02/01/2026
Eastern North Carolina, I came to you like a man shedding a heavy coat, believing I had finally outrun the long white hand of New England, and yet you met me with snow. Why? I traded granite winters for marsh air and slow rivers, for earth that stays open and forgiving, and you answered with the same cold confession I thought I’d left behind. The flakes fell thin and unsure, but they were enough to reopen an old fatigue, enough to remind me how far I had dragged myself to be done with them. I did not come here to measure life in inches of silence or scrape mornings from a windshield of ice; I came to forget that discipline, that endless endurance. And so I stand, watching the snow mount, feeling foolish for my hope and stranger still for my disappointment—lost between the place that hardened me and the place that promised, briefly and falsely, to let me rest.
