The dark days of winter come and go and she finds, miraculously, that she’s unbroken.

Fragmented perhaps. Splintered definitely. But still so relatively intact that it makes her happy.

Like waking from a bad dream and realizing her real life is still there, waiting to be led zigzag  on a leash, like a suckling, milky-eyed puppy.

“Let’s get you outside,” she says, rising.

Stretching her limbs and feeling in them life.

Which is how she finds herself in a sunny park downtown, with her gorgeous son and her perhaps recovering drug-addled ex.

He’s tortured and trying, but not her responsibility.

Today or ever.

Fact is, it’s shocking anymore, how little investment she makes in anything save beauty and risk.

Even to where she wonders how her lessons were once unlearned.

The lightest breeze lifts her hair, blows her skirt against her legs.

She lets it.

Before walking the kite down a long grassy corridor, her son and old friend unwinding its lead and heading the opposite direction.

“Delilah, now!” they scream, and she slowly pivots and lifts the wide silk triangle high above her head, standing on tiptoes even, before feeling the pull of letting go.

The kite lifts, dips and dances in the current, elevates further.

The joyful boys in the distance triumphant in directing its path of freedom.

~