Second person

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You decide to go for a walk on a night that is evenly split between winter and spring.  Feeling cautious, you put on your dollar-store gloves and think to bring a scarf before letting yourself out into a late Monday dark.

Walking, you feel yourself loosen as you take in a breathful of air, and you notice that the snow is gone on one side of the street but still a foot deep on the other.  Then, you hit your stride and stop noticing much of anything at all.

Instinctively, you turn, avoiding the sidewalk smokers and the rivers of cars that surge every time the lights change.  Instead, you veer toward the place that makes you feel calm and unseen even as a whole city hums around you. 

Here, you take stock of yourself, conceding every hope and ache and fear that runs through you like blood through a waking limb.  Still walking, you let yourself become a shadow that sweeps against blind walls and slouching fences, stretched between alone and not and suddenly mindful of the difference.

Then, a train passes and you stop to listen because you always do, and as its steel chords sound you come back into yourself slowly.  That’s when you notice the cold and the three-quarter moon, whose light will follow you home. 

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