still

Five a.m.: New snow on the city sidewalks is even, undisturbed, luminous. When a solitary walker crosses the surface, her passage is reflected in sharp-edged footsteps, which are not unattractive--at first. But two feet will become four, will become forty, will become four hundred, the dazzling stillness forgotten. It's enough to make one despair, but for this: just under the surface of the fine flakes, I see the ghost treads of one who earlier walked this way. Not much longer and those marks will recede entirely, as will mine, and all the rest, blanketed by the diamond-bright drifts whose own eventual disappearance is but a change in form.

now

Pen to paper, finger to key, spade to soil: beginnings were easier in the beginning. Years of practice only serve to reveal the vastness of my inexperience. What is it in me that resists beginning? Why to I refuse to come in from the siren-song soup I call "research," "exploration," "time to think"? As I flail around in the warm water of self-deceit, a time-tested system seems dry and unappealing. I know, but won't acknowledge, that I'm built to breathe that very air. Just a little longer, I think, imagining my fingertips wrinking, my limbs growing heavy, all movement stopping.

On second thought, maybe I'll come in now.