I ljus och i mörker

The overflowing flower bouquets in your apartment start to wilt, start to come down from the novelty of celebration. A cluster of balloons drifts along the floorboards. There's symbolism here, but it would be too on the nose to point it out. You start to pack your things instead, start to prepare for another life. 

As you tend to do. 

You've never found a more satisfying solution to the dust bunnies than to pack it all up and leave. Never found a more cleansing process than saying goodbyes. You see how it brews in you like an illness, a boiling pot in need of release. In your quieter moments you look for ways to fix it. 

But in May you only look to open the door. 

 

Arrange

The to do list swells and devours your sanity, you're a balloon of anxiety, you get nothing done. Approach the tasks gently: one by one. Meander through the delightful streets of Brooklyn Heights to get a passport picture. A first in a sea of firsts. You don't know how to get work done when the sun beams in this particular way. 

Anyway, after that, you feel better. Anxiety bucks and weaves. 

But you know the high from checking something off the list. 

Know the value of a ticket in your pocket. 

And all the things that were to come
were too wodnerful not to tell.  

Oh, Shenandoah

Stand in a large courtroom, right hand held high, a small flag in your left. Hear jumbled words fall softly off your lips, in tandem with 157 other newly minted members of the Great Experiment. A judge stands at the front of the room, telling you what it is to be an immigrant, telling you how this country was built by your kind, and when he says congratulations, he means it. 

When you walk out of the courtroom, you let out a breath you've held for 33 years. 

Later that night, wrapped in novelty flags and the love of those who've carried you here, with the bartender announcing your feat to the room and playing Neil Young in your honor, you get one brief moment where everything is suspended in mid air. Nothing needs doing, nothing needs fixing or dissecting. For a brief moment over PBRs and nacho cheese and whimsy, you are only in the moment and nowhere else. 

America, you have given me all
and now I'm nothing.  

America two dollars and twentyseven cents

We've come a long way together, you and I. 

Where will we go,
next? 

Start Over

Each morning a reset, like you get a second chance a thousand times over and maybe this time you'll get it right. A voice in the back of your mind says if you haven't so far, why would you now? but your optimism is relentless. Surely you've done a few things better the second time around. Surely you are still redeemable. 

Around you, your friends are changing the world. Saving lives. Improving the future. Raising their families. While you wake on an air mattress in someone else's home and only buy food on discount. Something's gone sideways and you don't actually quite know what. 

Two days until you're a new person on paper. 

You wonder if that's the reset to set you straight.  

I'll Just Pretend

It's typical, I fear. 

All day you are a ball of nerves, a countdown that's started too early, a tangle of trauma catching up to you in vulnerable moments. You see the ties you fought so hard to connect to yourself dissolve at the slightest tug, but the rules you make aren't fair, you're creating trick questions in your mind without reading them out loud. 

Your storage company writes to say they're raising your prices again. The sky feels full of signs, you spend so much of your time swatting them away.  

You take a few deep breaths. Let yourself think the unthinkable thoughts. Let yourself cry in the corner of your storage unit where the cameras don't reach. Spend a sunny evening looking for four-leaf clovers and coming up short. 

Still, sometimes the looking alone does the trick. Sometimes stepping outside the ticking clocks for just a moment is enough to set your sight straight again. 

Down by the Water

The bartender can't be more than 25. She wasn't even alive to see the 90s, you hear your internal monologue say, as she plays Imogen Heap and you realize it's like you playing 70s music in your youth and dipping into history. 

But you remember hearing this song on the alternative radio stations before you were barely a teen, feeling like you'd unlocked secrets of the world beyond, like you knew a darkness now that you couldn't have known if you were just a child. You remember a temporary home, at the end of a long corridor, and how sparse your existence that you never questioned. It occurs to you (again! again!) that everyone lives an entire life like this, with details piled upon details, years and decades of their own experiences. Does everyone think so much about the things they've seen?

It doesn't matter. 

You can only play the cards you were dealt.  

Distract

Some days, you arrive at the bar sheveled, a mess of thorns and distractions, some days you're a single focus laser from the moment you sit down. For a person who doesn't like a casino you sure will take the gamble every time. 

Today, you arrived with your head lost to someone else's shoulders, forgotten on the 6 train heading north, every thought is drifting without arriving anywhere, and you have so many places you need to be arriving now. There are so many stops on your route, so many deliveries to be made. You haven't the time to dawdle. 

It occurs to you that maybe not everyone lives their lives forever about to go somewhere else.  

They read your manuscript and tell you there's something there. You wish you knew how to revel in that thought, because it looks delicious from afar. In the end, though, all there is is returning to the page, carrying on. This isn't the life you choose if you want to finish. 

It's not the path if you ever want to think you are 
done.