In the coffeeshop today, the furnace is too low and the cold outside too bitter, and so my fingers keep going numb and I blow on them to restore feeling and stare out the window where the day is a study of leafless trees to backlit clouds, no blue evident but here and there whited cracks limn the gray sheet of sky as if all were burning beyond in a dull winter forge, faint of fire and all but heatless. Behind me, a young woman in a faded teal wintercoat and triple-wrapped yellow scarf, blonde hair pulled back with a red bandana, sleeps with her head to the table, her mug of coffee no longer steaming beside her nose; earlier, she was sobbing into her cellphone, raising her voice only once to say, "No, I'm fucking not all right." Now, she is asleep, exhausted with hurt, and while she looks to be deep in the respite of dream, soon enough she will wake again, with still too little, too sad, too much to bear. If the empathy of strangers was not its own burden, I would tell her that this too will pass, but who am I to assert platitudes, knowing nothing of where she has come from or where she is bound?

I know this much: that my fingers are cold and stiff, that the words come haltingly, that there should be more that can be done than to stand in a dim room staring out a window at an empty parking lot lined with leafless trees, the street empty, only a single raven winging overhead and then gone. This morning I woke to a message from a past love I've been unable to let go, calling my choices 'admirable', noting that "few people that can sustain a single-minded pursuit of something that will likely not bring wealth or a traditional notion of success." She sincerely means to compliment, but there is an unconscious edge, too-- how I didn't pursue her with the same dedication, how I let her leave without objection or attempt to follow, and though she doesn't know it, she is more right in her implicit reproach than in lauding the purity of my choices. So I have chased art down a rabbit hole into darkness-- all of us will end up underground. I should have chosen happiness, which there are only so many chances at in this life-- instead, terrified of trying and so losing, I lost more. I know that now, and will not make the same mistake again-- yet there is little comfort in the wisdom of past folly. Instead, there is the long still afternoon, and the melancholy of regret, how it unwinds through memory: how did I turn down a laughing girl who drove her old car too fast on the backcountry roads, stopping only when the engine billowed smoke to add more oil? Who ran, laughing, ahead of me on a snow-locked March trail so as to ambush me with a barrage of snowballs thrown so inaccurately she missed entirely, who jumped from tree to tree crossing a waterfall, exhuberant enough and tough enough not to care when she slipped and put her leg in the icy water to the knee? I spent those hours anticipating her gone instead of appreciating her there, just as I sit now watching the day, infusing the shifting sky with arrest, longing for what I cannot have instead of seizing what might be.

The sad girl has taken her cold coffee and gone, and there is no profit in mourning misery you have made. Time to leave this window for warmer rooms and wider windows, to go out into the day; if my heart is heavy, I know too that there are limits to what can be carried, that finally we must forgive even ourselves. That does not mean we must forget, but we can dream, and hope we wake having become better.