Be exacting. Measure. Make that second nature.

Ride the subway from Upper Manhattan to Brooklyn in the morning, then over to Queens in the afternoon. Rush to class on the Upper West Side. Head on home. Board the Metro North to Westchester the next day, ride share to my destination, then reverse the whole thing come evening. Cut quite a figure across the tri-state area for the rest of the week.

Assume that my feet take the brunt of it, but it’s not just them doing the heavy lifting. The bus doesn’t pay any mind to one more. Keep getting on. 

Have shaky standards. Visit with this one and that, combine folks randomly. Never ask who pleases or fills my cup. Wear myself out with volumes of everybody and in-person, no less. 

Seal myself off. Listen to science. Embellish it.

Adapt seamlessly. Surprise myself. Don’t burden the doctors and nurses. Do these things for a long time.

Watch as helpers come with provisions that will one day, at a time and place of my choosing, be my slow ticket out of here. 

Let almost everybody else go first. No destination is benign. 

Make it simple. Say yes to yes places. Maybe means no. 

Never forget what happened while locked up. Eyes that crinkled around the edges, perfectly matching the smile inside the rectangle. Those who asked for help. Those who made old timey phone calls or wrote generous, multisyllabic words in sentences with punctuation. Those who came to find me. Those who left me where I was.

Let the world work harder before getting up from the ground to meet it halfway. Plant the seedlings but when something is dead on the vine, go ahead and compost it. Better yet, put in in the landfill. There’s a time for haste. 

When leaves dazzle in twelve gradients of green. When the answer is either gunshots or fireworks. Garbage strewn about, flies and dank. Fine fresh air with a hint of lilac. A perfectly calibrated air conditioner. 

Have one rule for people. Make ambivalence I can taste and smell a hard no. 

Peripheral vision is a privilege. Use it. Listen to the shift in color. Hope made it all a mystery before. It never was. People tell me what I need to know. 

Whatever it is. Whoever. Allow it to speak. Then rise up and make it mutual. 

From the archives:
Before, now, then wide open
Rending
The sun it did rise again