One Month, Maybe Three

We’re less than ourselves half the time. I am stretched thin and the flowers have already begun to fade. I suppose it is the constant awareness of aging that makes us feel as if time, in some cruel jest to my person, is doing nothing but speeding up, racing me toward that unknowable and forever finish line. 

I write a lot about time as if it is something I have only recently begun to reckon with, as if before now it was less than idea, more a rumor that I didn’t believe. I feel myself quartered among the ways in which I want to spend my life. If I could I would take up reading full time and invest in a small plot of land and see only the people I love. If I could I would pack a bag and keep going and not stop until time ran out and send only letters home to the people I love. If I could, I would just be satisfied. 

I feel the hum of happiness like singing bowl in my life, a sound that vibrates my ribs, like the time we laid on the floor in the Rose Room. Do you remember, because I cried and afterwards we had pizza. I think so often of walking through the North End that I wonder if I’ve left a part of my person forever circling those streets, hashing out the ending to a story I might never finish. 

I’m working on writing just to use language and worrying less about the book I cannot seem to finish and even more so about the one I cannot seem to start. What I really need is for time to stop, for one month or maybe three, and then I could see where I could get. 

But, what I really want more than anything else right now, is to sit by the river and act like we never left.