It's been ages

I haven't posted here in a very long time. Life gets in the way, you know.

And in some ways I've forgotten that I have a voice. It's small, but it's there. And my audience doesn't have to be any bigger than me. Which, today, it isn't.

Living alone again has been good, and bad. As punishing and rewarding as an artists retreat.

And this city isn't one where you can hop on the subway for fifteen minutes and emerge to another neighborhood where no one knows you.

I missed the first time I came here, full of the idea of reinvention. I'd hoped I could go to a new place and become a new person. I'd hoped I could come here and leave it affected by me, my thumbprint on it somewhere. Indelible, shallow, and still electric from my touch.

But you see, it doesn't work like that.

You're the one doing the moving - and sometimes the shaking - but only very rarely do you get to change yourself. A haircut or a new perfume can make you feel brand new, but to the strangers that see you, you haven't changed a bit.

They, the great they, are not affected by your transformation. And perhaps they emerged, phoenix-like, from the hot remains of a loss or despair. They too are wearing new clothes. But to you, their mate in this fleeting moment, they are nothing different than what they must have been for years.

It's all in the way you're feeling.