Starlight

In the space within your rib cage where your lungs normally reside, in the space within your schedule where most days you have panic and scramble, for one evening you make room for words, your little stories. Time becomes irrelevant in the little wood-paneled living room, they write to say, stay as long as you would like, and you wonder what you would like. At the coffee shop, neighbors and strangers speak with each other like they're in a tiny village in the woods, not a great beast of a world metropolis. It warms you. Outside, a cool wind blows the cherry blossoms across the street. 

You long for nothing, yet you long for everything. The world lies vast and possible beyond your door, your door, but it lies vast and impossible inside your ribs as well, it is an equation you have never been able to calculate successfully. One seems to take too much from the other. 

Both give more
than you could ever have hoped.

Revel

How the days rush beneath your calloused hands, they wax and wane to no end and you are powerless to stop their passing. And yet, would you stop them if you could? Is it not like damming the river, like trying to hold the spring flood? One cannot step in the same river twice, but all that means is what a delight it is to step in as many rivers as you simply ever can. You spread your fingers and watch the clear water trickle over your fingers. 

An early morning run, Red Hook is empty save for the dog walkers in Valentino Park. You flail along the water, your muscles still sleeping and your head elsewhere. Brooklyn rises in spring blooms, your life rises in colorful petals and deep breaths in your lungs the kind that lift you off the ground.

Life is finite, you have but this one.
You do what you will with it, of course.
But it seems wisest just to live it, after all.

There may come a day, when you won't regret it, and that day is worth all the wait.

Apply

The house sitting website unfolds itself before you, one delectable life after another serving itself up for perusal, for consideration, for you to think, Do I want to play pretend here for a while?, and all the options are limitless. You make a profile, paint yourself in all the desirable colors, you know how to angle your illnesses so they look like just the thing someone else was looking for.

This much mental damage deserves some sort of benefit, you think. 

You're losing too much hair lately, your body is too restless when you wake, it knows May is coming and it will be time to leave again. May was always the time for running, it's in your bones. You sit in a coffee shop and breathe in a Friday afternoon in Brooklyn, wonder what else you could be doing with your lungs.

The road calls you again. 

You're starting to think there is no cure for what ails you.

Dock

You wake to the sound of cars in the rain, to the soft sense of a world muted. In your kitchen window, a cruise ship covers the Manhattan skyline, and you think how great it must be to board a boat on a rainy, gray morning and know that soon you will be where the palm trees are. You make coffee and return to the wood-paneled living room, sit and write in the silence, willing yourself to ignore the deadlines that loom on your own horizon. Outside your window, the trees are popping their sticky green popcorn kernels into existence.

The budding trees are a precursor to May, and May is a reminder of the Road. Your whole life, spring has been the time to run, to burst forth like those sticky buds and explode like a million tiny sparks of glitter across the continent, has been the time to put everything you own away – things and people alike – and be light as a feather. This gift is not lost on you, nor how it may look like a Madness, depending on your angle. 

And what choice do we have, but to unwrap the gifts we've been given,
see what lies in the unknown beyond?

Waterways

The early evening sun hangs low like an august sigh, something in the air smells just like summer breaks of your childhood, you weave through the docks to reach a ferry landing and everything breathes in you like life is ongoing, unbothered. Cross the water in just a few minutes, upended on Manhattan shores like you haven't moved to the ends of the earth, you ride a quick bike through Chinatown, the route so familiar you'd forgotten to miss it. Find her in a small nook of a bar in the east village, heady with unscented perfume and thick drapes, think, this would be a perfect date bar if dates were something you entertained anymore, and the bartender walks you through their elaborate cocktails like he's never been hurried. 

By the end of the night, trying to make my way back in the maze of Brooklyn subway suspensions, eventually I walk back under the BQE, smoking a cigarette that followed me from Africa. On a stoop, I find a bright red bicycle helmet, and I'm not too drunk to see a sign when it appears. I bring it home. 

There are moments when I wonder why I continue this exhausting living, when I wonder why everyone carries on for decades and decades like they do, why we do not simply return to the ground from which we came. But then there'll be a soft summer evening on a ferry in the East River, a golden sun spreading across the Brooklyn bricks, and you'll take a deep breath and feel perfectly at peace, and that moment

That moment keeps you carrying on another
day.

CHS

By the time checkout arrives, the great rains have piled in over the coastline. You can imagine 18th century hurricanes drowning colonizing entrepreneurs, making their money off the backs of shackled humans and thriving off their own daring leaps into the world. The histories of the one doesn't exist without the other, and it is a legacy the sweltering peninsula has yet to reckon with. 

The drive to the airport is a dive in the ocean, you know the delay will catch you well before it appears on your screen. The stereo system plays Here comes the rain again and you wonder if it's on purpose or simply cruel irony. And while all you want is to return home, to sit quietly in the crooked apartment at the very edge of Brooklyn and watch the sun set over Manhattan, pacing an airport brings you just as much peace. It may take a lifetime to build a home, but once you get there, it remains with you. 

The desert calls you again, the road. Your suitcase is full of new itineraries, your head is full of dreams. This town broke you once, 

but you have yet to be broken.

Ghost Tour

In Charleston, slavery lies thick like an August afternoon across the streets. You know this town, you have seen it before. When you think of it now, all you remember is how it was the beginning to the end of a great love. You know this is not the city's fault, but your heart has not forgiven. He leads you through cemeteries and speaks of boo hags, but the only thing that catches you are mosquitos and the great exhaustion. You wrap yourself in a robe and fall asleep like you didn't have an alarm set for before dawn. 

Ghost is a relative term,
it's no more - and no less -
than what your mind makes it.