Sunday

Today, I walked with tongue out and my face turned to the whited sky, catching snowflakes, watching the sheet of single crystals falling all at a different speed for a different place, trying to pick out the descent of a single flake that might be caught given a generally forward trajectory. This pursuit looked as stupid as it sounds. It was lovely.

Finally, the snow failed to stick; now, with the cold of night come down, the sky is mostly clear, an occasional sprinkling fall of white like thrown glitter here and there and then gone, and I do not think it will be a white morning tomorrow. Black ice will suffice, anyway, as far as hazards go-- people will think, no snow, and cars will skid through intersections into lamposts, water mains, unlucky pedestrians.

I believe I will rise late.

I woke to my cold apartment at eleven, Saturday night a blur of pool with friends, the dance club with the ballerinas and my friend who is dating one of them, me dancing badly to hip-hop, not so good with the 4/4, and finally the final cold walk home through the long unlit alley that is a shortcut that I often take but that unsettles me with a couple drinks in me late at night, my white breath before me in the dark, the overhanging trees and the fences and unwindowed walls a long queue of shadows.

My apartment was cold-- I had forgotten to turn up the heat. Out my 11th floor window the Coburg hills were dusted white and the falling flakes fell the length of the window in their greater fall, and I stood and watched for a long time the snow in downward path and the cars crawling the square streets and my own dim reflection in the glass, a man looking down and past and over and through, and after a time a feeling came over me, and then a phrase, intolerable clarity, and I grinned at the overwrought narration of my own life and went to shower.

I have become a poor observer of my own habits. Too much navel-gazing and liminal space. Too much of the bar and of the sorrowful nature of longing.

Tonight, I had dinner with my parents and my brother's family and my sister-in-law's grandparents, an affair that as usual involved hours of entertainment from my nephews of four and six who remind me an awful lot of my brother and myself. Watching them in their madcap capers and mayhem, hamming it up, banging knives to glasses to announce their next trick, turning cartwheels and flips and shooting toy guns with lasers, requiring endless management and in their energy too filling my brother's living room, I thought of the morning, of my still cold apartment, of the life I have now which speaks as much to absence as anything else. I would not make my brother's choices, to have started a family at twenty-two, but I would not make my own choices either, to have stayed too long in one place enacting endless circles. I need-- more.

And to find it, I will have to seek. In my dreams the shadows too often close, the child cannot be saved, the clock ticks toward some dreadful imminence.

But I am writing this story, and so can change how it ends.