A Measure of Time

It was a year ago today that I awoke alone in a hotel room by the airport in Chicago.  (Maybe I had never really fallen asleep.)  I cried on the airplane.  In New York, I had only two suitcases of belongings and no friends.  And the weather was much the same as it is today, temperate and overcast.  I was stubbornly sad, stubbornly hopeful.  That too is much the same.  And I’m sorry about that.  I didn’t know you then.  I don’t know you now.  But I could measure the year in notebook pages I’ve filled, in kisses, in tears, or in taxi rides.  And it all amounts to the two small, almost imperceptible wrinkles that have formed between my eyebrows – something about the way I chose to look at things and how I now look back.