Riff

Winter in NYC, 1996

This morning I held Sophie in my arms, her long legs dangling over my lap, her head resting heavily on my shoulder. I had a sort of vision a deep body-felt of her inside me, how I carried her. I closed my eyes and spoke to her in my mind and she spoke back. Language is amorphous even as the body is concrete. I might have never known that if Sophie hadn't embodied it. I can be ugly and persistent in despair. Note the placement of words. Unlike thought, words are specific. Despair is not ugly or persistent, but I am ugly and persistent in despair. There's a tenacity to strength that wears me out. It's impossible to describe. My mind drifted to the winter of 1996, a huge snow storm in NYC, Sophie's pink snowsuit, that damn backpack I needed to climb up eight flights of stairs to our tiny apartment. Sophie not yet  a year old and I just 32. There's not only love. Yet, there's love.