Ellis Island

So many doors, so many mazes to get where you are going. You wait for longer than you thought you would before you are led into the little room. It all happens so fast you barely have time to be scared anymore. When it’s over, she smiles and says it all went so well and you breathe a sigh of relief until she says But I cannot make a decision right now. In 1999 you drove too fast and there’s no way to prove that that’s all it was. 

Back outside all the doors, in the cold winter wind, a cop says I see you smilin all the way up the block, and you don’t know if you should tell him all tha passed in the moments before you met him. 

Life is strange, and long, and short all at once. One step at a time. A friend calls and asks if you’ll meet for lunch. Says we’ll go somewhere with strong drinks. At the end of the day, your pockets are full of gifts. 

Snap

I'm deep in shivasana when I hear it. Slow breaths, muscles settling and letting go of the day, a peaceful winding down to sleep. Silence. 

And then, for just a second, a sharp sound not afforded the padding of traveling in through the windows. Something from within the walls. Just that quick snap, nothing else, no lingering sensation. Something was here, now it is not. 

I close out my reverie, gather my being inside my body again. Walk to the kitchen, unthinking. 

In the corner of the room, in the little gap between the kitchen counter and the crooked wall, a mouse trap lies sideways, released. The trespasser perfectly captured in a square, its soft body draped across the pad, eyes wide, pleading, its long tail still. A New Yorker is forever at war with the mouse, but it is no less of a life, no less of a heartache to witness the results of battle. The death quiets me. 

As it should. 

Cygnes

A quiet day passes. Not even the mouses stirs, and you wonder what else you should be doing. The appointment in the calendar continues to wave its flags in your direction, you weave around it like a cat on a hot tin roof, never not aware it's there. 

The story begins to fall apart at your fingertips, you question your abilities, the youth in your veins. It's been too many years since everything seemed possible. 

You've reached a point where all you aim to do is 
survive. 

Slush

A page turns in the almanac, a new month, a step closer to spring. The snow recedes from the flower pot on the fire escape, the small body of a dead mouse resurfacing, reminding itself to you. Life is so frail, so fleeting, when you see it on the other side. Death doesn't scare you so much as soften you. There's a gift in there, perhaps, but it is hard to look directly at it. 

The week ahead intimidates you. There's a date in the calendar, an appointment in the books, and you cannot look away from it, cannot distract yourself with tasks closer at hand. There may be no way around it. The only way out is through. 

You were raised to know right from wrong, and to do the right. That doesn't go away just because the woods get dark. You were raised in the woods, raised to know there was always a way out. You see a new year open up before you, see opportunity and potential in the paperweights of the world, see the sheets of paper unravel and fly around you. There's a surrealist air to the brush strokes, a Daliesque quality to your tumble down the rabbit hole. All your best stories were written in madness, in wonder. Why should this year be any different? 

The remaining mouse scampers across the kitchen floor while you sleep. 

If you didn't know better, you'd think he was inviting you along.  

Chill

The mornings were never for storytelling, you let yourself admit, albeit reluctantly. Your mind was never able to wander like it needs to, you're not sure why you keep banging your head against this Lutheran wall. You try to eke out a few words but they fall flat. In the evening, you chase another mouse across the floor, despair turns to murderous rage and when the deed is done you crumple into yourself. 

Cannot imagine what it would take to do this to another human. 

The neighborhood remains snowed in, piles of white gathering an icy sheen, it's impossible to traverse the obstacles at the end of each block. The ice thickens in the Buttermilk Channel, the air tingles with deep winter, but the sun beams down on your pale skin like a homing beacon, like it's telling you it's still here. Your cousin sends reels from her favorite restaurant a few stops up on the ferry, says What I wouldn't give to see you there. Sometimes you are reminded, 

everything you ever wanted
is here.  

Run and Run

For a day, I am confined to bed. Every step on the creaking wood floor sets off a vertigo without explanation, it owns your body and you've nothing to do but relent. There's some sort of lesson in there, but you are too far gone to read it. 

The day after illness is always a gift. Bright sunshine beams down the east-facing streets of Brooklyn, ice floes lapping the little beach at the edge of the neighborhood. I take every step in full pleasure, indulging in the way the light charges my skin, the way the cool air soothes my brow, the way a body was meant to stretch and exert. The gift lies in renewed potential, in the feeling of blank slates and white pages. It is not lost on you. 

The sun shines, the world begins. 

You may as well do
the same. 

Monday Bar

Stepping it out in Manhattan, I am reminded at once how the storms look different in the city, all narrow canyons of footsteps cutting through the sidewalk fortifications, all slushy, brown rivers and impatient walkers, all grit in the face of adversity. A man tries to unbury his car on Houston, a monumental task three days in the making, at least. 

The hardware stores are all out of shovels. My car will have to wait until the spring. 

I make my way to the writing bar, and the bartender beams at my arrival. No one else has made it out yet. We spend an hour weaving around the stories of the last week, a routine that took years to build and which you never want to let go. This is how you build New York. Borrow a cup of sugar. Help an old lady across the street. Build a living room in a bar down the street. This is how you build yourself into New York. 

You've done so many things wrong,
it feels like,

But at least this one time you did something 
right.