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My darling friend and dearest neighbor in my apartment building is Anna Ross, she of the Upper Garden District Ross’s, here having coffee at my place about this time last year. We’d both been fighting back at our cancers together, yet so very alone. That is truly the case since each individuals battle is unique, no matter how much support you have around you. This morning at 6:36AM, my Anna slipped away from the rest of this maddening crowd. Heather, her only child and I were there to send her off. Away from the pain and the indignation. The pain of cancer and it’s treatments you get used to. It’s the indignation that brings the hopelessness and embarrassment that there’s no medication for. So here I sit, alone now back in my apartment. I’ll be able to make that resolution again in a few days to continue to remain cancer free for 2019. Anna nearly kept hers with me this year. She won’t be here at my top floor apartment windows to giggle, oooh and awe like the perennial kids we are. We’d look out over the Big Bend of the Mississippi River at every New Years fireworks display since I moved in next door to her. Their distant explosions are muffled through floor to ceiling, century old thick wavering glass and their glittering, cascading glow is smeared across the tops of all the ancient and imperfect slate roof tiles of the French Quarter in a softened, moving pallet of dampened, muted radiant reflections.

I’ll be standing there though.

Watching the wheels.

For the both of us.

For all of us.