It’s been weeks since the first breath

of winter, and the geese are just beginning

to make their long trip south. They fly

in a perfect > but they do not think

what is ahead of them is greater or less than

what is behind them. That, you are certain,

is the definition of peace. But you have not known

peace in many months, since the day

your love’s shoulder turned cold.

You were standing in the kitchen the first time

you noticed the temperature dropping. A storm front

rolled across her face. Ice forming in her once-warm tone.

You had no idea what was happening.

It was a season you had never seen.

Everything before then—summer. Years of her

grabbing your hand and pulling you toward

a teal August sea. Looking back, you think

if you’d had just one week of autumn, if

you’d seen even a single leaf turn

from green to red, you might have been

prepared. Might have even thought it natural.

Everything you know about climate change

insists the sudden shifts are what’s most dangerous.

It was eighty degrees one day and below freezing

the next. You turn onto Maple Bridge Road

just as another flock of geese lands on a half-frozen lake.

Geese can migrate 1,200 miles in a single day.

If you drove through the night, you could too.

It’s not a thought but an instinct. A knowing

that you aren’t built to survive this kind of cold.

Where will you go? a friend on the phone asks.

Somewhere warm, you say, and if it were years

earlier, you know that somewhere would be

a someone. But you’re done making vacations

out of people. You want a permanent home.

You want decades of her teasing you for folding

her sundresses terribly. Geese, unlike many birds,

do not fly south at the first cold breeze. They wait

until they are nearly buried by the blizzard. They stay

until they can’t find one last edible seed. That day

in the kitchen when the ponds of her eyes froze,

you started skating a figure 8 across them, over

and over, trying to etch infinity back into what she saw

when she looked at you. But visibility is drastically reduced

in a storm, and it has not stopped snowing, so staying

may no longer be an option. But before you go,

remember the weather almost never shifts

this suddenly by itself. You’ve scoured the soil

for her carbon footprint a thousand times,

but have you scoured it for yours? Not to go

looking for shame but to know your own

impact. And can you do that without deciding

you are a poison in the air? Before you leave,

put those questions on the map. Love yourself

enough to go there.

WELLNESS CHECK

In any moment,

on any given day,

I can measure

my wellness

by this question:

Is my attention on loving,

or is my attention on

who isn’t loving me?

MY GIRLFRIEND’S KARAOKE SONG

I’ve been told as a kid she never stopped singing