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.