Expiry

My parking permit expired yesterday, and I don't have the money for another until the end of next week. If I am not permitted to stop, then I might as well drown in this mirrored river, and keep within me the sound of these words dying. Some sounds crisp, some sounds fading, some sounds dulling the brain. I once believed in the declaratory power of words. Pen it, and it was. I believed this. I wrote to cast out my moments of anxiety. I wrote to dissolve the self-loathing. I wrote away my guilt at my grandfather's passing. I wrote to defeat my fear of delivering a eulogy for a friend who had my name. I wrote incessantly, at one time to affirm that I was riding the clouds, and at another to obliterate all but none of my obsessive torture and tortuous obsession. But lately I have discovered this power, if I had the audacity to call it that, or if I had it at all, is gone. I am just aging. And not very gracefully. The anxiety festers; the self-loathing is urgent; the guilt is stifling; the fear is black; and not even the tortuous obsession is something I anymore have the ability or strength to describe. My grandfather appeared in my dream again to ask about the laundry. And in the midst of all this, winter is stubbornly passing by.

How many seasons will expire before I see you again?