Though I walk through the valley of strange holidays and mouths that ask me for change in the name of a dead man that people believe in like tables and chairs and truth, to this world I say, “You can not take the wonder of snow away from me, for lo, it is powerful and bright and slides under my feet.”
My flight leaves from the airport here at five:thirty and arrives in Vancouver, though the strange vagaries of time-zones, at only eight o’clock. I imagine Ray will be there to greet me and whoever else would like to be there should contact him. I understand the Twenty-fourth is traditionally a family evening, so I won’t feel slighted if you’re busy elsewhere. However, if anyone has any parties, get-togethers, pot-lucks, or general meanderings that are open invite, I would like to know about them. I want to continue moving when my feet touch the ground, to distract me from being there and to remind me why I stay.
It’s thirty and ten steps to the corner of the street. Another fifty to notice the absence of good friends in the crowd, another fifteen to secretly smile at a pretty stranger. Six backwards and it’s possible to fall into a dream while you’re counting paces. Three, this leg wakes the dead whenever it slips on ice. Three is all stories, three then two, the pair, the holy lovers falling together though all the skeletons that live in the closets that were born in the suburbs. Back and forth, bodies and warmth and winter time is here, not there, but right in this very spot that I am looking up in the sky and trying to catch flakes of alien ice on my tongue and inside my smile. This smile, right here, this smile is wintertime. My feet hit the cracks in the pavement but my mother doesn’t die, only the little sheets of I want to turn back and explain myself. Take away my forgiveness and rain down ambiguous threats of calling you on the telephone until I have a map to follow back home, that mythical place that you all seem to have that I never found. I imagine a hall full of doors, a place of a thousand keys but no, I’ve got these three steps, now two, now one. My schedule is walk under this tree, walk forward, swing my feet like the water crumbling a sand castle by the sea glued together with my lipstick smelling like me.
Swinging like the back door, this is the final part of the operation, setting my feet straight on the slippery street.