Dragging on

Days stretch into weeks stretch into months, and the experience of distance and longing never dimish. The withered pre-spring blooms on my desk compete with the tete-a-tete, that ubiquitous symbol, their shining, delicate stalks gathered by a hand sorry to see them curl and die, but glad to preserve them. The temperature has yet to rise enough to encourage the real harbingers of spring, the furtive, green-brown shoots of the outside world, to push up out of the hard ground. I wish it would. Easter soon to be here, not quite a time of rebirth, not quite laden with blossom and scent, not quite ready. I wish it was.

I receive small glimmers of hope in the form of vacant, and stuffed-to-the-gut missives, but the longing lives on. More time to myself means more time for thought and for the books too long neglected, but instead I'm sitting here, the carefully metered beats dancing me inside myself, tiny muscle twitches no substitute for the ungainly movements that are so much a part of my world, though not now.

A web of veins maps the back of my hand, was that always there?