defining moments

It’s 2:00am, and too cold to be smoking outside in skimpy pjs. But practicality’s not my style, so I throw on long fur coat and slip out the back door. I perch on the back of the bench, and use the knee-high snow as a footrest. The ambient glow of the streetlights and the full moon beaming through a cage of branches light my yard. Wispy clouds bedeck the winter sky, lit pink by the downtown luminescence. The moon and her cloudy nimbus turn the cradling arms of the trees into dark silhouettes. The brittle tinkling of a wind chime is answered by the distant wail of a police siren. Bits of an unseasonal garden ornament protrude from a snowdrift, the iron flowers hovering just above the frosty crust. Like me, the bare stems of their beings are encumbered by excess weight. When springtime comes, the flowers will be divested of their present burden. With dedication, I will be too. Exhaling smoke and fog into the bitter air, I imagine the kiss of newborn sun on a taut stomach. Alone in the still night, my bare knees flushed from the cold, I’m awash with a rare feeling: contentment.

I collect these solitary moments; they are special provenance of the sleepless. I try to memorialize them through words, save them to a folder labeled “escape.” When the swelling tide of demands and temptations and misery threatens to sweep me away, I click through them. Like Audre Lord said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me, and eaten alive.”