Dear S.,

It’s your birthday and the snow falling outside my window drops into light and light blue without design. There’s a Cardinal sitting on a low maple branch that reminds me of Papa. It’s cherry-red time worn crest stands out from blankets of white. Will it fly south to Florida? I wonder, pressing my hand into the cool window pane and watching the heat from my hand leave an outline in the glass. Will it rise on wide unfolded wings, ignoring the darkness below?

It’s your birthday and today we’ll sing of warmth and fires, clear skies, the stars, horizons, distances, bodies touching, all coated embers dancing in moonlight, dancing like Nana in the living room, dancing like D’Angelo at the Apollo that night when it seemed like time stood still, dancing like time has no meaning, It’s you birthday and I’m dancing for no reason. I’m moving for you, grooving like I can’t stop to celebrate the day. I’m cruising to remember. I’m spinning to rejoice or as FM says, “to demonstrate survival.” I’m bending and believing and beginning and before I know it - I’m airborne.

On your birthday dancing helps me forget that you have cancer. Dancing knows me. It recognizes the clicking sound my knee makes when I lean into a squat. It knows the difference between disabled and unwilling and understands I am neither. Dancing helps me cross a border that’s hard to define. On your birthday I’ll go for a walk and count every Cardinal I see, even the small, light orange one I notice tucked between ice coated branches rom the corner of my eye right before it takes off. Flickers of white and orange and brown. When I step closer, it returns for a second as if summoned. Bright tufts of snow dissolve on it’s wings. Flashes of orange and white and it’s suddenly overhead before disappearing. It’s your birthday and the nameless orange bird vanished so quickly that I stopped in place. Could it have really flown away that quickly? I looked at the birdless spot of air where it had momentarily been, quietly imagining it flying into an invisible current. Flashes of yellow and orange and red coat my memory. I wonder if it’d been a vision.

Some birthdays are made like fires and sheathed in iridescent bodies. They’re are violet birthdays that step heavy and you can hear coming up the road from the car. We’ll spend some birthdays in the living room laughing at old jokes and fretting at nothing. Sometimes birthdays are written into belief like scripture and glow in the dark. Some birthdays are brittle like quartz and taste sweet when they wet your lips. Some birthdays change shape if you let them. Today I’ll sit in the backyard and watch vultures circle for hours. Isn’t there something so pleasant about being in motion? Some birthdays are chosen blankly and then spun into being, woven into living, knitted from chaos to knowing, pressed into peace and placed into present, poured over plates of lemon yellow custard and honey lined squares with crystal blue icing. When you pause to blow out the candles I’ll make my own wish.

When hands become wings birthdays are for cruising down 95 with the windows down. Fingers glide through Decembers evening fog. Flashes of orange and moonlight. When you land, tilted branches hold your weight. Flashes of yellow and moonlight. When you land you’ll watch the snow fall and dance through the air in slow motion. Aloft from all this singing, you’ll hang around. Flashes of red and moonlight, dancers now airborne and weightless. When you land, it’ll be the cool air whistling past your ear that reminds you of the difference between hearing and listening. Flashes of black and white create a ripple in the air that your ride into another place a little like this one, suspended in animation hardly visible, but you hear a note black and bleak, vivid and shrewd - familiar. After you land you hear his voice in the distance and nearby like it was universal, frothing from every leaf and mouth and spine. “Won’t you come closer?” a voice sings without pause like it’d been crafted for this very second. Let’s listen some more as angels surf through dark matter. I wonder how it feels in-between lives? Reanimated in time, collected like snow that’s almost enough to shovel, lost in those rare moments when we were able to cross the vast distances that divide us from one another.

with love,

L