Attendance Shifts Accordingly

At last it is winter in ways that are not alienating. I walk for hours through buffeting winds, snow flurries skating over patches of dark ice. One begins to understand the specific role fear plays in their learning. Strangers call back their barking dogs and the loneliness tightens like a spring. Where we played once, now we ache? The dead begin to take their place around me in ways that suggest the afterlife is closer to a choir loft than anything else. I press briefly against her in bed - the warmth, the welcome - but horse cries float through pre-dawn darkness and our attendance shifts accordingly. Pulling on jeans stiff and cold from a night on the floor, "miso happy" t-shirt, light flannel (yellow & gray stripes), sneakers bound with duct tape. Johnstone is right that we've gotten confused about the difference between mediums and creators but hell if I know how to fix it. "Keep it simple" I mumble, stirring boiling coffee, and wondering what the first sentence will be, precisely as if it were my choice to make.