Wednesday, May 1, 2024

May

Just before sun set, I left the office and got on a bike at Hoyt Street. Turn right on Sackett, cross Smith and the little incline up Boerum Hill, before it's all downhill all the way home. Riding west, the deep, low apricot beam of a sun hangs right beneath the treelined archway. There's a cool breeze in the air, there's the end of a work day on the breeze, my limbs ache with movement, with life, it is May now, and all the things that are to come lie here before us. 

Are you ready for the things to come?

They are here for the taking. 

So take them.

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Troponin

Your father has been having chest pains, she says across the line, her normally stoic voice tinged with just a quiver of concern. It's a conversation no one wants to be having, but the acknowledgment that it might be time to go to the country clinic passes over it like a relief. By evening, they've sent him to the big hospital in the other valley, he sends pictures of snowy mountain views but every message is an exercise in carrying hope. You find yourself distracted at every turn, a gnawing sense of unease in the periphery. Your mother eyes her ticket to New York and you both tread quietly around what you already know. 

Life waxes and wanes across your to do list. This is how it is meant to be. You, yourself, wax and wane across the plans you had for yourself, after all. 

We are but leaves in the wind.

Thursday, April 25, 2024

Wash Away

There’s a turn in the path, just before you reach the esplanade, full of concrete and crooked branches, a moment of silent nothing, belying the magic that lies beyond. A few more steps, a deep breath, a turn, and the world explodes in a sea of pink blossoms, of birdsong and light steps across green grass. Every year you think you’ve seen it before, and every year you are proven wrong. You’ve never seen anything like this before. 

You’ve never felt alive like this before. 

Spring rails into every cell of your being, bursts like mini grapes, like champagne bubbles in your blood stream. You think maybe this life is worth living, you think maybe this life is worth making the most of, you are ready to decide what that entails and to do it. You are ready to hit the town, hit the road, spring forward straight into space, May lies around the corner and you can feel it in your bones. 

If you were looking for a ride, now might be a good time to speak up. 

If you were looking for a ride, now might be a good time to set fire to your hopes. 

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

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.

Friday, April 19, 2024

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.

Thursday, April 18, 2024

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?