Reverie

I stepped out into the silent chill, and froze. The world was winter still, and breathless. I listened to the rustling of the ice-covered branches, and I thought I might never move. Winter, at night, brings me to myself. I felt this as I moved slowly to my car, and when I turned on the radio, there was something fragile and delicate and lovely and unutterably sad, with harp and piano and strings and flute, and as I drove in my cocoon across the empty highways, I thought how my bones felt in my skin, and how I am not enough to fill them. Or am I too much? And the music on the radio is like the music my soul makes as it whispers to my bones, like the ice on the branches. This winter soul is my solitude, the part of me only I know. The girls I never was. Or, was, and might have been, but am not. Is my life like I thought it would be? More. And less. The ballerina. The pianist. The singer. The child who tiptoed through my grandparents' house, talking to my dead grandfather, fingering his books, his jackets, eyeing his spirit, present in the mirror. The mermaid. The writer. The witch. And the music on the radio tells me of the poignancy of ice and bone, soul and branch, and my heart cannot bear it. My sleeping neighborhood, those sleeping ladies in the sleeping little houses, my sleeping soul. The black branches against the dove grey sky. So lovely, so rare, so dangerous, always and forever coming back to remind me, like winter, of me.