4 seasons

But to be in love with someone is more than sex and romantic dinners. To be in love is to be wanted or valued, or to be prized; marked with pride; appreciated; owned. My entire life had unfurled before me in one long string of independence, and, while that feeling of freedom was good, I could feel a primal form of want pulling at my mind.

Often, when I am deep into my practice and rooting around in the harsh feelings and negative emotions each man has, I can feel a single long and unwieldy thread that loops and curls and knots within them. I have learned the name for this Gordian creation: the mother-thread, from which all threads are sprung or grown inside the body. This single stem is connected directly to the body, though it’s hard for the untrained eye to know where. Some say it’s always at the belly button, a spiritual remnant of the umbilical cord, though I’ve never confirmed that myself. It’s as long as a person is old. It winds with their age, matching in length each painstaking and dogged year they’ve lived second for second; beat for beat.

I am convinced it is the only thing we truly own. It is the thing we make for ourselves with each new hour and, when I gaze upon that, when I travel my fingers across its ragged edges, it is always begging or pleading. It demands attention. Someone to need it. To love it. To own it.

When I left him I disappeared into the city, getting lost in the maze of crisscrossing streets and alleyways snaking through buildings, cutting through the land like some strange and foreign scribbling.

There was no purpose to my wandering. I was attempting to reorient myself to this new spring, but I had no clue where to start. The city was large—larger than any city I had lived in before. The number of people grew by the day and, that spring, the buildings were always shifting: changing positions, disappearing, or growing taller. I popped in and out of coffee shops and small museums, rundown markets, and empty office buildings were the walls were peeling and stained by the slow trickle of water through rusted pipes.

I realized sometime during that spring, though I can’t remember when, that I kept falling for disappearing men. Like ghosts their translucent forms wandered in and out of our relationship, never staying long enough for me to touch them. They haunted me now, even if I couldn’t see them.

In Summer, the sky burned a gradient of red hot orange and violent pink. The sun setting gave rise to the faint glimmers of burning balls of gas, light years away from us, just now flickering into view. My stomach was churning from lukewarm beer, as a sickening sort of feeling crawled up from my stomach and branched out through my limbs, leaving my body cold and clammy—sticky with sweat and dirt and ash.

Early Fall a flash freeze overtook the country. It barrelled in from the north and blanketed the country in a thick coat of eerie white. The trees were exploding; splitting down the middle from the swell of water buried deep inside their bodies. The noise was not too loud, but you could hear it if you were outside and quiet.

I was doing nothing, again. Bundled up in my warmest clothes I circled the park and traced the great lake watching as chunks of ice surfaced and broke against the current. The great winter was yet to come: the coldest ever recorded. I wasn’t ready for it. But nobody ever is.