And In the End

Orphan puppy sleeps. I put my hand on her body to make sure she is still breathing. Wrap us both in my blankets and try my hardest to fill her tiny body with my warmth and my love. Make the best of this last time that she has.

I am already exhausted from the day's emotional exertion. My heart is lead, my eyes brimming with tears at every turn. We sit at the kitchen table discussing our ideas of death, of love and loss, of the life after. We don't agree on any of the topics, but today it doesn't matter. We are making the best of this last time that we have.

Everytime she stirs, I am grateful. Everytime she looks up, walks across the floor, sees that she is home. It's another hour we get to spend with her.

Life is precious. The reminder is painful, but it springs little blossoms of joy in my heart. Precious. We should all be so grateful.

Epitome

Fates conspire against us. Great yellow machines dig up Leroy Street and cut all our cables; we live the week without connections and I can't decide if I miss it.

Orphan puppy spends another night at the hospital. There is an empty space where her three pounds used to lie, and we don't know if she'll ever curl up there again. I miss the patter of her feet on the hardwood floor, the softness of her inquisitive affection against the groove of my neck. The thought that she is spending her last days among strangers breaks our hearts and we long to take her home, if only for a few last moments of peace.

Life is precious. We must remember to be grateful for what we have, and make the most of what we can get out of it. The weather clears. March beckons on the horizon.

How heavy my heart, tonight.

February

How little changes, year after year. We are who we were. I learn my patterns, hold my breath, and brace myself for the last struggle before it gets easy again.

It always gets easy. Spring always returns. And February, is almost over.

http://twodollarstwentysevencents.blogspot.com/2010/02/puppy-always-gets-scared-and-hides-when.html

On Domesticity

It occurred to me recently
that I am very close
to being but a year and a half from 30.
And though I realize that 30
is the new 20
it still scared the shit out of me.

Somewhere along the line
I promised myself
I'd have my life in order by then.
You know,
grown up,
gotten a job,
gotten back on the right track.

Tonight I contemplated the baby
growing in my dear friend's belly
and the ridiculous commercials
of homemaker women
whose lives seem composed
of lunch boxes
and air fresheners
and minivans

and I know I imagine that life
to be
so much simpler than it possibly could,
but God
some nights
it's awful tempting,
nonetheless.

Abridged

It was cold, too cold, there'd be other opportunities for a stroll and the trains run so frequently on weekdays. But before I knew it, I'd reached the Bedford Avenue entrance and was slowly making my way onto the Williamsburg Bridge.

Perhaps the wine helped, kept my legs warm. Perhaps it was the sweet remnants of invaluable friendship, still coursing through my veins and reminding me what an amazing thing that is. Here we are, in the City, all together, how blessed are we?, and I couldn't help but smile. As I climbed to the peak, my ears filled with Axl Rose in his youth and my step kept his quick beat. I felt like an animal released to pasture in the spring, I stretched my tired muscles and sang along.

The Williamsburg bridge, all steel beam prison and glimpses of the world, the city beyond, was nearly empty; lone bikers rode home in the opposite directions. The J train passed below, countless cars, but mostly I felt as though it were all mine, and, with it, so was the city. For that brief moment, how high I was. Literally, too. At the descent on the other end, I looked up and saw nothing but the night sky, and was again reminded how unusual that is. I was lowered past people's 12th story windows, saw the skyscrapers I know as friends disappear behind rising buildings. Considered that if I jumped from here it would still be an awfully long way to go.

And then, suddenly, deposited on Delancey Street as though the whole thing were a mirage. Crossing the Lower East Side streets, my Manhattan streets, as though Brooklyn weren't a world away and hadn't I been here all along? Turn a corner and there is Morton Street. You may act surprised, but in fact it is nothing unusual.

All roads lead to home, if you let them.

Block.

I stare at the screen. Scroll back over the pages. Read passages I adore, passages I can't stand to see, and consider where to begin. I can't tackle the ending, it breaks my heart. But after a few hours of strikethroughs, it seems I cannot tackle any other part either. Frustrated, I resign myself and whisper Tomorrow, but it makes me feel no better about today.

I took a long walk through the neighborhood today, to visit a friend in Chelsea. Walked through the projects and remembered how those exact streets had looked four years ago when we went there for a gallery stroll. I know them so well, now. I weaved through Saturday afternoon traffic until I got to the edges of the Meatpacking District, those few corners that are still seedy, dirty, decrepid. I love them. Then navigating through the maze that is the West Village, over the cobblestones, back to my beautiful Morton Street, to my New York City home.

Some days, New York appears more enchanted than others. Some days, simply by existing, by showing me streets I have not seen for a while, it reminds me of its magic, of its sweet secrets waiting to be uncovered. On days like that, all that has been can be easily forgotten, all the bad wiped away and I remember again why I came.

I don't know how I'll ever be able to leave.

A Plague On Both Your Houses

We were young; we knew not yet that the world did not revolve around us. Our world was that small town, those rules, a universe of feelings fit into yet-small bodies, unexperienced, flawless. We navigated our presents without care for our futures, and even the new morning could see our dispositions changed. We sat in the back of the movie theater and drowned in Shakespeare one night, each other's lips the next. All the world was a stage and yet we required it not, our stage was so small, so contained.

Are we the same people, still? With our children, our careers, our stage so much larger, our considerations so much more complex, are we still the eager youths we once were?

Perhaps the question is best left unanswered, the ghosts best left unstirred. We know how it ends; why wait until the final breath, hoping for altered pasts that may save the future? The exit music plays, we leave the theater and return to our real lives, and everything has changed.

That's the only fact that remains the same.

the Swan Queen

The theater emptied quietly. Thursday night, there were only a handfull of patrons there. Besides, it had been running for a while. We parted ways on Broadway, she found a cab quickly while I pulled my clothes tighter, tried to catch my breath. The New York night was freezing again. Stiff fingers tried desperately to roll a cigarette, finally I had to stop in the street. I stuck my trembling hands in my coat pockets and smoked with the cigarette resting between my lips all the way down west 10th.

The film stayed with me as I walked home. It heightened every sense. I heard the steady beat of my heels against the concrete, it echoed against the quiet townhouse bricks and reassured me. Lights strung in trees seemed to shine brighter, the cold was sharper. People walking past didn't affect me. I felt a dance move in me, every muscle tensed, relaxed, twisted and leapt, my eyes alert. Battles of a dark heart and a frail mind, or perhaps the opposite, dueling and teasing within me.

I suppose the story was not new. I suppose the insight was not revealing. We already have the answers within us. We already know what they say. The magic lies in having those feelings stirred anew.

I felt it.

Perfect.

I was perfect.

Play. God.

I return, after such a long absence, to the Book. It lies there, waiting, dogeared and unkempt. I forget where I ended. I forget what the whole thing is about, or perhaps I only pretend to. I turn on a playlist from long ago, and I get to work.

Perhaps it's the music. Perhaps it's the sad note on which I last ended. But within a minute I am engrossed in the story, I forget about the room, the cold floor, the list of things to do before bed. Orphan puppy lies on my chest, wrapped in my college sweater, while I type furiously, trying to fight the story that is already there, the path of which is already clear.

I cannot save it. I cannot paint a brighter ending. It wrote itself in my mind long ago, and I fear with it, I wrote my own story as well. The playlist like exit music. End scene. I see a deadline looming up ahead. When I have to be finished with the book. When I have to be finished with the adventure.

Maybe people are never satisfied, she says. Maybe we always have the dream that got away, while we revert to what's safe, what's comfortable. I still regret the things that never were.

The draft from the window rushes down to the floor where I lie. It makes me shiver. How late is too late to rewrite our endings?

of Sand and Sea

Such a sunny Sunday; when I woke up, my window was open, and mild, cool air wafted in over my warm bed. I can only assume I had opened it in my sleep earlier that night. After a week of procrastination, finally I collected my quarters and went to do laundry, to wash the clothes of my trip. For so long I had put it off, reluctant to rid them of their salt and sand. My gawdily colorful beach towel came out smelling of clean, soft, dryer sheets and it made me sad. I left the trip behind. We couldn't throw it out, said my mother of the sand, we emptied it into the flower pot. My mother is not one for nostalgia. Such is our love for Australia.

Meanwhile, orphan puppy has taken to sleeping in my bed. I allow my sleep to be interrupted, inconvenienced. I find myself postponing things on my to-do list in order to bury her in love that will mend her broken heart. I upend my every container of tenderness on her for the last few days she is with us, seemingly doling out more affection the nearer the farewell comes.

Typical.

It is easier to love what I know will not last. This is no comment of the safety of objects lost.

I just tire so quickly, of commitments.

Saturday Light Naïve

St. Marks remains a pillar of comfort, of reliability.

Lives fall apart in the city, even after years and wedding bands and babies. What do I do now? she says, and I have nothing to say. Black and white is never as easy when his grays have nestled into your every pore. Your life is mine now, my life yours. If this ends here, who are we?

We walk west until St. Marks turns into 8th until it ends and we navigate the greenwich village maze. I cannot find my pyjamas and fall asleep in the button down shirt of a man who is not mine.

Shirt and man, both.

Friday Nights

We are going to dance! she exlaims for a week, preparing for the weekend of her birthday. A motley crew trundles through Williamsburg to the narrow bar where lumber jack-wannabes crowd onto the nonexistant dance floor, and the DJ loses himself in 1980 and 1991.

Eventually, I walk home alone down glazed streets along a row of cat calls. New York City sleeps when no one is looking and only the garbage gets picked up. Orphan puppy is tumbling about in my week's worth of dirty laundry; when I go to bed she nestles in my armpit and putters happily while I sort through work emails that were lost in the excitement of Friday evening.

How simple the pleasures of life, sometimes.

Ultima Thule

They said there would be an ice storm. I woke up to glistening, frozen branches outside my window, but walked out to inches of cold, cold water all along Hudson Street. Miserable doesn't begin to cover it. The children stopped and played in every puddle between the swim lesson and the house. Their joy so contagious, I couldn't keep from dancing the last block myself.

I want this winter to be over. I always want winter to be over, but this year, it seems like such a continuous slap in the face.

Still, as I walked home from Hell's Kitchen last night, my back straight and my heels reassuringly even in their pace across the slippery streets, I couldn't help but feel happy about where I was. The grayer New York gets, the colder, the tougher, the dirtier, the more miserable, the more my heart paints curlicues and rainbows around its name. I miss Australia something fierce, the sun, the surf, the sweetness of the people and the ease of living, but this is my home.

This is my home.