Rip Tide

My body collapses, my steps slow and I fall onto the sand. It's time for a break. But then I turn around, I see the sea rolling to shore, turquoise waves crashing one by one into white froth at the water's edge, and I cannot help myself: I am pulled back in. I dive quickly into approaching waves, swimming feverishly out, out to where the big swells are. I try to stand but the current is strong, it pulls me to the side and I fight it, fight it, until I simply let go and am swept away. Far away I spot it: the next big wave. I wait for it, gauge where it will crest, position my body just right, until I feel that familiar tug backwards, leap in, and surf all the way to shore in one long, overwhelmingly powerful roll. I immediately dive back out, let my body float across green and blue waters until the moment is right again.

Hours pass, I am oblivious to their steady gait. Nothing is relevant but the next wave, the next dive, the feeling of cool Pacific water against my skin. When we leave the beach, I stare at it from the house and long for it, immediately. Much later, I still feel the push and pull of the ocean on my body. Every breath a roll of the tide.

I am lost to sea. I am found.

Australia

A hundred million miles and suddenly only a few feet away. We stepped out into the Sydney air and in an instant I was transformed. Gone were the countless hours of travel, dragging my heavy bag through post-blizzard New York snow, anxious pacing of terminals and restless sleep on cramped seats. Gone were winter stress and Real Life sorrows. All is forgiven, I thought, as the sweltering air of Australia hit me straight in the face.

The feeling of recognition comes back in steps. The humid air like velvet on your skin. The incessant songs of cicadas. I rolled down my window and the scent of eucalyptus flooded my senses. My tongue contorted to form sounds of another language, trying words out quietly in the backseat as we drove past signs and familiar objects. The sand squeaked between my toes and I couldn’t help myself, I left the others and ran the last 50 yards to the water, letting the Pacific wash over my feet like long-lost friends reuniting at the airport exit. Hello, again. I’ve missed you. The beach stretched out for miles in either direction, with a few scattered fishermen still strewn across the late afternoon sunlight, but mostly the place was empty. I giggled the entire time. Finally finding my favorite flower and realizing that it smells just as overwhelmingly comforting as every time before; I breathe it in in deep hits, as though trying to consume it entirely and I cannot get enough.

Australia brings out the very happiest child within me. Immediately, I forget my qualms, my concerns, and my insecurities. The world and its people fade away, and left is only my body, my quivering heart, and this land. I absorb every flavor, every scent, every scene of the landscape that envelopes me. I laugh with reckless abandon and stare at every leaf as though it were an entire new world for me to discover, exploring with innocent curiosity every possibility presented. We go for a morning swim and I cannot get myself to leave the water, straining against the mighty currents only to let myself be swept away a second later, but unable to leave when time is up.

What if we return and are disappointed?, my mother said a few days before we left. With expectations so high, it was a fair query. But as I lie in bed, staring at a million unknown stars with the heavy air draped around me, I am already plotting my future here. How every trip is a blank slate. How every trip is a new life, in the making.

Nerves

The night before, and I feel like a child awaiting her birthday. I am exhausted but too jittery to lie down. I run around the apartment doing meaningless things with my time, instead of, for instance, packing. My bag lies there, half-filled, taking up the entire floor space and begging for attention. I am aware I will find myself across the world with too many skirts and not enough underwear. It doesn't faze me.

A vicious storm raged across New York, and all exits are sealed. My departure lies in shivers of uncertainty; I cling to scraps of hope. If only I can make it across the water, it will all be okay.

The thought is comforting. It is the way my body leans. If only I can make it across the horizon, I will be washed clean, I will be born again. The secret to life lies in always having another ticket in your back pocket. Nothing really changes, butI believe it just as fervently every time.

I set my alarm. My body itches. The horizon beckons. I am ready to go.

Stirring

Orphan puppy is restless as she watches me put my boots on, my jacket. I gather the bags of trash, find my keys, and she looks at me with those giant, sad eyes, until she realizes that she's going with me, and she begins to tremble that excited shake of hers.

We step out onto Morton Street. Christmas Day, and all the world is quiet. I have never seen the street so still; it's an eerie silence. Orphan puppy is delighted with the fresh air and trots down the sidewalk unnaffected. Later, she lies alongside my leg, all sugarplum visions and deep breaths, while my mind tries to remember a story worth telling.

December has been one long dry spell, without words, without a single spark. Christmas rolls around, social tinsel and work line my every day with soft cotton that numbs my senses, and nothing is contorted enough to write about. Everything just is. Perhaps it's a welcome break. Perhaps I should be alarmed.

The bigger questions will not be away for long. Some nights I enjoy the stillness of their absence, but mostly I itch for their return.

I am not me, without them.

In a Whirl

It's been such a year. (It's been such a life.) There is no wrapping one's head around, there is no making sense of the madness or becoming aware of the Bigness of it all.

These are our lives. You may believe you will have another, an infinity, an energy, a soul, and that this life only prepares you for the wonders of what is to come. I, however, believe in no such hopeful future. I believe in cells, and mulch, in carbon dioxide and earth. I believe that we have this one life, this one moment of existence, to do with as we please. Outside my Greenwich Village window, a great big moon hides in shadows from the sun; the galaxy lies impossibly vast beyond. Sixty square feet of apartment has nothing on infinity. Five liters of oxygen in my lungs are dismissible in the scheme of things.

But somewhere therein lies the magic. That this life is mine and no one else's. That this spark flashes now and never again. That life is a moment, and you have to make that moment worth something.

We must never forget to be tickled pink, at the mere prospect of being alive.

4:44 a.m.

This will all end in tears, he says, and something inside me says he is right, but not for the reasons discussed. You deserve so much better.

I drop him off on Charles Street, and it is not until I walk alone down Hudson that I realize the city has gone to sleep. It seems like minutes ago we were leaving a bustling East Village street and sending our loved ones off in a cab, the New York night vibrant with promise and giggles. How quickly it dissipates into undefined future. How quickly the world changes and the city is not the same.

As I walk down the avenue, contemplating his new future in a whole other world, a whole other life, I realize all this talk of leaving for my part is ridiculous. If I were not here, I would be nowhere. If I were not here, I would be no one.

On Morton Street, I have left the radiator valve open, and I have to open a window to breathe. An orphan puppy sleeps in the room next door. How quickly lives change. How much we take for granted.

I set my alarm. Tomorrow, the world begins anew.

Congestion

For days on end this ruthless cold, this chilling air but it's not so bad. There is too much else to see to bother with shivering. New lives are created in a world far from mine, and the knowledge thereof warms my senses. We sit at White Horse Tavern and reminisce; we were all 16 once, flipping through yearbooks and molding stormy feelings out of clay like they were the be-all end-all of all time. He says thank god we don't have to remember all the words we used. All that's left are the mixtapes.

We part ways by the Rite-Aid on the corner and I think how many things have ended in this life.

How I wish for something begin, instead.

1989

it's so close
I can smell it.

Plastics

Big, heavy snowflakes slowly twirl down toward a West Village courtyard. They land on the trees, the windowsills, the brick walls. They melt on the ground but rest quietly on the cast iron rails, and in the distance, the sky has that faint glow that comes with snow.

Overnight, the temperature plummeted, and everything grew a little more still. The blood doesn't course as quickly through my veins, my breath isn't as shallow. My To-Do list grows and I accept. Patti Smith comes on the television and says New York was such a kind city, but that it's no good to artists these days, and that art is sacrifice. She looks happy. She has such a soft face.

I know it isn't true. But I still think the world was a cooler place, then.

To Stand Still

When it rains
it pours
and floods
and drowns my panicked muscles
swallows my tongue
clouds my senses.

I go to parties and forget how to interact. I fight with my roommate and haven't the time to clean up the mess. I fail, I fail, and I fail.

She dropped me off in her cab on the way, leaving me at the wrong end of town but I decided to walk. The Lower East Side had been washed clean by the rain, and nobody wanted to come out and dirty it again just yet. I placed my wooden heels on the cobblestone.

Click.

Clock.

When all else fails, these streets reassure me I am still above ground. My head is still above the water's edge.

What You Get

I found a home in the dirt.

In the seedy underbelly, in the unfriendly New Yorker, in the disgusting words of my favorite writers' descriptions of that which we as people try to hide. Therein I found my nook, where I could feel like someone had seen the world for its true colors and not hid it, not polished it. How much safer I feel, comforted in that truth has been restored. It isn't pretty, but neither are we.

We are real.

The Great Escape

New York grew cold this week, big puffs of smoke flowing from everyone's lips and weren't their steps a little quicker, their eyes a little more glued to the ground? Thank god for accessories, because how cute the outfits appear beneath layers of knits. We agonize for half an hour, choosing just the right christmas tree; when we return home, our clothes smell of pine, and I find myself humming a seasonally appropriate tune. I allow myself to get swept away in the holiday, because I could just as easily forget, and I do appreciate the sparkle.

She has said she'll leave for as long as I've known her, and still we picture ourselves 20 years down the line, in the same apartment, in the same life. I go home to a friend for drinks; she says she longs to move back to the country from which she came. I say, will you say that for another ten years and never return? and she shudders at the thought.

The days amass; a hundred times I have thought my time to be up. But New York is home, and in the cold december air I open my eyes to it again. I straighten my back and look the city right in the eye. And there it is. Unwavering. I relax, lean into it, and for this short moment, all is well with the world.

After a While

I'm growing increasingly tired
of hearing myself
dissecting and digesting
the same damn words
feelings
"thoughts"
day after day
without getting anywhere
and without ever looking
beyond my own skin

do you ever feel that way
too?

The Climb

How high the hills, stretching ever upward and I can not muster the energy to even start. I hang out here on the bottom, making lame attempts at ascension, but I don't know where to get the energy. It is pleasant down here just now, if only that list of things to do would not grow longer by the minute.

Today the weather turned in New York; snow fluttered noncommittally to the ground and the cold air made us walk a little faster, made us keep our head down. In three weeks I will be on the verge of leaving on a long-awaited adventure, a journey to the ends of the earth.

The cold wind, the steep inclines, they don't seem so bad then.

Sounds of Silence

I went west. I drove down the mountain into the snowy valley, and in the absolute stillness I slept a hundred hours of heavy sleep, waking to wander the impossibly large house in my father's PJs and breathe in the fresh country air. My limbs stretched out, my eyes opened, my muscles relaxed. Words fell from my conscious and my pen lay silent, unable to create a mere morsel of a tale. Minutes and hours were instead filled with the laughter of my oldest friends, the comforts of my family. Life in Utah is effortless, somehow, and I tried to soak it up without remembering the remorse of not being able to stay.

And still, standing on that platform at Howard Beach, waiting for the A train to take me back to the city. How comforting the sense of home. The sense of my body, my clothes, my steps, suddenly fitting again, suddenly allowed to be themselves without reservation, without a makeover.

New York is the place where I am, without a makeover.

I open the valve to the radiator; it smells of a hundred winters in the city already past. I wonder how many I have yet to see.

Dead. Line.

And so it is, with deadlines. They come, they go, and the moment in which to savor a victory is so short, so fleeting. Suddenly it is December, and I am on to new things. How sad those last few hours with my piece, even if this is not truly the end, and suddenly how much more I had to say. How much life mimics art, the experience mimics the life.

In words, I see a world begin to make sense where it didn't use to. In my words, I see secrets I hid from myself. I remember that this is why I loved them in the first place, when I was still writing stories on my father's old computer in the 80's, the kind that only carried a word processor.

There is magic in words.

There is also magic in Christmas lights strung gaudily around bedroom windows. I realize it is not the same kind of magic, but tonight, when my word document is closed indefinitely, I lie in bed and look at those lights, and do you know, that is all the magic I need.

Ex Libris

I learned to read very young. It was my mother who refused to read comics to us, and my overwhelming desire for cartoons apparently drove me to achieve literacy well before the expected time. After that, I was insatiable. I devoured books. We would go to the library and leave with our bags full. The summers were one long line of stories. As I grew older, I discovered the deliciousness of staying up, staying still, staying isolated for entire nights to finish a book that was simply impossible to let go of. The calming smell of bookstores where time disappeared.

I loved books.

They were my escape from a confusing reality. They painted the world in colors and curlicues that made sense to me. My brain was bursting with crooked imagination; in my fantasy, the world was a magic place, of unending possibility and madness, and books seemed to speak that same language. I don't know when that started to fade. I don't think adults lose their ability to imagine; I think we just don't let ourselves play like we used to.

We spent the train ride home discussing books in general, and favorite books in particular. And it occurred to me how much I love them, how every book is an undiscovered treasure, waiting to be explored, and how every book spins my inside and never leaves me the same person I was before. Our favorite stories reveal more than we may realize to others. How much I might learn by reading yours.

Eat the cookie. Find the key. Open the door, and the magic is there.

Steady, As She Goes

I cannot tell
if I write this book
to rid myself of the demons that are
or to paint myself the picture
I wish I lived

and sometimes I think
the demons
and the picture
are one and the same.

I am not,
without the other.

Brooklyn Lights

It felt like a Spring Sunday. The sun returned, people were over-dressed. We walked with our coffees to the train and sweated; I stared straight into the sun. How could I not? The Brooklyn apartment was too bright for our advent celebrations, but we made do with good cheer. Hours later, the sun was setting in the west, and the buildings outside our window were sat aflame.

You give me my story without my asking for it. Suddenly my mind rushes, the pages amass beneath my fingers before I can even react. I appreciate the life. I just wish it didn't have to thrash so loudly within my soul. I wish you would catch me, not push me, when I near the edge.

If only I could figure out which one is the third rail.

Deck the Halls

With all guests gone, how quiet the apartment. Little signs of their existance in every room, triggers to remind me of their open hearts and generous souls. Thanksgiving leftovers tirelessly feed me. New shoes gleam by the door; my family can't stand to see me in such poverty, apparently. I would like to tell them one is never poor with family like that, but it seems such a trite observation.

Still, I revel in the quiet. I stay up through the night writing, until my eyelids close and I have to hope my fingers hit the right keys. I walk around in my flannel pyjamas from last year and listen to cheesy Christmas music, stringing up lights and tinsel around the room. I turn on the radiator in my room for a brief instant; it fires up with a crackle and smells of warm dust for a while before it sends hot, dry air into the apartment. I can only leave it on for half a cycle before the room is too warm. I revel in the soft feeling of approaching winter.

Christmas begins today. The magic begins today. My soul decides that any major turmoil must be put aside and dealt with at a later time. Maybe, by then, it will have passed anyways.

Perhaps that is the best magic, of all.

If I Only Had a Heart

The E train wound its way through midtown and along Queens Boulevard. Weary travelers already, we yawned and mourned the end of a not so unusual, and still so pleasant, week. Such is the thing about family, after all. New York was a grey, cold Friday afternoon, and probably best spent in bed. I walked through the transfer center at Jamaica and felt the familiar tingle of travel. Soon I will be there myself. I never tire of the feeling of transit. The elevator smelled of travelers, of airport bathroom soap and expectations. I rode the subway home reluctantly, tempted to stay out there for just a little longer, in the delicious feeling of going.

Back in the Village, the apartment was unusually quiet, and I slept like a baby. My phone kept demanding answers of me, kept tempting me with illicit proposals, and I am torn between what I need to do and that which I desire. The ground has already been spoken for, I remind myself, and pretend to look away. How quickly my heart beats, in all the wrong directions, and sometimes that which is closest is still endlessly far away. I ignore the racing blood and turn to my evening's work. Words get so easily convoluted, and I am grateful for another outlet where they may flow freely.

It occurs to me
that I would follow the yellow brick road
if only I knew where to start.

post script

And
I know it may seem silly
It is hardly a day
when it comes up
(otherwise)
but today
as every day
I am grateful
that when that ledge was close
and the building so tall
I never jumped
I never fell.

I think of you often
of the air on your cheeks
I think of the magic
you could have seen
and I am sorry.

Gratitude, year II

Tonight, I am thankful
for family and friends
for calm West Village streets
for sudden chill and
imminent winter
for the approaching
glitter
and magic

for the break
from myself
and my incessant contemplation

for the promise of
adventure
on the horizon

for enough money
to live
and breathe
and sleep calmly
after all

Tonight
I am thankful
for Life
at all
and this life
in particular

for New York
and for the Word
that burns so brightly
so incessantly
in me

Tonight
I am thankful
For you.

Pause

Sometimes,
there is too much at once.
Too much fun, too much drink,
too much social sparkle,
too much concrete covered.
So that when the evening has settled,
and the world is sleeping,
you still haven't the time to digest
and turn it into words.

Sometimes,
perhaps
that is okay,
too.

The Pitch

Days and nights spent with new acquaintances in the business, I try to keep my head on my shoulders but fail no doubt. These people with their perfectly tense muscles, their perfectly tense teeth. They smile big, slip you their card like it's a five-dollar bill and maybe you can get them in, get them out, get them somewhere they can profit from being. So what do you do? and always ready with their pitch, with their end of it, with their cleverly crafted words and success stories. They sold to a Japanese company; we go nationwide early next year; she signed with that Big Label. So what do you do?

I know this business, and that makes me feel at home. I was raised in this business, but that also makes it so foreign. I have no pitch, I have no cleverly crafted words, when words are all I should have, really. I try to describe my pages, my ambitions, and they fall flat by the wayside.

In somebody else's eyes, how could these words be any good? In somebody else's ears, how could I possibly call myself a writer? I can't take such liberties, and I quietly sink into a corner and smile. I do not write for you, it's true. I write because the alternative would drive me to madness, to a boil, to deflation. I write because I can't not.

But if a tree fell in the forest, and no one was there to see it, would it not have fallen in vain?

I brace myself, I open my book, and I open my voice to the world.

September 6, 2007

The end of America
I ran
the last steps to the Ocean
the West Coast at my feet
and all of America behind me

letting the water wash over my weary feet
my overwhelmed soul
my grimey sweaty heart
elated
and giggling madly

at the Greatness of it all.

The end of the Road is beautiful
and bittersweet
warm in my chest
like the California wind
that dances around me

My head is spinning
the palmtrees sway
but the waves
are comfortingly eternal.

Hey Porter

I miss the South.
I miss the humid greenery, the unending roads of America.
I miss that car, safely carrying us coast to coast.

I miss fried pickles in Natchez, Louisiana, and ribs in Lubbock, Texas.
I miss the soft, singing dialect of Alabama and sunset over the wide Mississippi.
I miss Pie Town, New Mexico, where the apple pie came with real vanilla ice cream and I thought the world existed just for me.
I miss the way the Pacific Ocean seemed to lie in wait for us and only us.

We sat at the White Horse Tavern tonight, and I thought there is so much more to life than whatever we think we deserve to expect.

If I could be satisfied, I know I'd be happy forever.
But I'll never be satisfied with this, with this anything.
That's what keeps me working through the uncertain terrain, through the cold, dry winds of New York. One day I'll be elsewhere, wondering wherein comfort lies, and I'll look to another horizon. Satisfied dangles like an impossible word.

I'd have it no other way.

America, I will come for you yet. Life, I will struggle for you forever.

Fall

Suddenly swamped with work, I barely retain the energy to digest what little life I have. I rise in the morning, spend my days in another language and exhaust my energy playing catch and smoothing out the uneven edges of young souls having just arrived at Battery Park. For a short break, I walk along the water's edge and draw long breaths in confusion, before I return to my small space in the Village to meet a hundred different deadlines. I try to remember to shower, how to make time to smile. Suddenly desperate to learn how to stop time. Reeling from always being so many steps behind.

A story of fiction runs parallel to my life. Too many similarities, I feel trapped by its foreboding future, its inevitably unhappy ending. In my journal, I write, I fear I write my own death sentence. Realities swim sickenly around me; my sleep comes reluctantly and remains restless. I cannot tell myself and my stories apart. I said I'd sacrifice anything to go to New York and write; I sacrificed my health, my happiness, my future. Is this what you wanted, New York? Is this the tab I ran up?

Yesterday when I walked home, the Hudson River fresh air was too overwhelming, too violent, and I crossed over into TriBeCa to walk safely along Greenwich cobblestone home. It is a rough world out there. I needed my New York streets to ground me. In the West Village, the gingko leaves have turned, and on my street is now a long line of bright beacons, every tree a torch toward enlightenment. If I stay here much longer, I will waste away. If I leave, I will surely die.

Already Escaped

Tomorrow I'll throw away
Everything I keep



Tomorrow when you wake
I'll be on my way.

Habits

Years pass; I grow older. My body is weary and will not dance like it used to. I wonder what became of my dreams of mad adventure. The blood in my veins itches again; I suspect beyond the horizon there is a more colorful land. I wonder if I should not take a break, now, return to the safe land where money grows on steady jobs, the air is clean in your lungs, and the trees aren't planted. Regrouping, and opening the door to another adventure.

When I voice this thought, I get resounding applause. I hear sighs of relief in echo; finally, she is coming to her senses. Doesn't that sound like a reasonable plan? I appreciate the support. But when it comes down to basics, is this not the exact same running and packing up and leaving that I always do? Is this not the restless pacings and dreams of brighter futures and greener grass in which I always indulge?

I used to believe there was a Forever. A forever Love, a forever Home, a forever Life.

Years pass. I am not so sure anymore.

The Id

In therapy, we say that talking freely is the gateway to letting those fettered feelings verbalize and slip out, a way to release the words we've tried keeping hidden, perhaps even to ourselves.

I write, and write, and plan, and structure, and write. I decide my characters will travel in these directions and calculate what will be of importance to them.

But as I sit down to write, after a few pages, I forget my plan, and my characters forget my place as their Creator. They run off in other directions, behave against my wishes and feel things I would rather they didn't.

When I pick up my pen, I open the gateway, and though many beautifully crafted words emerge, safely nestled in their defenses and their theatrical makeup, just as many rogues slip out, wreaking havoc with my Piece and with my Peace. They hold up a mirror to my face, and I can no longer hide. I turn the lights off in my room, but my word processor glows.

I run with it now; I can always label it fiction later.

Unpublished Rhyme

Pushing Daisies

The day drags slowly in a cloud of post-intoxication, eating away at my day of making up for lost time. I linger over morning coffee but return to my bed to watch a movie and wait for the shivering to subside.

Some days, the words flow like an uncontrollable river, and I have no choice but to follow the story wherever it goes, only stopping to look back of what has passed upon reaching a slowing in the current. The problem is trying to return to Reality, to a world where I do not feel like those words told me I was feeling, where I did not just experience the picture they painted. It is a tricky escape. It's an exciting world.

It evens out.

W 3rd, Greenwich Village

So tired, and yet the desire to straddle the streets. Tumbling down stairs and ending up on west thirst street with dear friends and dear giggles. Lethal martinis and revisiting the late nineties as though they were ages ago and nowadays, they are. Morton street swims upon returns and how soft the pillows.

There is no moral to this story.

That is the beauty of Friday night.

Excerpt

"Are we ever really integrated into each other's lives? Are human beings able to truly love on another and become more than extras? The thought fascinated me; I did not know what that was like. We are such solitary planets, traversing this earth in our own separate orbits. We may collide, but we never melt into each other until we are to the point of being inseparable, where I cannot tell my mountains, my clouds, my molten core from yours. At some point, perhaps, I believed that. But without this skin to tell me where I end, I will dissolve into the universe. If I melted into you, where would my boundaries be?"

W 27th St

Tonight the winds blow cold over Manhattan. How dark the streets and nightfall caught me by surprise. I walked home through Chelsea, pulling my jacket closer. As I walked, I realized that my shoes had not been their original white in a long time; yesterday they leaked winter rain into my skin. My tights were snagged and treated with nailpolish. The corduroy on my skirt had long since been worn flat, and I could not lift my arm for the risk of showing the ripped seam in my jacket. The rest of me was wrapped in oversize knits sent to me by a doting mother with a hobby.

So that when I walked through the Chelsea Projects, and the shadows I met in the alleys perhaps should have concerned me, I felt my spine stretch, my eyes steady, my walk soften. Somehow I felt like I had found a place to belong, and I wondered how much of my playing poor was still a game.

Changes

We so easily become those we most scorn.

Perhaps that is why we scorn them.

They are who we secretly know we wish we were.

Comforts of Home

...and yet, here's the thing. In the midst of all the madness, the travels, the itching blood in my veins and my desire to always run, run run... When I see those pictures, of people buying houses, trudging around woodsy yards in muddy boots, lighting fires and growing their bellies, I think that must be the meaning of it all. If only I could insert myself into that space, would not my blood flow a little softer, my lungs breathe a little warmer, my heart sleep a litte sounder?

I know this may all be yet another spot of green grass, just out of reach and thus pleasantly possible to idealize. But that doesn't make it burn any less bright, in my imagination.

Grenache

Some days it just hits you. A long day of tedious work, plenty of potential for a Saturday night on the town, but you know all along. Today is the day for it. So you bide your time. You do your work and cancel your plans. You let the feeling of limitless time sink in until your soul melts into the broken places.

So that when the job is done, the food is eaten, the phone calls are made, you can sink into the books, the notepads, the research, the feelings, the word processor.

And you write.

Novel Ideas, Part II

and then again
in the magic of creating your own planet
lies the quiet
but oh-so real boundary
of when the discrepancy
of the reality you are trying to escape
and the beauty you are trying to paint
becomes too immense.

You won't know it until you are there
but then you will tumble across its threshold
and end up with the rude awakening
of bruises on your body
and words in the trash.

Bought

I hear it in his voice, in the melody of his Are you happy with that?, the answer that he isn't. I opened a door, and pushed back poverty for just a little while longer. My body exhales, the jaws I have held clenched for so long slowly soften their grip. Yet somewhere in the back of my ribs, a slow dark cloud meanders, echoing his doubts. As though this were not the preferred outcome. As though I should have amounted to more.

As though desparation should have garnered a more enlightened invention.

On my way home, I flounder, unsure what feeling to experience. Part elation, part concern. I decide that money, this necessary evil, will triumph today. I go to bed smiling.

New York kicks you when you are down. The trick is knowing when to kick back, and knowing when to simply grow a thicker skin. The end goal must always be simply to do whatever it takes to survive.

I Thought You Died Alone

Novel Ideas

The wonderful thing
about writing fiction
is that you can paint your story
in different colors
and edit your endings
and rewrite clever exclamations

until the song rigs beautiful
and you believe your own world
of make believe.

Déjà Vu

You are the one relationship I don't want to bail,
that I don't want to run away from,
that doesn't terrify me.
New York, you are the love of my life.
Can't-live-without-you love.
New York.
Please say it isn't over.

December 17, 2006
NYC, NY

Short Stack

The novocaine wore off quickly, and again a precarious morning of mortality. The reminder of empty wallets but no less of a body that will not last forever. Such a rude awakening.

Such simple things will tip the scales quickly. How dark the future and how impossibly close the end of Things-As-They-Are. Reaching out for some sort of guidance, I get conflicting advice and get nowhere. The newsfeed ticks, unhindered, reminding me of lives joined, new ones sprouting in the bodies of those around me. Sometimes, freedom feels more like floating away into space and having nothing to keep you grounded, and one those days, I mourn my lack of tethers.

Only the next few days are brightly lit and planned for; after this, it is all murk and mist. I suspect that tomorrow my heart will be lighter, my patience and skin thicker, I will scrape the fallen pieces of my future and put them back together again, to endure yet another day, or week, or month in this life. It's just tonight that the galaxy feels so endless.

Frog Prince

There is a tiny green frog by my bedside, jewel-encrusted and golden, a tiny crown on his head. I forget to see him most of the time, habituated by appearance. Such a small piece of decoration. I was never much for trinkets.

Yet I still remember the day I bought him. Cold, slushy Stockholm, with snow inside my shoes, with snow inside my bones, and this tiny piece of magic touched my heart. I could not afford him, even then. I have been on the verge of poverty for so long I cannot remember what it is like to not consider coins. Still, I could not resist him. Within his body, he now carries notes, words of me long ago.

Some nights, I rediscover those notes, those words, those unassuming jewels. Some nights it's enough just to see him. I remember the jump. I remember slushy winters and the desire to leave, the burning resolve. He shines as brightly now; I am grateful.

The winter winds blew cold tonight. You can no longer shelter me, from their chill. Geography separates us. Reality, separates us.It was a slap in the face, how quickly I was replaced. I take it. I just wrap my jacket a little tighter.

Back on solid ground, I love that the wind blows not nearly as hard, on the west village streets I call home.

FYI

Today I realized
that when you punch in "home"
in a text
you can just as well
end up with "good"

So when I wrote
I'm home

my phone told me
I'm good.

I suppose
really
it's the same thing.

You're Home

I get home late, the dog barks. I try to sneak around my room, but when I open the door to go brush my teeth, he is right there, and he slips into my room and gets comfortable in a pile of laundry. I turn the lights off, curl up in bed, he is still there. He likes to make sure everyone is home and accounted for. Comfort in control. I feel noticed.

The night ran on for longer than expected; I didn't realize how tired I was until I left. I waited on that platform far longer than I should have. Couldn't I have been home by now if I'd just walked? But when that A train finally comes, how soothing is the rocking, how short is the ride. Like an early morning love affair with the snooze button, I consider staying on for a stop longer than I should. Torture to pull myself out of my daze and get off just in time.

Tonight I saw the sun set on tall buildings, saw the Times and the Empire State glitter in the warm August light. By the time I reach my own door, the temperature has dropped at last, the street is painted in yellow leaves. It is beautiful. I'm okay.

TriBeCa

Go for a walk. Clear your head. Except the air is too heavy with tropical moisture, no clarity is to be found. Why did I choose TriBeCa? All quaint cobblestone streets, clean children with tired nannies, successful suits and fancy storefronts. It's like a movie set for Having Made It, and nothing makes me feel more like I Haven't.

I walk into Whole Foods, this mecca of delicacies and conscious consuming; the professionals duck and weave, as they pick up italian olives, organic cheeses, local micro-brews. I walk slowly, fill my basket carefully. After a while I start backtracking in the store, picking out item after item from the basket and returning them to their shelves. I didn't really need that one anyway. Poverty makes my stomach hurt, and I end up at the register with milk and tomatoes. By the time I leave, the rain has picked up. I walk along West Street without so much as a breeze from the river. It is sweltering. My hair curls itself upwards, climbing like a vine along my faltering umbrella. I am soaked before I even reach Canal.

I don't have the answer. I really don't. Living day by day means time may run out at any curve in the road. I go to sleep in my own bed tonight, but there are no promises of where I'll awake tomorrow. Hell. I don't even know the question.

Square One

Four days without a shower, mere moments outside the apartment, the air turns stale and I open my window wide. November disappeared on the horizon; it is much too warm, a summer rain coating the yellowed leaves. Another deadline arrives, I wrap it up and step into the bath.

But old ghosts catch up and haunt me. A simple comment from an unexpected corner makes me doubt words written and paid for months ago. The pride, the slowly building resume, all tumble into a pile on the floor, next to the mess my deadline habits created. How can I offer my services, promise to deliver this magic, when I clearly cannot in full deliver?

Learn from mistakes, voices whisper. It is what life is. You work your way upwards. I hate those voices, there is no room for running around at the bottom of the ladder. They expect the skies for their babies, and they are right to. This is the life I am signing myself up for, every day a question mark.

I could have a steady job, I could have safety nets and the knowledge that rent would be paid for months on end. I chose otherwise. Brace yourself. This is life.

I rub my skin against the city, pray to make it thicker. Hopes are pinned on you, expectations soar. Fuck it. Jump.

Sea Shells

It seems that all my bridges have been burned,
But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works

How are my veins so void of words, lately? I have nothing to say worth saying, no stories to regale, no insight reached. I dream in images of childhood and travel, I see songs and turn up the volume, but I fear this is not what belongs on these pages. Old poems read ancient.

I miss you. I miss the skin on your cheek, the hair on your arm, the melody of your voice. I miss the depth of your eye and the warmth of your love. It is better now, but the scars you left still pulsate angrily in the night. Time taught me how to think of something else. I whisper his name with confidence.

But I always have to think before I speak.

Nano

People will write it differently. They will prepare differently, they will execute differently. They will listen to other music and use better pens. They will make you feel like you are doing it wrong. They will be following guidelines or tailoring to currents trends or be in some other way perfect in a way you are not. This is the downside of taking part in community. The upside is, perhaps, three weeks down the line when the 10th cup of coffee has stopped working, that somebody else will sit at the other end of the line and tell you it's worth it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

No matter how you want to tell your story,
the most important things is that you tell it.

Jet Lag

I awake in a start, the bad dream quickly transitioning into a bad reality. I try to breathe slowly, but my pulse races. Daylight is hours away. I expect to sink straight back to sleep, but it evades me. I am wide awake.

Perhaps this should be cause for frustration. The alarm is gearing itself up to tear me from supposed sleep, a long day of travel and adventure ahead; I need rest. But then I remember returning from South Pacific travels as a child: how black the January night, but how delicious the 2 am breakfasts, how cosy the kitchen where we would all stumble, one after another, our jet lagged bellies disregarding the clock. I learned to love the aftertaste of travel then, and I have never forgotten it. Awake in the night, you need never share your world with anyone else, not even your own reality.

My pulse slows. My stomach begins to rumble. The world outside still dark, but my heart lightens.

Musings

Another day within the white walls. The quiet of solitude, of loud music and skies that, if not endless, are at least miles wider than your West Village sighs. Technology fusses and I am disconnected from all but the physical world. Satmar families in suddenly appropriate wool clothing as the cold wind arrives from the sea, pen on paper, coffee slowly going cold.

Nowhere to run now, the apartment too light not to see the various facts swim around your head. That there never was an answer to be found, never a soft pillow to rest your head forever. She says you were raised by gypsies, and you know she has a point. Those two suitcases stuffed into your closet will be perpetually ready, willing. Perhaps New York is home, perhaps it always will be. But home is a place you remember fondly, with a sad heart. Home is a place you leave.

Opportunities arise, my fingers tingle with adventure. I long to throw it all out, take my boots, and run far into the jungle. I was raised in the jungle, raised to learn how endlessly large this planet, how many stories we have to tell, and I long to return to that life where you wake up in discomfort and brace the elements. I idealize the noble savage, yearn to follow in his footsteps. There is no such thing as a vacation, every trip brings a camera, a script, an opportunity for something Bigger than your own recuperation.

Outside the windows, dead leaves flutter and I think, at first, they are butterflies. Autumn winds are here. I stood so close to your skin, how warm it was; how hard to focus on conversation. New York, is our honeymoon over? I miss you. I love you.

I always leave the ones I love.

Free Range

In Brooklyn, the apartment is different. The ceiling is twice as high, uncluttered, the walls are white. So white. The sounds are more trucks, fewer sirens, the view from the windows never ends.

I spend an entire day here, to open a door. I drink their superior coffee and enjoy every sip. The pretty things. The gracious welcome. I turn up the music and sing until my lungs smile. How much a little space does for the limbs. They stretch, relax. The soul follows.

The other day, we kept each other company from Union Square; we were going basically the same direction, anyways. I looked south down 5th avenue, the arch on Washington Square beginning to glitter, as the streets grew darker and the sky put the sun to bed. I said, It's just that it's such a beautiful city. I never cease to be blown away. He agreed. And even though our worlds are so different, our New Yorks not the same town, really, I do not doubt we can both love it, all the same.

Right

I rearrange furniture, place my computer on a side table by the window, spend the day staring into the neighbor's living room. I make another cup of coffee; it's been months since I had this much in one day. I tug at my long hair, which I normally can't stand to have let down. I put Mozart's Jupiter on repeat, sometimes interspersed with bursts of Symphony no. 9, it's good for the intense writing minutes. I realize I have to cancel all sorts of plans; this deadline kicks my ass. I remember what it is like to kick it back.

Too easily have I become complacent, thinking It may not be the best I can do, but it will have to be enough. Too easily have I forgotten the joy in words tumbling around my head until they find their right spot, the flow that forgets hunger, remembers coffee, ignores daylight. My roommate speaks to me and I do not hear. The clock ticks and I do not hear.

In the end, I believe it amounts to equal portions of despair and elation. I change positions a hundred times, delete, erase, rewrite, swear. My neighbor comes out on his terrace. I stare at him for ten seconds, take a deep breath. I begin to write, again.

Paradox

But then, a day later, my fingertips still cold, deadline adrenaline slowly beginning to fizz its way through my synapses, that longing for security vanishes. I watch documentaries from the depths of ancient Borneo rainforests for the film pitch, see colorful birds and humid vegetation. I grow restless.

There is more for me to see. Too much Earth left to explore. All those years I could not bear to travel, I was fed up, and now I race to make up for lost time. I wonder if I am done with New York, or if I should be. To move on to the next. A farm in Australia. Join a rogue documentary film team and be their PA slave in Amazon jungle. Go to India, to my beautiful L, and spend cheap days sweating with her by the Ganges.

Perhaps it is just the cold, playing tricks with my senses and making me dream of sweltering climes. Perhaps once the risers again begin to sing with their boiling steam and the kitchen begins to smell of holiday comforts and spice, I will sink into these warm clothes, this warm home, and I will cherish its convention again.

If only there was not so much adventure to be had.

And Then

Cold day, I sit still for so many hours, staring at the drawing board and building the story, deadline looming. It chills the tip of my nose.

The heat comes on. It spreads through the risers. The room smells of warm dust and ancient pipes. I remember the smell. Seasons change, comfort in recognition.

Sucker for safety and repetition.

On History

Stirring the risotto really is the toughest part, the rest of it is child's play. We brought the wine and the food into the living room and sat down on the floor. She brought out a video cassette, and an old PBS documentary on New York sprang to life. For hours we sat enthralled, as images of Old New York swept past: panoramas of a town where the Brooklyn Bridge towers were the highest point in the city, wide uptown avenues where carriages could turn and cramped Lower East Side tenements of a hundred ragged children. We saw buildings go up and immigrants arrive. Everyone building their American Dream, their vision of a Life in New York. And I heard the voices of new New Yorkers so many generations ago echo my own.

What is a New Yorker? A Jew? An Italian? You come here and start over. You are a New Yorker. Slough off your old, begin anew. Run, work, fight, hurry, this is what New York life is. You have to make this life better than the one you left. You have to make this change worth your while.

This was always the city they ran to, stars in their eyes and dreams of a better life. They left dying crops, religious persecution, death, and disease, one suitcase and one ticket to the golden gates. They ended up in cramped houses of vermin and squalor, and they had only so much time to thicken their skin and wipe that hope from their eyes. New York kicks you. You have to stay standing.

But you do.

Because if you just run, and work, and fight, and hurry, if you keep up with the City and survive its beating, then the pearl of the oyster is yours. If you can make it here, they say, you've made it everywhere.

When you are tossed into the cauldron of New York,
you are born again.

Dionysian Dissonance

I pretend, for a while, that life is a carefree game. That drinks at the boathouse or neverending sake marathons at seedy downstairs joints are nothing out of the ordinary. A steady stream of old friends and strangers' smiles. I wake up in a daze, dress in the last clean items in my closet, begin all over again. Work piles up around me, last night's jewelry. My inbox is a slew of unanswered emails and propositions. My fridge is full of farmer's market produce bought in a flash of faith in my staying home to cook at some point. Dollar bills dance from my open pocketbook.

Finally, on rain-soaked Soho cobblestone, the endless debauchery trickles to a stop. The calm makes my head spin. Already, plans are being built for the coming weekend, but when I step inside my quiet, crowded apartment, my little space in this mad, turbulent city, I can feel myself start to unwind, pause. I will sleep, I will work, I will clean up the remnants of this tornado, I will write.

So it goes, the ebb and flow, the calm and the storm.

I would not have it, any other way.

On Comforts

When I was little,
the grossest thing I knew
was the skin that would form on milk
when heated on the stove
to make hot chocolate
when it was dark
and cold
out.

But I really loved
a lot of things
about being a child.

Posthumous

Some days are like that, difficult to get started and a long uphill battle to get anything put together. I give in and pick up a book, instead. It was a birthday present; I loved how many books I got for my birthday this year.

A few hours later, I lie in bed, tears slowly trickling down my cheek and landing on my college sweatshirt, so worn from all these years that have passed since I was a freshman. Tears get stuck on my glasses so I can't see. I have to take breaks from reading, because my eyes are blurred. I hear my roommate and wish that she will go out for a while so I can have this moment uninterrupted. She does. I can.

The years gather in piles. The words unsaid gather in covered holes in the ground. How much we pretend not to see, how much we carry on within us.

One day I will make you proud. One day I will say all those things and you will know that the fault was not yours, nor mine. One day I will explain to you that this is what life is.

But I will try to wait, until it's too late for you to hear it.

October Sky

When the alarm rang, I had slept for mere hours. Outside my window was only blackness, the building was still sleeping. I snuck through quiet streets to the subway, and on the train, the few passengers were scattered across the seats. Workers. The city took on the air of a small community, and people dared whisper good morning into the quiet stillness. I walked back, toward the water, and saw the dark, looming buildings of Manhattan slowly light up. Satmar Williamsburg asleep, I pulled out borrowed keys and tip-toed into the pasta factory.

Amid the unwrapping of gifts and eating of surprise breakfast-in-bed, the sun rose over Brooklyn, and through giant windows, it warmed the loft, the people in it. We rode the rush hour train to Union Square together, sardines in a can, everyone rushing, everyone in their own bubble because this is Manhattan and we all enjoy the show. I had errands near Wall Street, comfortably dressed amid a thousand suits. Just beyond the glass buildings run the oldest streets in New York, crooked, dirty from hundreds of years of traffic, narrow. By now the morning sun stood high; I decided to walk home.

Suits and business gave way to tourists and Broadway. I turned a corner and found myself on Tribeca cobblestones, quiet residential streets where hip, hard-working families had all gone away for the day. Stuck at lights, I stared into the sun, and soon enough I was back in my West Village, in the part of New York that is most like home.

Darkness gives way to light. In just one morning, I walked through so many different worlds, in just this small part of my city. Later that night, in a cab leaving Grand Central cocktails, we agreed that a Manhattan cab ride is still magic, everytime.

She asked me if I feared the dark as much as I used to, if I trembled at the thought of winter with the first turning leaf and the anticipation of what is to come. I had to think about it for a while, the answer not immediately clear.

No, I said finally. Not since I moved here.

Home

One drink turns into a stumble along the West Village streets. Classy to trashy to a dark, quiet corner and recapping months past. New friends mix into old friends and you remember where you came from. A year ago, how different we were, but I know you a year more now. We have nothing but the future ahead.

Did you think this was me then, too? Of course I did. We both knew this was you all along no matter the layers of makeup or make believe in the way. The years amass on our birthday candled cakes but every day brings us closer to who we are.

I sat by the Hudson today, Saturday afternoon sunlight warming throngs of people and making the deep blue waters sparkle through even the darkest sunglasses. My journal filled up with endless pages of self-deprecation and question marks. Such is life when I boil it down to its essentials. But in the end, the ink trickled into one conclusion: this city is Home. Even the question marks grew silent.

"I endure," she said, before the beer ran out and it was time to let a cab navigate out of the crooked grid, "because this is love, and this is what I have to do."

How right she was. How well I know the sentiment.

For a minute there, I lost myself.

No Alarms

and no surprises. please.

Look You In the Eye

October. Seasons change. The dark green leaves of the birch tree outside my window begin to shrivel, flash to yellow. I wake up before dawn to close my window. Still we brave the inevitable end of warm air and sit in the bar's backyard, smoking, our slushee margaritas forming icicles along the edge of the glass.

The train home was almost empty as it climbed the Williamsburg bridge. A man sat across from me, old, disheveled, wearing New York Mets pajamas. His hand was bandaged and the id wristband on his arm made me think he'd escaped from a hospital. He looked so kind, in his ragged, curly beard, and he smiled as he mumbled something to himself; I couldn't help but feel a smile spread on my own face. We began our descent into the darkness underground, and I saw Manhattan glitter and welcome me home.

I dreamed in color last night. Vibrant, sparkling, beautiful color, a dream that began with travel and ended in song. October. I will make a friend of you, yet.

Room in the Room

The storm was imminent, but my bones had sat in front of that computer too long. I saw my window, and I stepped quickly onto the streets.

I always walk along the river; it is my refuge, my little piece of fresh air and green in the encroaching city. But today, as I stared at the swelling waves and the wind picked up around me, it was not what I was after. I crossed the street. I wanted my city.

Hoards of suits and heels swelled out of financial centers and crossed the streets. I passed the gaping wound of America, looked at the rising steel skeleton and thought how impossibly large it was, how loud it would be if it fell. Between the buildings, the wind was rising, and I turned east, down small alleys crafted when the town was still young. Fall; it was already dark.

Soon, the offices had emptied out. For a short while, downtown was empty, black. A few yuppies ran past me; I could only pity them for choosing to live here. Conveniently close to work. I walked north, passed the Woolworth and remembered standing at that exact street corner years ago; how nothing had changed. Streets shifted, soon I was dodging slow-moving tourists. Countless blocks north along Broadway, the Chrysler building glittered in the distance. I meandered through Chinatown. Dark streets made me think it was late at night; the strange smells reminded me it was dinnertime. Slowly I closed in on Houston Street, made my way west, closed in on home.

New Yorkers get very enamored with their neighborhood. They stay there, live their entire lives there, rarely venturing out to other parts of the city. Why would I, when I have everything I want right here? As humans, we cannot fathom too large a home, so we make it small even where it is not.

I walked around my city, safe in its changing scenery, comforted by its differences and its sound buildings. I thought perhaps I should get out of my West Village rut, explore something new. Perhaps if I move to another part of town, I will see the city as brand new again, and it will sparkle in that magical way that only New York can do.

I am only human. If this City is now my world, then my restless pacings around it are no different from the running I did across the countries. Always looking to the next clean slate. We do not change, we simply repeat with another manuscript.

But, I thought, if this City will be my stage, I will play my part till the lights go out.

The Years

How many choices, how many diverging paths in the forest and we must follow only the one. No point in regrets, there is no telling what could have been. If he hadn't died, if she hadn't left; it happened, and you are who you are because of it. So I do not worry.

But sometimes I think. If I had not let you go home that night, your eyes so sweet and my heart already gone, could we have endured? If I had not pleaded to move, again, to return to a Home that was no longer mine, would I not have spent an entire youth lost? If somebody had stopped her until she decided to live, would she have been saved? Would I?

It leads nowhere, of course. I know that. But your smile made everything okay. And I miss that.

End of a Century

1999 was a good year, in so many ways.

On a Day of Incessant Rain

"Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?"
-Clarice Lispector

Bubble

Another Friday night phone call, and my roommate must make her way over the water for a funeral again. I should be just as distraught as last time, but I don't have it in me, she says before she goes, I am numb.

And so it is that a Sunday afternoon finds the apartment on Morton Street empty, quiet. I wrap myself in soft cotton sheets and read hundreds of novel pages without coming up for air. When the room finally gets too quiet, the freedom apparent, my fingers and lungs grow impatient and I uncover the piano.

With every flight over the keys, my body softens. With every sad sweet song of love and loss and longing, my soul unravels, dares to look at itself honestly. It is not long before tears form in my spine and the thick skin that separates them from their physical manifestations on my cheeks begins to thin out.

Suddenly I am 15 and living in that house in the dark country, trying desperately to fill the void with music because what else would I do with my time when I had lost my home and myself across the sea. I would sit at that piano for hours, never tiring, so intertwined with the song that I could forget reality completely and be one with vibrations.

But there was always something to fix, I learned quickly. Voices nearby would point out mistakes, correct artistic freedom to fit classical training. By the time my voice teacher on the other side of the woods tried to encourage a little off-beat singing, it was too late and I had no spontaneity left in me. In the early afternoons, my livingroom would reel from arias and soul, but by evening, they would retreat to quiet platitudes.

It doesn't take a psych degree to see why I cannot sing in front of people. It takes no genius to map out the fear or the hurt. I was one with the music, and if the music was flawed, then so was I.

Is it then any wonder why I keep my words mostly to myself? Stack passworded manuscripts in secret folders and save them from the world's scrutiny?

My skin is thick. But my heart beats so softly within.

Realism

The Word returns. Catches me unawares, sneaks up and distracts me from conversation, work, errands. It teases me but disappears as I try to give it proper attention; it dances around my head and giggles at me behind my back. I am not angry. I am delighted it returns, however tentatively, and I try to relax, let it settle on my shoulder.

I have so much to learn from my children, he said. To look at the world with curiosity and joy, to live in the now and believe in the Goodness. Normally, I would smile at the thought of innocent faces and blank slates, but today I felt cynical. It's easy for children to be wide-eyed when they have yet to see how ruthless this world will be. They'll learn.

It always ends, so why pull the taffy of this relationship until the end of unbearable? Someday I will try to persevere, to stay and believe it may work, to not cut the chords prematurely out of mere cynicism. But not today. Because how sweet the song in your voice, but how ugly the pretense in your words. Your sugar isn't worth the toothache that follows.

Twinkle, Twinkle

No place is as peaceful as a house of sleeping children. In one bed, a five-year-old hugged her plush crocodile and sucked her fingers. In the crib, a baby lay with fluttering eyelids and pouting lips. I walked from room to room, turned out the lights, and pulled up a chair to the panorama windows.

On the other side of the glass, New York glittered. Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers spread out like rhinestone trinkets. In between buildings, I saw the cacophony of Times Square lightbulbs change color, and a full moon painted the darkness in a velvety gray. I walked out on the terrace, and the air was warm, smells of end-of-summer and traffic noise drifting through the air.

And just like that, like so many times before, New York blew me away.

I leave myself completely open. I consider the risk of having no defense but I still let myself get swept away everytime. Sometimes I dare to contemplate if this whole thing is just madness, but then moments like these arrive, that are so simple but so overwhelming, and I fall helplessly in love all over again. I make it work because I see no other option.
journal excerpt, Sep 23, 2010

How simple these moments, these reminders. They may catch me off-guard, but they are never unwelcome. Amidst all the perils, the challenges, the days spent staring at the wall and shaking my head, a single second like this wipes every dark cloud from my heart. A single second like this, and there is no other life I would rather live.

Oh, Jack

Dean and I are embarked on a tremendous season together. We're trying to communicate with absolute honesty and absolute completeness everything on our minds.

The text message made me smile. I knew he was reading it, and that he was again ready to be ignited by its spark. I remembered that day, ten years ago, when he first wrote me of it, when I sat in my dark, confused existance, needing a light and being given this bonfire. The short email was written in a blur, in jumping sentences and crazy giggles, and I caught his bug without even having seen the book. I said Why the hell not?! and ran out into the world.

"I can feel it. I understand it and I am held there... I'm inflamed and I just want to hang out with Mad mad people. Even if they completely abandon me before I'm through, I'm there for the ride... you know? I have too many things I want to do and not enough time to do them in... But do you know what this means? It means that there isn't time for stupid petty things or stupid grievences. It means there is a world out there. And I can learn from it."
(email, November 7, 2000)

When he gave me Jack, he gave me the Key to the riddle. After years of running in mazes, I finally knew where it was I was heading. I had tried so hard to dig myself a safe cave of inertia that I forgot that what I truly wanted was to run head-first into the world and Live it. When he gave me Jack, he gave me the Road on which to do it. Ten years of a burning heart, and my gratitude has not even begun to cool off. We grew up, we changed shapes and shed cloaks, but with every reading, the book changed to fit the place we were now.

His last text came in as I walked down Christopher street at dusk, New York City a warm, vibrant buzz of a city, the streets crowded, and I thought how right he has always been. He gave me my dream of New York; I can never repay that.

I am reminded that I love this book because it is, as is life, poetic, beautiful, holy and haunted by inestimable sadness.

Could not the same be said, for ourselves?

The Word

Slowly, the days return to normal. The Life. I pick up the crumbling pieces of my existance, scattered around the tiny room where I live, along the concrete streets where I've fallen apart; I gather them up, take a deep breath, and begin to glue them back together again. (I always do, in the end, you know.) My computer travels around the world and returns with jobs, projects, promises of income that'll pay the rent another month, secure my footing in the city for a sliver of a while longer.

I begin to sleep more soundly in the night.

But as I scramble about in the cellars of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, my soul lies silent, its needs and contemplations stowed away until there is space for them. A hundred beloved projects lie unattended in my word processor; if I cannot live, I cannot write, and priorities rearrange themselves without my effort.

But, my darling word, you are not forgotten. Do you not see that I do this for you? That I toil, and weep, and fear, and fight, so you will have a spot of soil in which to grow, in which to flourish?

Wait for me. I'm trying to build you, a home.

No Other Way

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

On Mad Hatters

my own seeds shall be sown, in New York City.

The Lack

There they are, words in print. A small achievement, perhaps, but nonetheless, your mother would beam proudly if only she knew. Always the treasure at the end of the rainbow, the light towards which you run tirelessly, because a word in print promises to fill that dark, empty hole within you, promises to make you whole. A word in print promises to negate the Lack, and you will certainly want for nothing once you hold its sweet victory in your clenched fist.

And yet there you stand, staring at your exhibition, gleaming in its untarnished newness, and you don't feel the least bit accomplished. There is not a single curve of its letters you could not pick apart with disappointment. You look away, shake your head, and the let the piece endure your parental shame. The hole is gouged a little deeper, a little darker, in the reminder that not even the one Truth to which you hold, actually is true in the broad light of day. The piece loses its shiny sparkle, and you have only yourself to blame.

Minutes later, a new sheet of paper lies pristine, bright on your drawing board. You see the rainbow stretch beyond where your eyes can see. You begin to run.

Feel Brand New

The sun shone brightly on Brooklyn rooftops and cold beer bottles, and before long, it was too late to bother with trains; I slept soundly by newly painted white walls. When I finally made my way to Marcy Ave, the rain was sloshing through borrowed sandals, and it felt like fall.

On a dreary, dirty street in Midtown, in a quiet Korean restaurant, I cured my hangover with kimchi and little sips of soju, while that same question wafted around the room. But if you have all that over there, all those people, that whole life, why are you here? What is it about New York that you love so much?

I didn't have an answer for him, but it didn't matter. I walked down the soaked Manhattan streets, and in my heart, those soaked, gray, busy streets were all the reassurance I needed.

Even the rain, didn't seem so bad then.

Clean Sweep

The night was long, and without much sleep. Fight or Flight, my body was ready, eyes alert and adrenaline tickling the nerves. I awoke and dressed in a haze. On the subway, the boy in my book lost his mother. I thought if I can't even handle a small set-back, how would I ever survive that? I spent the morning with a baby in my arms, and as she looked at me, smiled, and fell asleep, I thought it was about time I pulled myself together. In a sun-drenched apartment in Hell's Kitchen, there it was: perspective.

In the storm of questions, of angst and impossible darknesses, suddenly I saw the only question that mattered. If I want to stay in New York, I have to find a solution, work it out. If I want to stay in New York, I cannot lie down and whither to dust, saying what else was I supposed to do? If I want to stay in New York I have to fight.

And I do.

Inside me, the girl who never takes the fight, who always brushes her shoulder and walks away, walks on, says goodbye, she turned silent. I haven't the blueprints for any other girl; all I have is this beating heart that says this city is all it knows how to love. I will it to carry me, until she is here.

And New York,
honey,
please be worth the fight.

Rock Bottom

How many times I have lied crushed at the bottom of the mine shaft, thinking so this is what over feels like, and it turns out I was merely camping out on a ledge, and there were miles to tumble yet.

I sat on the stoop, slowly taking drags of a cigarette while the world swam sickenly around me. My insides wanting desperately to come out, but my limbs numb to the touch. I can pay one more month's rent, and then I will have nothing left to my name but a box of duty free tobacco and a suitcase full of books.

I feel like I have been drowning for half my life. But now, the water is beginning to boil.

Under Construction

On my leg is a scar, a long line traversing my left knee down on to my calf; I fought barbed wire once and lost. On my arm is another scar, on my foot another. A small mark on my hand reminds me of a childhood in Australia, brown freckles on my chest remind me of a day of too much Spring sun.

The years pass, my body endures them. For years, I would be upset by the change Life wrought on my skin, the purity it destroyed. But where once was smooth skin and a child's blank slate, now is experience, a story painted by my body's efforts to heal, to compensate, to carry on. Where once was soft clay now is a hardened shell, a thicker skin more able to handle what challenges are still to come.

It was such a week. Where everyone around me ran into roadblocks and off of ravines. Where not a single phone call carried good news, and every morning was a short blissful second of ignorance before Reality made itself known.

So that when I stood in the basking sunshine on the loud corner of Bowery and Houston, and heard a voice on the phone say that after years of longing, anguish, and fear, they had at last heard the heartbeat of New Life, it was the lightest my breath had been all week.

Turned Leaves

The dog didn't bark like he usually does, when I put my key in the door, he just paced anxiously in the hallway when I came in. Something was not right.

She sat at the kitchen table, weeping uncontrollably. My oldest friend just died, she said between sobs, and I could see the disbelief in her eyes as she did. The bottle of gin stood open next to her, no glass, and she had to keep recharging her phone to endure the traffic that didn't abate for days.

The pain in my jaw didn't hurt so much then, the pain of my existential angst. The shadows that hover so closely when I try to sleep went quietly to wait in the corner. I ask him about everything. Who will I turn to now? He was my family. Everything gets painted in different colors, when the loss is so tangible. She remembered to walk the dog, but our steps were hesitant, trembling.

Days have passed slowly on Morton Street. Beautiful, cool summer days come and gone. The sun will always rise. We just have to be there to see it.

Short. Fast. Deadly.

The Great Relief of Letting Go

In my dream, we hung off the side of an impossibly tall building. My feet tingled the way they do; I am afraid of heights. I turned to her and said, Can you believe some people actually let go? I should have known it was a dream; I was so calm. I should have known it was a dream because were I awake, I would have replied, Can you believe some people don’t. I woke up in my own bed, but the sheets were twisted.

This Grace Thing

Trembling hands hand over prescriptions and a quiet body sits in a corner to wait. Dizzy mind takes the wrong train and finds itself crossing the wrong bridge, but how beautiful it is, in spite of itself. The September sun beat down indiscriminately, and I sweat just standing still.

How things that for some would be a minor inconvenience can shake the earth and darken the skies for others. How I falter and tremble, re-evaluate my own existence altogether. I sat on the train back to the island and wanted desperately to tear this evil out of my body and toss it violently from the bridge; and yet, how different, for the evil to be something tangible, concrete, as opposed to those wraithey demons that will not let themselves be caught.

I decide that this is no dignified life. I hang off the edge of poverty, of sanity, of health; it was not what I had planned. (I suppose I had nothing planned at all.) I stand on a viciously hot street in Brooklyn, tears streaming down my face, and the train rattles overhead. You must break down, to build up. You hit the bottom, and you've nowhere to go, but up.

and Your Bleeding Heart

tell me now
where was my fault
in loving you
with my whole heart

Early in the morning, before the suited commuters begin their impatient ant trails across the streets, a calm lingers over the city, an air of anticipation but also of regrouping. I stepped out to the sounds of differently suited workers cleaning up the city, preparing for the onslaught, holding together the backbone. The air was blessedly much cooler and I thought, I should always be out this early. Let the jet lags pass and all will be forgotten.

I have shed too many tears in the last few days for the relations around me. It catches me by surprise, and I wonder what has brought about this dust bowl storm. Lives crumble, from age or from love grown sour, and poisoned arrows fly from every direction. Definitions and boundaries have been re-evaluated, stretched, moved, only to be ripped at the seams too soon. You're making me sad, and I struggle to care. We fight with bigger words than in preschool, but the rules remain the same. Pride swells in our brains until pettiness trickles out of our ears and now what do we do?!

You leave without an answer. I couldn't make myself ask for it. The temperature spikes, and somebody pours an entire bottle of bleach on the sidewalk. Another night, washed away. Another bitter aftertaste, that won't go away in a brushing.

Oh, This Town

Need Not Worry

(anymore)

I'm out of coffee, he said, and within the hour we were sitting in my kitchen with a fresh pot, recapping the long weeks that passed. He told me of the loft that waited for them on the other side of the bridge, of high ceilings and uncovered windows, and we dreamed of fall on the roof, overlooking Manhattan.

By the time he left, my ceilings felt higher, too. The New York streets sizzled with opportunity, the blue skies opening my eyes as though their lids had been heavied for too long. The homeland felt a world away, my thoughts of returning and settling down.

It may just be a revived honeymoon. But at this point, I take what I can get. September lies in wait, with cooler nights and a fresh start. I will live it, if only I can pay its rent.

Birthday Letters

If you tire of New York, leave.
Please don't get tired of New York.
August 27, 2009. Brooklyn, NY.

Re-entry

The days ran quickly, not like sand between my fingers but more like strange dreams and you wake up in a daze. Suddenly it was seven a.m. on a Sunday morning in New York, and it took me a while to orient myself. Realize that I had passed out the night before but still managed to turn off the computer and the television in blissful ignorance. See the sunlight stream in through my window and realize how hot I was, what that felt like.

I had spent so many days shivering, lately.

So much has happened, and I had little time to digest, to put it into words. Mad runnings around the city, navigating through the messes of my interior and the orderly mazes of those around me. New impressions, old reminders. Drifting back into the person I was and lost a little, in the jaded streets of New York. It was nice to see her again. I visited family and saw the building blocks of my own life, but cried behind closed doors anyways for lives wasted and words unspoken. How much in a life can be sad, when it should be overwhelmingly sweet. I ran through woods I have seen since childhood for the last time and tried to remember every leaf, the silence, the beauty of Nature. I turned 28, impossibly, and made sure to leave a great mess in the wake of my departure. Two hours of sleep later, I sat at the airport with a toothache and wasn't sure if I'd remembered to pack my passport.

The trip seems to have lasted months. But it seems to be months since I was there. A world away. I stepped into the shower this morning and it smelled of America. Of cucumber body wash and toxic cleaning solutions. The air stopped being so silent. I met dear friends for breakfast and wasn't sure how I could've ever doubted that this was where I belong.

Your kisses were so sweet. But this city sings me to sleep, now.

So I'll Stay

Confusion reigns surpreme on this trip. The highs and lows of my emotional rollercoaster rivaling even the neverending hills of the city I know like the blood in my veins. Such a long walk home, and how cold the wind that swept in while no one was looking. It cleared the clouds, and their bright cotton puffs were white against the Thursday night lights; I saw stars, the deep, dark blue behind them.

The social marathon continues. My mind barely gets enough peace to put words on your pages. Children grow in the gardens and make their way into my friends' lives. The comforts of home, the steady job, the incomprehension of my strange apparition. I get tempted to pack my bags, return to the homeland. I will get a proper job, an apartment of my own, and the rest will follow suit. I assimilate well, it will be no problem, I can put this whole insanity behind me.

But that cold walk home, New York music in my ears, a voice whispered you are mad to think it will be so easy. I always see the opportunity of the next step. This one always leaves me unsatisfied. I long for grimey subway tracks, for people made of stone when they walk home in the late night, for streets never sleeping and stoops that lead to a place where my keys fit.

Literally, too.

Zen

Days pass with me faltering. I walk around these streets, trying to feel nostalgia trickle through the wood work, but I fail. As though these streets were a whole other world than the one I loved and left. Even our regular bar, where we've spent countless drunk nights, fails to move me like I thought it would. (Like I thought it should.) I feel numb and decide not to ponder the meaning of all this until later.

But then I was awoken by my roommate's early morning plans, hours before our normal rising time, and I could tell immediately that something was different. There was sun.

After weeks of gray cold wind and news anchors leaping head-first into words like fall and change and over, a bright sunlight was making its way across the houses, the lush trees and glittering cars, and the entire world looked different.

Before I had rubbed the sleep--or, indeed, last night's mascara--from my eyes, I was on the 11, bound for the sea. The tram hadn't even reached its final stop when it came into view: blue, glittering, endless. I had to force myself not to run the last bit to the cliffs, and then, there it was: the ache in my heart that said This is where you belong.

The way the smooth rock warms up in the August sun. THe sound of the waves softly lapping against the shore. The cool breeze, the white sailboats. The smell of salt and kelp and the color of the sea.

The place was deserted; school had started, vacations long forgotten. I sat there in the near-silence; I was one with the earth. As my shoulders warmed in the mid-day sun, the water turned an even deeper shade of blue. I postpone my confusion a little longer; for this one moment, all is well, with the world.

A/Part

Twenty-five thousand people swell out of the wide open gates, racing onward to new destinations, spreading like veins in a river to their respective destinations: clubs, lawns, forest parties where the beer is cheap. I love this spirit, like everyone is going somewhere, and knowing that the city is full of people who normally wouldn't be here, or who would be home watching television, she says. She loves the feeling that the town is alive, that somebody else is sprinting around madly, hoping for fun. I take her keys, begin the walk home. Not tired, but too weary to run alongside her. Too weary to endure their eager eyes and their bleeding hearts singing in unison.

The town's most beloved son returns, ten years after that record, and a sea of his disciples screams every word as tears run down their faces. Holding hands, they revel in the Bigness of it all and the feeling that they were not alone in feeling it. Once the storm has passed, voices proclaim their amazement, and their joy in how far they've come since those teenage years and the endless despair.

I remember when the album came; I remember who I was. Ten years later, and not much has changed. I leave the gig indifferent, or, perhaps, a little further from the masses still. His sad stumblings across these streets and his outstretched hand ended, eventually. He goes home tonight to his wife and his children and his success. How beautiful that is, they say, and leave content, knowing the same awaits them once their beer glasses are empty.

As I walk the last paces to the apartment, the air is so quiet that my footsteps make a dizzying sound in my ears. Far away, the after parties send beats drifting in through the balcony door of the empty house. I stare at the screen, too much to say and still no peace of mind to say it. If a tree fell in the forest and no one heard it, did it make a sound? I bruised my knees, regardless.

White Blank Page

So many days, running past me, whirling like autumn winds and it's too soon, too quick, too overwhelming. I tumble along the rip tide and try to stay up long enough for air but I am not allowed the time to digest, to stare at any sort of paper where I may turn the confusion to words, to make sense of the madness, the impressions. I mill in crowds before stages of loud music and have so much to say but no space in which to say it. Nights are late, sleep is instant and I pass too many hours in beds that aren't mine; I am never alone (I'm alone all the time). Up and on to the next. I jot down notes in my phone and hope I will remember after the intoxications have passed, the night.

After a week of clouds and rain and impending mud, the sun broke through and warmed my shoulders as I sat in the grass, keeping beat. It shone undiscriminating on the crowd of my supposedly like-mindeds. But I find no comfort in togetherness. I writhe anxiously as I look over the field, the club, the tram, the street. The closer you are to me, the more I close my skin around me, the further away I feel.

I took a bus across the bridge the other day. For a brief second, the sun shone on the sea, which glittered and sparkled in the distance, at the edge of the city. I thought, I might jump off this bridge, and swim out into the ocean, until I, might glitter, too.

A Little Fall of Rain

Heavy skies eclipse the day's plans. The week's plans. Inside the warm apartment, my head is stuffed with cotton balls and cold viruses; I can barely be bothered to fight them. Sometimes our bodies tell us when it's time to stop. Contrary to popular belief, I am not slow to listen.

An arm full of scars and a mind full of ghosts, she is lost in this world and scrambling to get out. When you've fought for so long, it's difficult to believe there actually will be relief around the corner. Suddenly, my world is filled with people who are struggling for air, each in their own personal hell and I wonder how we all ended up in these places. We had such promising futures, when we were young.

Yet the relief in recognition is short. I feel my body and mind separate, my face smiling, my legs carrying me to another social circle, but my self shrinking slowly and enclosing itself in a thick shell and closing off. I go through the motions, but all I really want is to sit on a rock in the ocean, staring at the ends of the earth.

Outside my window, the sun breaks through the thick clouds. I take my borrowed bike, roll through the streets where I once belonged, feel the wind blow softly through my hair. And rain, will make the flowers grow.

Carry Me Home

Days rush past; there is little time to dwell near the keyboard and ponder words. I wish this were not the case. My mind a whirl with thoughts and feelings, it longs for typekeys to make it all make sense again. We react differently to the tidal waves: some long for activity without break; I need that moment of silent solitude to regroup, put into words, let the silence wash it all away.

He says he believes in my writing that story; for a second, I am convinced, gladly accepting the confirmation before self-doubt and "reality" strike back. We are all lost, trembling in our insecurities, our disappointments of what this life turned into. I scramble for coherence, even now, even here. People put new decades in front of the zero, and some do not mind. They are at the righ step in the maze. I can't decide if I envy them.

The point is, if I were to give up, on the dream, the life, the city, where would I go when I cannot go back here? There is no place for me here. Rustling trees whisper at me that I will pine for them hopelessly. A million beautiful people pass me, and I know our eyes will never meet. The air is cold as I walk quickly to the tram; I stare straight into the light and hope for a warming ray. Perhaps, tomorrow, the answer will reveal itself. Perhaps, tomorrow, all will not be lost.

Unsatisfied, I close the lid to my laptop, tie up the leathered straps on my journal, turn off the lights. Too much left to say, I twist and turn in my borrowed bed. Perhaps, tomorrow, this too shall pass.

Up For Air

Thin mattress in the corner of a room. I placed my suitcase here days ago but have yet to stay here. The days pass quickly in a daze of alcohol and making up for lost time. As though the time were actually lost. As though it didn't feel like no time had passed since last I walked these streets, since last I saw these faces.

I still react to the voices around me; they speak a language I know but rarely hear on Hudson Street. I react to the fairness of their skin, the familiarity of their ways. But beyond that, it is as though I had never left. This city, so ingrained in my memory, I walk the wrong way home from the bar because I forget that my apartment is not mine, and I am borrowing the sleeping space. We make breakfast together and I forget that I have a whole life in New York, it is a million miles away.

Walking from one under-the-radar forest party to the next, we get lost in the steep uphill climb and find ourselves alone at the top of the city. No lights, no people, not a single sound but our careful breathing as we allow ourselves to be scared by the brief darkness of a Swedish summer. I stand still and listen to the silence; in the absence of sound, my mind hisses, confused. When we walk down the hill again, dawn is slowly creeping in through the trees.

The fifteen minutes of walking home after breakfast today were the first moments of solitude I'd had since my late, whirlwind arrival two days ago. I cannot digest anything yet. I am swept away in the madness of it all, the magic of it all. I fear if I stopped to think, I would not know which way to turn. Jet lag dances across my eyes; I pray for imminent sleep.

Departure

All day, all week, I got caught off guard by the Travel Jitters. They surprise me; I have made this trip a hundred times, and still before every trip, at the back of my spine climbs a slight unease, a tickle of excitement, a tremble of uncertain control. And while I should have been abating this restlessness by running my errands and planning my packing, my every night lately has been spent in the company of those I love, whiling away the New York Summer Nights in drops of sweat and echoing laughter. I have no regrets.

And then, now, when the packing has, at last, been done, when my clothes are laid out and my alarm is set, though the hour of departure draws near, I am calm. I fear not the unexpected, I am not anxious nor impatient. I am going Home.

I spoke to a dear friend the other day, and before he'd finished saying hello, I knew something had changed. After years of trudging through a sweet but seemingly harmless relationship, he had fallen completely in love. It shone through his eyes, trickled through his voice. He said this is what it's supposed to feel like, and all the clichés danced around our conversation in the most uncomplicated way. They were the matching puzzle pieces, in the other's eyes they saw forever. And then I realized what was different, what I'd seen before he'd even said a word: he was calm. It was as though he had found a safe place to land, and he was no longer chased by whatever demons, outside or in, that normally haunted his shifty eyes and itchy posture.

If you trust the soft landing, you need not fear the fall. Perhaps that is what love is. Perhaps that, is Home.

Of Two Wholes

I pulled out my suitcase from the closet the other day; it fills half the available floor space, a constant reminder of change to come. I haven't had the time to pack, but it lies there, awaiting my attention, my realizing that mere hours remain before the plane leaves and my backdrop changes completely.

So many years passed when these two continents were completely different worlds, where every trip between the two meant forgetting the other. So many years passed where the same could be said for me. I would spend my time in one country, and there would be a whole other person lying in wait in the other, as though she didn't fit the mold, as though she weren't allowed through customs. Every time I moved, be it east or west, I had to leave half of myself behind. I had to let her die, so that the other half could survive the journey.

Next week it will be 17 years since I first moved to America, to the land of the Great Dream and limitless possibilities. This was the country where I blossomed, but also where my clean slate erased my history. Where I learned quickly to erase any trace of an accent, where I assimilated, but also where I, for the first time, felt like my being different was an asset, not a burden. Next week it will be 17 years, and the incessant back-and-forths that followed have softened my dividing line. I allow American me to bounce around Sweden; I allow Swedish me to nuance the blacks and whites of my American self. I force myself to merge the two. I remind myself to pack them both.

I walked up ninth avenue this morning, and it felt like September. Such a cool breeze, such a sweet scent in the air. I took a deep breath, soaking up America so I could bring it with me on my trip. I'll be back soon, I said, but perhaps it's been 17 years since I was ever, really, gone.