morning

Sunrise falls darkly across the path of snow we call our planet. December blue is warmer; pink is washed away, sipped pale til the straw throttles. The kind of gel they put in snow globes. My skin beats a blind writhing pulse beneath myself so I'm breathing against air, in lockstep with my skeleton. I like the fingers of the naked trees and how they're always reaching. I like the eyes of the birch trees reminding me god is just a party line enforced alone. After two decades of living I'm realizing naive things like this, at the point where I can say "a decade ago." When days off in the winter were earned irruptions of normality. One exceptional year the snowfall was so thick and high it could support my weight above it. The horizon line swallowed all objects lower than the mailbox, my sister and our friends and myself on the other side by luck of timing. After we went back to the house we dunked our clothes in the washer and ourselves in the bath tub. At that age the feeling is anything could happen again because you're not acquainted with probability. You don't know that this is an outlier and the general trend of the world is melting. You still sort of think you'll grow up into an astronaut. Across the tub there's a neighborhood girl five years older who'll end up working tech for some very bad people. Briefly, a summer internship; the job market, you know. According to my sister, she wasn't told the larger purpose of her task. Everyone got a little bit of it, the elephant so to say, a fable about mob bosses, repudiated responsibility. Our socks streaked about the cessation of rumbling, incurious towards direction for the vector of velocity. A jack-in-the-box could've sprung from the portly dryer door. But there's only the heat's metallic smell, about to blow out.