February 17, 2018

Early spring

There are 5,280 feet in a mile, and I’ve counted each one as I ran, the way I’ve counted every day since I lost you, though sometimes I wake having met you in dreams, and then the counting begins all over again. I’ve found myself lately running down the middle of the road—veering when a car comes, but always drifting back—and I don’t know what that means, except maybe I’ve found a form of equilibrium, though today this doesn’t seem likely. Today, I am an early spring, struggling to break from ground still frozen. They say another storm is coming. I look with worry on daffodils pushing from the dirt, on camellias beginning to pepper with blossoms. They always teach us to fear an early spring, tell us to huddle over its fragile beauty and let the hail pummel our backs. But the truth is, nature is far more resilient than we’ve ever learned to give her credit for. So I guess what I’ll do now is go on a run and recite Dermot Kennedy’s “After Rain” while I’m moving, the only song that makes sense in your absence, in the way that it makes nearly no sense at all. But not the released version—the live one, with the four beginning verses that got cut off in the recording, because isn’t that always the way of it?