(a journal)

This morning it rained, but at four in the afternoon, I left the locked psychiatric ward and walked into the vestiges of day. The sky was grand and mottled with clouds, the pavement luminescent from the storms, the late sunlight making something surreal out of the green stone church at the top of the hill.

Across the cobblestone street from the green church, there is a small statue of Force set on a short pillar at the entrance to the park. I have always loved bronze statues of muscled men, all those archetypes, cast down in aloof glory to the spaces of this actual world. Force sits on a lion, and a boy rests at his knee. His hair is bronzed into curls, his bulk does not move against the winter wind. He rests his left hand on the boy’s bare shoulder. I long, childlike, for that steady hand.

For the third time in my life, I sleep in a room that’s adjacent to a flat roof. (In the warmest days of autumn, I’d step out of the window, blackening the bottoms of my feet on the tar paper.) Tonight, it’s snowed under, just an inch or two, as are the roofs and porches and fire escapes across the alley. There are people singing out there, and then the Amtrak horn four blocks south, and still the sleet on the skylight. I turn out my lights and can still see the room; the sky’s all orange-white even at three o’clock in the morning. (I wonder for a moment if nights were ever dark at all.)

Just north of the city jail: marble stoops chipped at the corners, the exterior walls doorless and windowless and muted with plywood. The friezes have crumbled away from the roofs and left the upper rooms open to the sky.

It’s winter, but forget for a minute all this stalled decay. Already the days are lighter, a minute longer every evening, a few heavy things set aside for this: the Sunday morning train Philadelphia, a friend I haven’t seen in years, a ball of orange wool. I sleep on a couch in the Old City with a cat curled into the crook of my knees.

In Mali this summer, I always thought of dusk and dust together, the day ending and the loose sand rising from the bare ground, grayish clouds of engine exhaust in the streets. Here, in the winter, the elision comes apart. On my way to dinner this evening, the harbor was blue and gold in the late, clear light.

I’m thinking about seagulls in parking lots, feathers puffed and heads tucked, standing all apart from each other. Slicks of ice unmelted in alleys. Cold rooms with mattresses on the floor, collapsing sofas that serve as beds, or the place where the social worker says stay in the car and the young man joins us there, quiet quiet nodding. He has the darkest circles under his eyes, a cap pulled tight over his ears. My coffee’s stale in the cupholder, but tonight I will come in from the cold to a warm restaurant, a shared bottle of wine. How lucky I am.

but I’m quietly thrilled by it, as this second evening of the year sinks into the season’s coldest night. We take our bikes north on the trail, return traffic on the George Washington Parkway to our left, the Potomac River to the right. My lights are nearly dead, and I’m navigating by the yellow dotted line that divides the trail, four or five dashes at a time. The willows along the shore are stripped to the bare tendrils of branches. I look over my shoulder to find his light behind me. We approach the city, cross a bridge, take the road around the back end of the Lincoln Memorial, then around to the front. He rides ahead. I slow at the plaza before the marble steps to watch the cameras flash in the dimmed chamber.

In the last week of the year, I go running on a path alongside an airfield in Colorado. Early in the morning, the fighter jets pivot and take off. I turn at the mile marker and jog back toward the mountains.

On the last night of the year, I’m back in a city, again with the boy. Now drunk in a series of places: rooftop bars under heatlamps, emptyish dance floors. There are brief walks skittering in heels on sidewalks. And there is this boy, standing against a wall with his eyes half-closed. I walk over and touch his jaw. The year ends and we endure six hours into the next. Taxi cab back to the parked car in the suburbs, a return drive into the city when nearly everything is gated shut, a filthy McDonald’s, egg sandwiches unwrapped in bed.

This year will not be easy. I want to stay out late in bars, memories unraveling without nostalgia. I want to fall asleep, exhausted and safe beside him, and wake up on cold mornings with days ahead like promises. There will not be time for all this.

At the top of the stairs, there is a window. Outside, in the evening, tree limbs black on a blue-black sky. I climb the stairs in the dim light from the kitchen, watching the window, watching the trees. He follows, flicks on the hall light, and the window becomes a mirror.

All of October was like this, momentarily beautiful and then lost, all that time at my desk, at my computer, in a lecture hall without windows at all. The fall has been microbiology, all the bacteria that breach your cells, the viruses that drift into your lungs, proteins that lock and unfold and allow the lipid membrane to part. The parasites. The trematodes that pair off in a dark turn of your gut, curl around each other, and mate for life– there with your fluid washing around them and your blood vessels branching in the walls.

And your heartbeat in a chamber somewhere above, speeding up a little as you ascend the stairs and turn toward the bedroom.

Less than a mile from the district line, Michigan Avenue lifts into a bridge. I’m on my toes now, running in the sunlight on the narrow sidewalk that slopes upward alongside the concrete barrier. There’s an ugly little tangle of asphalt below, low brick buildings with awnings, the kinds of places where they hammer the dents out of car doors. Ahead, the dome of the basilica. A seminarian passes on the other side of the sidewalk, head down, black cassock fluttering around his ankles, back backpack.

I’m still some six miles from the Lincoln Memorial. Here’s the children’s hospital, my old neighborhood, protestors, blocks of office workers walking out into the autumn afternoon. Tourists descending into the hillside of the Vietnam wall. When I get to the end of the emptied-out Reflecting Pool, I’ll stop. I’ll climb the steps to stand beside a stranger and read the second inaugural carved into the wall of the north chamber.

Sunday night, I’m on the Metro, wearing a skirt and studying flashcards in my lap. Up out of the city and into the open air: the moon is low and orange and half-eroded. I get out at the suburban stop, and the train accelerates away above empty backyards. I walk alone from the station, through the neighborhood, all the time listening to the sort of music that’ll make you sad even if you weren’t before. Here, at nearly ten o’clock at night, the trees sound like sighing and everything seems a little lonely. A man stands in an open garage that’s lit white, packed with machinery and a vintage car. Someone runs a leaf blower in the dark. I stop under a streetlamp to write something down, hit the back button to repeat a song.

Most things are not dangerous, anymore. The Appalachians were once the highest mountains in the world, the jagged seam between this continent and Africa. Now they are rounded, forested: after the rain, you hike through afternoon light all watery and green. In the evening, you pitch a tent on soft ground, hunt for wood in the near-dark, drink whisky beside a fire, beside a stream. Touch his shoulder before sleeping, find it again in the morning. The car is parked at the trailhead, and you reach it just before the next rainstorm. You take the passenger seat, wipe the fogged windshield, watch the wisps of clouds spiral up against the slopes; there’s coffee in the cupholders, seatbelts, indicators, the engine hum.

But there are other things. Tuesday morning at the train stop, he parks in the post office lot beside the rails, you check the time, you shoulder your bags. He gets out to say goodbye and says something else instead, just as you’re turning away. You keep going, you’ll be undone by all this otherwise, cross the tracks to the northbound side. The summer’s dissolving into thunderstorms. You’re uncertain your luck will hold.