Not Dark Yet.

In the South, snow is something to celebrate.

The liquor store was packed with the kind of men who walked with their legs far apart, and looked at us too long as we laughed in the parking lot, our eyelashes and teeth cold and wet. 

Erin drove too fast, and we skidded slowly down a back road. I thought briefly of the forested trees outside the window, (wondered how it would feel to wrap metal and bone around their branches), but we adjusted and kept moving forward. 

Pounded tough limes into giant green and orange plastic cups, disguised the taste of cheap gin and drank like we were kids at a driveway hose. 

In bed, I put on the one Bob Dylan song that doesn’t make me feel like I’m listening to a Bob Dylan song. 

The conversation felt right. Everything has gotten simpler, and when we talk about it the pain is like a bruise and not a wound. 

She smiles about her new relationship, cracks jokes about shaving too much these days, destroying her bedroom floor trying to figure out which shoes to wear. I get serious about my endings. “I’m thankful he’s been in my life these past four years, but I’m just finally realising I deserve more. I don’t just objectively know I deserve more, I actually want it.” 

It always surprising to me how simply endings come -- how quickly your heart can be vacated by every ghost. 

Knowing I could be gone for a year, I looked at everything with more joy and more sorrow. 

Deepan angled into the corner of the bar, serious-eyed but smiling. 

My sister sleeping by her window in the morning, pink and snowy. 

My own reflection, pale and reluctantly hopeful. 

I’ll be laughing for years at the memory of Erin running down the hallway naked, a fistful of weed clutched in her palm. 

When I lean back against the grey walls, the lyrics ring in my head:  I know it looks like I’m movin’ / but I’m standin’ still.