The Sea Between Us

Clear Boot Diptych. Becky Kolsrud, 2017.

Good morning, I slept with my bedroom window open last night and woke bathed in all the fresh, peachy air of mid-spring. Grace and I have our coffees now and are settled back in bed, listening to the occasional car cruising below as if it were an ocean wave, mingling with Coltrane’s Sentimental Mood pouring out of the speakers. It’s beautiful in the way so many Brooklyn My Brooklyn mornings have been in my 40s, and if it were an ordinary day, in a second I’d hear the crash of the coffee shop next door opening its store front. Would smell their croissants coming out of the oven and know that in a few minutes I’d pull on a velvet bathrobe and (of course) red lipstick to pad downstairs to their cries of PICCIONE PICCIONE as I’d settle into the front booth with a second coffee and something freshly baked. Would bat my lashes, trade complinsults, feel that glow of uncomplicated human companionship that I so prefer to someone regularly in my bed, snoring and stealing the covers and infusing my unconscious with their uneasy dreams (an occupational hazard of being an intuitive). All that easy city love is still right outside my window. I feel it. I know it. I just can’t touch it. For now it’s encased behind glass, preserved in an era that could just as easily be 40 years rather than 40 days ago. O most bittersweet of springs.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy