Snow falls today, heavy, wet, swirling, landing in random patterns, piling high here, nearly barren there. My thoughts, my feelings, my emotions sometimes seem to tumble in similarly random patterns. Still, perhaps there's purpose to everything.
My neighbor Tom moved away. He'd already been a long-timer in this building when I moved in, and seemed to know the comings and goings of everyone who lived here. Sometimes I'd come home and he'd be sitting on the front stoop, reading a novel or working a puzzle. We'd get to talking, and sometimes other neighbors would join in, a block party in miniature.
Those spontaneous eruptions of neighborliness were on my mind a year ago, back when Tabbatha and I were still apartment hunting. I'd miss them when I moved away, I thought. But only vaguely; the promise of a new way of life--a better life, a life I'd never even imagined for myself, not just as a husband but a father, too--made such nostalgic feelings meaningless.
Fast-forward: I'm still here.
I don't know what my expectations might have been when I moved into this place. I'd hit rock bottom a year before, seriously injuring myself in a suicide attempt following the breakup of my marriage. I'd been forced to live on the charity of first my brother, then my mom, kind enough to take me in when I had nothing.
Very nice of them, but during that year, my life wasn't fully my own. Moving into this apartment was meant to be a first step, the beginning of a new life. It wasn't meant to be my whole life.
Time passed, people came and went. I met Tabbatha, and looked at my relationship with her as the next stage in my life. When it petered out, it left me unmoored, as if my compass was broken, and the very thing I was heading for was gone. She tells me I don't need her to help make a change, that I could upgrade my job and move away and make a whole new life for myself.
I'm forty-two. Neither of my parents made it to eighty. My life is, in all probability, more than half over. Snow falls, a beautiful new blanket hiding the old and familiar, creating the comforting, momentary illusion of a better world.
