A cold air’s breath on new year’s night is doubly possessive and, as such, not without perplexity. The same could be—and is presently being—said about time and age and love because I’ve “reached”(?) an age when love means time less in quantitativeness than in presence, and yet I continue to choose the language of personifications as though the breath and the night and the time were ever confused and not I. Givings and takings. My age, my breath, our night, and I, not I.

*

Nocturnal stratocumulus stratiformus that seem at home in weather reports but defy depiction rush over the city’s celebrations and indifferences, over me and my before and off into our tomorrow and the edge-of-world darkness above a 100-mile wide lake that will freeze in the coming months. Fireworks bursting from the pier must mean something to us polyphyletically or we wouldn’t keep coming back. Without choosing, I find elementary significance in an acknowledgement that the glittering occasion marks the beginning of my fifth decade and the last ten years of existence’s experience say there’s no such thing as running away. Learning to count must’ve been easier than learning to worry but this conflation of self and other seems as natural and puzzling as positive phototaxis or ending with another not I.

*

Advancement, plain and simple. Down go digits, only to be replaced by their successors, precisely according to our constructions, increment by increment. Two digits down this time, though, and the effect is more Kairos than Chronos.

To prepon, to dynaton, to have learned, lost, and be struck by the tenuous stability of our qualitative accumulations. Always changing and staying the same, the city and I-not-I identify through luster and language. We ride these Els through love, not to it, threading through tunnels and back out again, weaving tales of anticipation and exclusivity which when taken to inevitably unnecessary conclusions spell a sort of stasis in end points and destinations that my not-I so often failed to comprehend were all its own.

With each departure we are but bursts, multiple and multiform, our finales spanning spectral from grand to slowly fading as we recall the apparent sagacities of ascendance though wisdom, it might be said, endures in return, in effort, just as I, again, my own audience, find the moment primed and opportune for another not I.