The rain hangs over the city like a threat that cannot quite commit. You get a reservation to an impossible restaurant, the last few hours trickle away and you wonder if you made the most of it, if you let something precious slip away. There was a time in this city when you thought maybe you could have everything, and the loss claws at your insides, but everything circles back when you live at the center of gravity. Good things are coming back.
You will be ready when they do.
You hit the FDR at the very beginning inklings of rush hour traffic, a slow meander up the East River, a burgeoning irritation, a two-mile-an-hour crawl through the Bronx, but once you hit the Taconic, it's all winding roads and happy dances until cocktail hour. The dog greets you, their smiles greet you, the upstate is rainy and cold but yawns itself into sunshine by morning. You walk around barefoot, trying to grasp if grass under the soles of your feet can set something straight which has been crooked.
There's a quiet peace which settles when you are out of your illnesses. A gentle acceptance and ability to breathe through the neighborhoods, a lightness. You wonder if people live their entire lives like this, but it's best not to think of it too long. A chef in Cold Spring says come stay for the month in August, and you start to pack your bags at the drop of a dime.
Returning from illness is a reminder of all the things you could have been doing but haven't. It carries also the seed that there is time yet to do them. This is grace.
The rest, it turns out, is up to you.
You wake early, again, again, your spirit light, your mornings an exercise in hope. Get more done before nine than January you did in a day. You do not resent her, do not consider yourself above. There's a magnanimity that appears when your disease wastes away, a generosity of the heart that you miss when it is gone.You know the illness is a part of you, but this, this sunshine soul,feels like stepping into.a box that was tailor-made to fit your shape. This feels like everything aligned just so, stacking the rings of your wind pipe so that you can breathe again, as if for the first time in months.
You waste no time in catching yourself up.
New York beckons outside your window, summer beckons outside your window, at JFK airport a gate prepares to deliver your most precious cargo, I'm saving you a seat at our favorite restaurant, you know the one in the West Village with the tables squeezed so tightly together you weave your stories into the ones of the couple next to you, I''ll ask them to chill the wine for you, I'll ask them to make room for any tales you want to tell. Summer is ours now, New York and life. I took so long to get here I nearly forgot the way.
But all roads lead home,
if you let them.
The rain does one last lap around the bay, hides the highrises from the world in a drape of gray stuffing, washes the dusky streets in a cold wind. By morning, it's all gone. Blue sky the kind that pierces your eye, sunlight kissing your skin, the hope of the world again. The hours while away and you don't know how it happens, but you no longer have access to the darkness that would have you worry about it.
The space it left behind has been filled with lilac scent and whimsy.
I stuff my bags full, laugh as it spills over onto to the streets, into the arms of people I meet, over the words and creations I try so hard to bring to life. Little darling, it's been a long, cold, lonely winter.
But you are here now,
and that has made all
the difference.
The rain lingers, cools the air to a chill, hampers your forward motion and you don't know which direction to aim it now. Work simmers around you like an ocean full of crabs, you are reluctant to go in even though you know you can swim once you commit. The itch to write reappears along the inside of your skin, all it took was a whiff of smelling salts to emerge from its hibernation, all it needed was one long evening with no sunset. She packs her bags, prepares arrival. You cannot step in the same river twice, and this town has molted a thousand times since last she saw it, but no matter.
The butterfly always carries a part of its caterpillar life into its new reality, despite the metamorphosis, despite the turned page and new eyes.
Even when nothing about it looks the same,
it turns out,
the memories remain.
Trudge to the bathroom in the early morning, eyes grumbled and vision short, come out to realize a giant cruise ship fills the whole kithen window. A Monday morning cruise ship, all off schedule, everything is Wacky Wednesday, you revel in recognition, in how much you loved whimsy in your youth. How do we reclaim such joy in our adult years?
Emerging from the depths to remember what it is to want to feel joy is a gift, when you've spent so many months forgetting. You reapply your lipstick, feel the color return to your cheeks. What harm can rain do, when you can create light on your own. The little girl waits at the edge of the cursor, patient but eager, she wants the rest of her story now, wants you to tie her question marks together, to carry her across a finish line that is really only the doorway to somewhere else.
I want the same, my dear, I do. Let me gather my strength, let me collect my things. I've fallen apart across the floorboards but it doesn't matter now.
All that matters
is that we get you
home.
The rain arrives, cooling the steaming streets, calming your labored breaths. You wear lipstick to remind yourself that you are alive, brush your hair and look at the cars on the sidewalk, how no one sits in them during street sweeping hours like we used to in the East Village. Life is easier in the country, even if the country is only across the river. You find yourself wondering if the hard was what made you better. You've grown soft, now, all velvet skin and voluptuous curves when all you ever wanted were angles.
The streetsweeper doesn't show, anyway, rainy days mean perhaps the storm drains take care of the work for you. I've brought the geraniums in from the fire escape, their delicate petals shielded from the world. Soft. But soft with longer lifespans. There was a time when I used to tell stories of death and destruction but all I'm left with is children's literature, and with children you have to offer hope if you take something away.
No winter without spring, no death without new life, no sorrow without a hard-won joy.
They say we try to give ourselves the childhoods we ourselves did not have. You always were one for delivering your messages on the nose, but this seems a little obscene even for you. Look at your manuscript, turn it over in your hand.
See what kind of answers you are trying to give yourself.
