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.