First prompt: Take a line from a Robert Bly poem and let it be the opening of your story.

And I said to myself, "What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?'

Well sir, I replied. I've watched said garden overrun by briars, brambles and bittersweet.

My boots tread the frozen crust of it now. I'm collecting dried sharp and clinging burs along my pant legs.

Yes, you charged me with the burden of cultivation without realizing that I'd already devoted myself - my energies, my will - to the three-pronged discipline of the dispirited. 

My spiritual practice - rumination, procrastination, hibernation. 

Your garden, Sir, will have to wait for Spring. Just the same as us all.

Robert Bly poses a question that doesn't help me get back to sleep

By 8 PM, I could not stay awake. And by 3 AM I seem to have lost my ability to sleep entirely. 

I heard from an old friend tonight about a writer's group we talked about me possibly joining back in the Spring. Maybe it's time for that now. They could use some new blood, but am I even that anymore - tired, dulled, antisocial, uninspired? Groups are hard for me and something I turn away from most of the time even when I feel good.

The first writing prompt is to begin a story with a line from a Robert Bly poem. He recently died, Mr. Bly. I tried reading him a few times over the years but couldn't feel it. Maybe I'll try again. Why not? It's nearly 4 AM.

And I said to myself, "What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?"

Replica

The two black plastic guns, except for the orange caps on the muzzles, look real. I saw them laid out on the coffee table along with brass knuckles and a switchblade knife. The silhouettes of those guns glimpsed in the dark parking lot behind the station in the hands of someone who threatened to kill you and your co-workers the night before tips the balance of the situation.  

Cold

 

English muffin

Snow out there. The sound of the furnace in the basement. The tinkling of chimes. 

The smell of coffee would be the perfect compliment. Along with the smell of bacon. And of maple.

I imagine a woman, warm in her pajamas, quietly close to me. Happy.

It's then that it starts to hurt.

It's been a while since I've eaten an English muffin hot from the toaster spread across with Irish butter. 

Let's just dream about that.

A place just off the highway

The first snow fell today taking turns with the rain. Gray skies, wet black roads, bare trees - the perfect backdrop for a depression. We talked about it. About how we're prone to it and about how we manage to cope. Sleep has been my refuge. I tried to make the case that maybe I'm responding to some biological order. Going dormant during a period of plague and madness makes some sense. Seeking treatment makes sense too though, you're right. Everyone's there now, we guess. Depressed. Seeking the cure. 

The state of the world.

That thing in you that takes a pin to every inflated balloon spoke up this morning. Maybe she only bought you that jacket to make you more presentable and a little less embarrassing to be seen with. I told it to shut the hell up. I choose to believe. 

Milepost

All of us together for the first time in a long time. A relaxed day of family. All of us older and seeming to have advanced individually to our next respective developmental stage. This life isn't forever. It's just for a little while.

We had dinner in the barn. The temperature was in the upper forties. My oldest boy was quietly shivering in a sweatshirt. I gave him the blue down jacket you bought me at Eddie Bauer that one winter day we spent in Boston together. You said I needed "a proper jacket." An act of love, I thought to myself and smiled inside. 

I gave that jacket to my son today. It hurt a little bit to let it go. But I let it go. 

Commuter

Although it's long, I enjoy the drive through the countryside to the town in which I work. Tonight there was a bobcat in my headlights on the return near the Quabbin. 

For awhile, I thought I should move out there for convenience and to shorten my work day but I've had second thoughts since then. The townspeople seem entirely white and worried, finicky and entitled. I feel a different sort of distance from them than the sort of distance I feel from the inhabitants of the town I currently sleep in. There's a strange dryness to the place. 

Like most places - maybe all places - they're at their best when you're passing through.

Again

 Then it's suddenly Thanksgiving. I'm never ready for holidays.

Not very far

I make a list for the day. By the time I prepared a meal (for one, which is basically opening a container and pressing a couple of buttons on the microwave), pay the bills, do the laundry, and buy some spiked eggnog for the holiday I want to go back to bed. I'm finishing the last chapter of a book now and distractedly looking at tents on line that can deal effectively with the problem of hypothetical condensation.

No groove at all

Anxiety makes for a lousy bedmate. 

Up and out before dawn to manage a perceived crisis which had grown to the point of involving higher echelons of management and losing all sense of proportion. It resolved itself in a few hours without incident.

A good outcome followed by coffee and a waffle and ham steak in a diner. A boring conservative is talking to his wife. Sour complainer. "Let's go Bran-don," he chants, smiling smugly, seeming to thinking himself part of a club. 

I'm not interested. Almost every time I enter any place these days I immediately regret it and leave as quickly as possible. 

All day there's been that washed out feeling I get when my nights are messed with. There's another one on its way.

Range

I crossed the river tonight, its surface sparkling silver under the light of the rising-golden-warmer-than-it should-be-at-this-time-of-year-full-moon. Fool's moon. I wanted to stop and walk along its bank to feel the evening come quietly down around me. I wanted to, but I didn't, even though I knew it will likely be the last such evening for a long, long, long season. 

Sometimes you're forced to make choices. Sometimes there are no good choices to be made. Like if you made the choice to pee in your travel mug, covertly, sitting in your car on a residential street early in the morning in Holyoke, Massachusetts for example. You might consider that it's hard to maintain your dignity once you've committed to that choice. And you'd likely be right, but you'd also proceed. And then you might find yourself driving out of there, glancing around discretely, regaining just a little bit of class by not dumping the contents of your travel mug until you're a few miles away, by yourself, stopped for a red light at an intersection without a crosswalk so no one's going to have to walk through your business. 

You might also find yourself making a note to yourself not to just rinse the travel mug tonight but to make good use of some hot water and dish soap. 

You might find yourself in a situation like that. You never know. 

Crossroads

We leapt together, from different directions, into a corner booth and a moonlit parking lot. Remind yourself to feel your life.

Incompatible

You sound depressed

Isn't everybody? 

No, I'm not at all depressed

Well, I'm glad to hear that

Not yours, his

He's a Scorpio and starting to read up on his astrology. 

One horoscope predicted that he'd meet his soulmate at the age of 17. That's next year. He's feeling the magnitude of that specificity. I can see the brightness of hope in his face.

My heart tries to break quietly.

Car shamed

I dreamed I was trading in my high-mileage car. As it happens, Nick Cave was there, in the the car lot, at the same time, and he wanted to buy my car. He made the decision without really looking it. The cracked plastic bumpers, front and rear. The two missing hub caps. The pushed in rusted fender. The tree-dented roof. The rejection sticker on the windshield.

I felt compelled to tell him that it sputters and hesitates climbing hills and during acceleration. The floor is covered in dried leaves and pine needles. I have a dirt driveway, I confessed. It hasn't been vacuumed in a year at least. And then I noticed his wife was there too. The beige seats are all stained, I explained. Beige was a bad choice of colors for an interior, even though I didn't have a choice. 

Let me have it detailed first. Let me take it to a mechanic.

Low

Compassion fatigue is a real thing. It's a kind of secondary trauma. A draining of the empathy battery that can result in one no longer being accessible to others. Divorce is a consequence. Estrangement from one's children is too. Dissolving friendships. Isolation. 

Tonight there was a moment - a span of moments - in which every ordinary human sight or sound was sickening. I had this thought again, this place I escape to, of just walking away from it all. Walking and not stopping until I run out of land or no longer can. 

A pilgrimage begins by leaving.

Child proof

A bottle and a half of Tylenol to make a point. Maybe you're right though, maybe now she'll take you seriously.

Kettle

Here's the thing. If you come in and tell a young clinician you intentionally haven't eaten in several days, that your recent medication change has caused you to experience persistent suicidal thoughts, and that yesterday you were planning to write a suicide note, you're probably not going home with your boyfriend. That's how it works. Risk management. It's tricky and far from perfect, this business of suicide prevention. It often means differing opinions, consulting with a psychiatrist who doesn't even see the person, and someone being told they have to do something they don't want to do. Someone often ends up angry. I'm waking up with the leftovers of that mess. Paul and Art are singing, "Blessed are the spat upon, vagabonds, ratted on. Oh Lord, why have you forsaken me?" And as I put the kettle on to heat the water for my caffeine and head toward the shower, Sting promises to send an SOS to the world. On my behalf?

Or is that for someone else? No matter, we'll all need one sooner or later. The sound of the kettle boiling.

Maybe

Up from the dumps at work after a couple of good interviews and close-to-hirings. The work gets easier when there are people willing to do it. It's dark so early now. A one bedroom condo in an old multi-story building in a blighted section of a city a lot closer to work is on my mind. A move might be in order.

Silver

They talk a lot about the full moon and the timing of government checks, but after many years of doing this I still can't predict with any reliability when they will come out and when they will stay put. 

Last night, I'd anticipated a busy one so positioned myself in a hotel parking lot not far from the hospital. I spent nine hours of an eight hour shift inside an insulated sweatshirt underneath a poncho liner drifting in and out of sleep reclined in my driver's seat. The river fog moved in and a hard frost silvered every surface. Twenty-five degrees. I started the car periodically, ran the heat, and played the radio. It was a local college station without a DJ, just someone's play list without interruption. Most every song was one I'd never heard before and the hotel parking looked stilled and filled with cars featuring license plates from other states making me remember, not very long ago, living in hotels and eating on an expense account. I felt some variety of loneliness there with the memories of those people and places now relegated to the past. No one came to the hospital in need of what I do. 

In the morning, I stopped into a diner on my way home. A young father - big as a bull - his slight wife and their three small children. He snarled at the little girl for unintentionally making contact with her plate of scrambled eggs with the sleeve of her coat. She goes still, stares, her body rigid. My own body knows that feeling, remembers, hates. I pay and leave. 

When it's time to go, there are many things so often repeated that I will be smiling wide to escape. The things I'll have trouble letting go of will be the things I never really knew.

Twenty percent down

 In my dream, your daughter and I had become friends. She had grown since the las time I'd seen her sitting in a shopping cart. She had an easy natural smile that warmed and lifted me. We were outside looking at a piece of property. A small house with a couple of out buildings. One had a chicken wire enclosure beside it. I imagined raising chickens again. We were both happy at the thought of becoming neighbors.

The horror you read about in your twenties

What a horror Zoom is. This is the first time I've ever spent three consecutive days being distracted by the presence of my own face while trying to pay attention to others. 

You're a weird one for certain. 

What kind of expression is that on your face? What the hell is going on with your hairline? When did the pepper leave for good? You don't really have eyebrows. The circles under your eyes and those lines make you look sick. Are you sick? Your color sucks. Your teeth aren't anything close to white either. The shape of your face has changed - for the worse. Remember when it had features? 

You're a case study in entropy.

Bust

Worked from home today - the first of 3 days of training on Zoom - while the whole world seems to be gathering in their local ERs. I'm being asked for an accounting but am not there to know. Stay home. No one there wants you to come, believe me. The helpers have grown helpless. There is nowhere to send you. Everything is at capacity and beyond.