block, around and around again.

Our eyes scan the white upon frozen white of winter across the endless hills as we gnash our teeth against the indifference of the cold.

Even still, not everything we wish for is warm. Not everything that’s warm intends to bring us back to life.

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Photo by Yohann LIBOT