Crusted, Driven

There is a lighthouse at the end of Cape Horn, and its southeast side is flaky with crusted, driven snow. The lighthouse is not you.

The town of Ushuaia is paralyzed by ice in mid-August. The nights drag out for sixteen hours, and my days are compressed. The mountains pin the streets to the ice-ridden bay, seem ready to fall, but never do. Rock and snow, ice and the darkness—I’m not this town, though I can’t imagine leaving it.

There are innumerable ends to a rounded planet. One, for us, was a hotel room in Puerto Rico. Another at a beach bar on Koh Samet. Your father’s apartment on the Upper East Side. Calle Escudieri. An empty hospital bed. This e-mail, a string of ones and zeros, something, then nothing—a placeholder. This is just a placeholder, saving a spot for you.

If you’re dead, I forgive you. If you’re alive and you haven’t written, I hate you, but maybe the ice that arrests us is only a matter of geography, the season we’re in.