Dog that I am, I am missing the smells, pent up, pacing. There's Dmitri smoking on the roof, I have not seen him in a while. Everyone seems to have gone to ground. The cold weather and the cold I have been harboring in my sludgy lungs have kept me artificially stilled and now I am ready to chew off my own paw.

Somewhere on my run is a bakery and sometimes the air smells like bread and sometimes the sick sweet of cookies. If I kick the detritus at this curb I might get the rank smell of rotting ginko fruit, foul but evocative of a walk I took down a side street once that marked me indelibly. Here is where the Parks Department mulches each winter, ground up Christmas trees breathing and sighing their pungent last ghosts.

I am missing it, missing it terribly, the nighttime raids of distance, of blurry speed, of drawing this world into my lungs and streaming it out clean.


(this blasted system is not letting me log in except for sporadically. so when it surprises me and does so, I am slapping up any old or not old thing I have on hand. I apologize for the lack of quality control and consistency. feh.)