Daffodils

A friend tells me, “I think you’re one breakdown away from trying stand-up.” I laugh. I am one break away from infinity. Another friend left the city, and I was upset they didn’t text me more. Turned out they were busy with intensive outpatient mental health treatment. I spent last fall on the phone with social workers and a med student assigned to my brother’s case. “We’re trying to get a sense of his baseline,” they said. Not this, I told them, but not far: charming, confident, impulsive, a lightning strike. I hear he is cooperative, he is trying to help the nurses, they’re releasing him, he is so funny, he’s handsome. The second time I call a crisis team to find him, they need to know what he is wearing. He is so funny, he’s handsome, I beg. My father won’t stop calling. My mother won’t come back from the dead. But: when I was small, she put a foam pad under my knees in the back garden and showed me how to deadhead daffodils. The daffodils will light Prospect Park again soon. I’ve seen five bald eagles since November, and piping plovers and dolphins at Jacob Riis Beach last summer. Maybe we will all make it back this year. Maybe this year I will see something else for the very first time. I am one miracle away from infinity.