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.