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So here is how it should be

I didn't write much from the heart this year

I lived from it

So much from it I can't write it

I always said there is a time to live and a time to write

I have had lead in my blood, laughter choked somewhere in my gut, a slow impulse to letting things out

As all this overwhelming lush entity floods in

And I gasp expecting something worse than these beautiful sunrises and sunsets

God Bless you America while you last

The damage truckers on the 5 freeway can do to a relationship

We met on a rainy day in the crucibles of our own grief. We had both lost men who happened to have the same first name. Hers a year before mine and a lover not a father. But then my father was a lover too I guess, just not my lover. But he had made me that way, through loving.

And in the chaos of loss and the certainty of more of it to come butting up against all of the uncertainty as to when it would happen, we threw caution to the wind, messy like a liquid but lucky like a ridden wave. It would, we decided, be messier, all of it, to do nothing about us at all. And so we turned ourselves into that us and wrangled all the beautiful things that felt effortless like a wildflower bouquet in the hands of a child who had just crossed miles of mud to get it

mama there goes this man

You, I, worry about all the things that could happen to make it end. The uninhabitable Earth. The plague of physics at high speeds. What people can do to people. And what people can do to ourselves. And then, it all ends anyway.

This right now here and now is a recognition that I am letting my brain wander off as the confetti pours down all around me. This is me getting everything there is out of life at this very fragile moment and labeling it joy.