please connect this call

Dear K-

I don’t. The days get bleaker and I get more bitter and weathered with every exposure to the winter wind. I’m faded, resting pale against a pastel landscape. I miss the sun, the summer air and the summer cares. Deep in my bones I know it will someday come again, but for the moment I ache for relief. Hours stretch into days and days into weeks, and eventually I will be old and remember all the winter days I wasted in anticipation of spring. And perhaps I will regret.

It’s funny how little things can throw off your balance. I’m a creature of routine, and I rely on stability and repetition. Something as simple as having to shift which wrist I wear my watch upon due to the bruises left by an IV needle is enough to set me off-kilter for the entire day. I look to my wrist for a sense of temporal bearings and instead I find a sickly green and grey bruise with a tiny purple pinprick at its center. My stomach lurches, I quickly glance at the watch on my opposite limb, but already I have been knocked out of step and I’m stumbling to find my rhythm. I fumble with some paperwork, drop my pen, forget to smile to a patient. My mind is still thinking about the bruises.
I don’t adapt well to change. I hate transitional periods. Lately, I’ve been feeling like this entire year is a transition, and it makes me sick.

I’m going back abroad in the summer. I plan to see Brno again…the city I loved but couldn’t have, although in all fairness I had every opportunity to take it back. I’m both eager to see it and frightened. What if it’s not as beautiful as I remember? Will I still be content to stroll its streets and admire my surroundings, or will I find it more faded and dreary than my crisp, beautiful memories? But what if I find it even lovelier than in my dreams? What if I break my heart all over again and throw my life to ruin just in order to return to its embrace? What emotion will I feel when I smell the brewery? Taste the halusky, drink a beer, amble through the Tesco, hear the fluid river of native Czech language spewing from a citizen’s mouth?

Don’t worry. It’s not a one-way ticket, and I’m being accompanied by a lover who aims to keep me settled in America at all costs. He’ll bring me back. He’s part of the reason, whether he’d like me to admit it or not, that I stayed in America in the first place. He was one tether that I couldn’t shake loose.

Be cheerful to compensate for my persistent gloominess.

-K