A man camped in the windowed lobby of the bank, Saturday night. He’s got himself propped on blankets in the corner and he’s reading a book. I’m outside with the a baby who’s out too late, I’m fitting blanket and bottles into a bag, I’m lifting her sweaty form out of the stroller, collapsing the stroller, shouldering baby and bag and stroller for the trip down into the subway. In the morning, my thigh will be purpled with bruises. I look into the bank window as I enter the stairwell. The man appears to be reading conspiracy theory. End times are near.

I will run one hundred miles this month, I will learn to play a song on the guitar. My husband is away, but he calls, nearly-nightly, from Canada, via that imperfect miracle of video telephone. There, on the northern prairie, the yard behind him is green like spring and full of long light. Here, it’s just all the humid heat packing in before it breaks. The guitar falls out of tune.

Writing just to not forget that we were married two weeks ago, under a tree in the courthouse lawn. That morning, we dragged a kayak out into the Tred Avon River, navigated out of the shallows, and wrote our vows on pieces of paper folded against our knees. The next evening, we again kayaked out into the river, now his ring hitting the oar, now watching the still glass of the river and the lighted windows at the shore. In the weeks since, the leaves have begun to turn and loosen. There are days when they are lifted by the wind and remain aloft, a few meters above the asphalt and the grass, paused here at the brink of the season.

You move, again, this time to the north-facing rooms of an old house on an old street. You stand on your porch and look over into the backyard of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s city home. You unpack your books and fill the shelves, and you settle in. The person you intend to love for the rest of your life moves in around you. His desk in one corner, yours in another, a shelf full of both your things in the bathroom. And then, one quiet afternoon, you’re alone in these rooms. You find your old journals tucked in between books. It’s summer here now, and it’s summer also in these journals, three four years ago, a different life. In these pages, you’re mourning the slow end of a relationship, or you’re on a train, or you’re standing in a shallow river with a long-legged dog. You’re remembering Nigeria, you’re opening windows. You’ve opened the windows again.

I nap, unnecessarily, on the first hot afternoon of the year, just for the open window and the sunlight and the feeling of being a little uncomfortably warm. Two days later, the heat breaks and the rain begins. On the weekend, I’m driving an old-ish car with a sunroof and leather seats just beginning to crack. It’s raining, and I’ve got the radio tuned to any station at all.

I’ve got a ring on my finger; this is new. When I nap, I move the stone toward my palm and close my fist around it. In the car, I tap it against the steering wheel, turn the band with my thumb.

Inferior and distal and dorsal and posterior and caudal and all their correlates. I’ve taken to memorizing the little things, like taking a picture, here the crease just in front of the tragus of his ear. Anterior is the word you’d use, anterior to the tragus. It’s where I rest my thumb when I hold his head.

In bed, in his little room, I keep my eyes open when he turns away and reaches out to switch off the lamp. And then I try to remember that, too: the light along his cheek and chin, the light catching his ear, the mutual dark.

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 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 fixed into curls, his bulk does not move against the winter wind. He rests his left palm 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 to 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.