Awake Atop Awake

As I was walking home just now in the warmth of an early spring night, I felt the city around me, felt its buildings and its lights envelope me, I knew I was spending one last special walk with it. I walked past groups of tourist teenagers, all smoking cigarettes, I breathed deep their secondhand smoke, I loved the feel and taste of it, the thickness of it,  I missed it. The air on my skin– with just hints of warmth and life and movement– started to bring me back from a stupor, from one of the more stressful work weeks of my life, passing cheesesteak joints and bubble tea shacks and closed sunglass huts with the metal cages pulled down for the night, I felt the stress toxins slowly seep out of me, my muscles relax, the smile turning up at the side of my face. I did it, I thought. I didn’t know what it meant, but that’s what I thought. And then I thought of you – yes, you – and how much I missed you, and all the silly things we’ve done together, and that thing you always say that makes me laugh. And then I thought of me, and how much I like being alone, and how many things, wonderful wonderful things, I have done by myself, and how I feel this desire lifting, retreating, and finally craving other people for the first time in a long time, I feel it turning, turning.  And then other thoughts came to me, for reasons unknown: bright lights strung up over tall ships in a harbor, a Basenji licking my throw pillow, a five-piece rock crescendo in a minor chord, staring out the airplane window just after takeoff and noticing a still egret in the middle distance, the hot Florida summer as a forest fire blazes nearby and ashes fall from the sky, a footrace on the grass beside the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the smell of funnel cake, the smell of coffee brewing at 7am in a rehab common room, the rushing Niagara, and I’m so awake and awake now, and I kept walking, steadily, one foot after the other, and I think for a moment they stopped touching the ground.