Musings

There was a great rain today. Everything smelled of June in the countryside, when the flowers are just blooming, and school is just out for summer. We ran barefoot through the grass and it took until August for our soles to toughen up. Piles of books were read, late nights met early dawns and my legs would get wet in the dew.

The rain did not bring me down, then. It reminded me of things that are beautiful, and light, and that wait around the corner. The rain, will make the flowers grow.

Overs

But how can you be leaving? You are New York. You love this place more than anyone I know. We stood in line for coffee at one of the delis at NYU. The summer sun was bright; we made our way quickly to Washington Square Park to catch up. Apparently, my announcement came with some surprise.

We sat in the sun and watched the streams of people pass us by. She spun tales of the drama since last we met; it had been a while, there was so much to say. When I got home in the afternoon, my cheeks had a new flush to them.

Last night, as I sat on the rooftop of the pasta factory in Brooklyn, looking out over that glittering skyline, they both said Do you mean to say that you are leaving this?

But I'm not. Not really. Home is where the heart is.

And I heart New York.

Summer Sun

I wake up, and my feet are already warmed by the morning sun, long before my alarm clock rings. Another night, and another wash of green paint covers the land. I step out into the early morning, and the warm breeze stirs my wintered heart. It is summer.

And oh, how quickly I forget there was ever a dark day, ever a chill in my bone or death in my veins. My back straightens, my steps are long, even. The streets smell of flowers, of life, of soft velvet nights and bright blinding days. I forget my sunglasses but enjoy squinting; I love what it means. I smile at strangers and splurge on deep red strawberries at the market. Orphan Puppy comes out and dances along the sidewalk while I take deep, warm breaths and stretch my every muscle. There is only this now, only this.

Because there are things to worry about, plans to make. Time runs out of New York, time runs out of my youth, but it will be okay. There is sunshine to drink, life to live, songs to be sung. The dreary piles of debris and gathered angst will go nowhere anyways, so let them wait. Enjoy this moment now, this feeling while it lasts. Make it worth every November rain. I will breathe, while the air is new.

The In-Between

And in just a day, the world is entirely different. The magnolia in the courtyard loses all its petals and is suddenly a tangle of green. Everything smells again: the streets, the flowers, the food, the garbage. People peel off layers of clothing, but rain lies heavy in the periphery. Don't trust your eyes, you'll end up soaked in your flip-flops.

I float in some sort of apathetic surreality. How beautiful the summer sun, how limitless the potential. I divulge my great announcement to faces of disbelief, and I have nothing with which to counter. Life is changing. Roll with the punches. I am excited.

There are too many things to think, to process, to mourn. For now, I revel in regression, repression, and obscene amounts of music from eons past. Life was not simpler then. It's just simpler, now.

To Gather Moss

The neighborhood was so quiet, but along Hudson Street, all the streetside restaurants were packed with Sunday revelers staring into the sun. The warm air whispered of summer. By the time I walked back home from Chelsea, drunk and full of Easter giggles, it was pouring again.

Last night, I dreamed again of that gigantic basement storage. We rummaged about, finding all sorts of everythings, neatly stacked and stored, filling every cupboard; anything we could possibly need was there. The foundation of a home, grounded in the earth, where nothing needed to be disposed of or sacrificed, nothing wanted for.

Interpretation seemed superfluous, come morning.

(How does that feel?)

Bright Lights

The beginning of the end, but perhaps it started long ago. Perhaps the end draws near the second we begin, at all. We must ignore inevitable death to bear living.

I thought I would feel relieved, once the words were spoken. I thought I would feel free. Instead there is a great void in my gut, and a million magnolias can't make my heart of lead any lighter. The spring sun shines brightly, the busy streets carry on as usual. Orphan puppy sleeps in my laundry pile, and none of my playlists seem appropriate anymore.

Do you remember that party, years ago, that we just happened upon? I went home to your house early, you all stayed. I lay there listening to Matchbox Twenty loudly and knew, somehow, that life would be a long string of sorrowed days. I dreaded departure, but could never get myself to stay.

New York, darling, it's not you. It's me.

Morton Street

Home.

The simple pleasure of arrival, so quickly washed away by the knowledge of what's to come. I try to rejoice, but the clouds of anxiety and sorrow and guilt all travel through me at every step, every smile. I've known this feeling before, but avoided it at all costs. You hurt the ones you love. I can't look you in the eyes, just now.

Orphan puppy was confused by my return. It took her a few hours of walking around the apartment and staring sadly in my general direction, before she finally got into my room and started burrowing in random pieces of clothing. The vet had said that she is thriving. My heart breaks a million times that I cannot keep the perfect world intact.

Homecoming is lovely, calm. The magnolia trees outside my window are a sea of pink petals; the gingko leaves are just beginning to sprout. New York is a drizzle, but I still want to see it, to breathe it, to reunite. I let myself fall asleep early, so when I wake, the world is still mine alone. I brace myself for the fall. The times, they are a-changing.

En Fin

We grow tired. Life on the road is exhausting, and there's still so much work to be done. Still, we sit in the sunshine on the Place in Nice, drinking coffee and frenetically writing ideas, and we know how blessed this life is. This is our job, now, and it would be ridiculous to complain about any bit of it.

I look through images on my computer, pictures uploaded only a few days ago. I had already forgotten how beautiful that place was. Already, vineyards, cobblestones, wine bottles, melt into one another and I can't distinguish one from the other. If the life is privileged, the responsibility is to always appreciate it.

We buy a bottle of red, a selection of smelly cheese and smoked meats, and retire to our room. Saturday night on the Côte D'Azure, our greatest luxury is a quiet night in. If this is life, now, I think I can live with it. In the end, after all, I don't know what the alternative would be.

Vagabondery

We spend the morning rebooking tickets, pushing returns to further in the future. Someday we will go home, but not yet. Someday we will have a home, but not now. The Spring sun shines on us and nothing seems impossible. We have another glass of wine, have another glass of giggles. We talk of the future, and the things we see amaze us, scare us, titillate us. We are in awe of what opens up before us.

It seems somehow inevitable. We are at this point now, on this verge of a whole new tomorrow, and it seems the most obvious outcome. Had we been older when we were young, perhaps we would have known. Instead we strained and fought in our different directions, in our individual rebellions. Here we are now, and it feels like home.

Like what else would we do with our lives, but be mad, and live it?

On the Vine

Row after row of dark, dry stubs, seemingly dead, like a forest after the fire. They wash the countryside in an ocean of greys and browns, of uninteresting indifference. But we park the car anyways, we step out onto the dry earth and make our way down the rows. The sun has returned, our cheeks are flushed. Far away in the treetops, familiar birds sing familiar tunes; the side of the road is littered with the flowers of childhoods past. And there, when we get real close to the gnarled bark, to the dreary corpses and spindly arms, there they are. A million tiny leaves, breaking through the hardened lava, fighting their way to the surface, to the sun. Every leaf is a brand new baby, shiny and flawless, that new bright green that only comes in Spring, and never lasts through the cycle of the seasons. We are born to die.

But oh, when we live, how brightly we shine.

With a View

I saw your pictures on Facebook. In New York the cherry trees are in full bloom. They litter the streets with their petals of pink.

I had forgotten to think of the City. Just for a moment. I got caught unawares.

I think of leaving, and it breaks my heart.

Trop Dure la Vie

Another night, another French village, another party with complete strangers who took us in and let us smoke in their living room. We crashed early, and I dreamed of babies and a place where I wasn't always tripping over somebody else's language. The weather plunged and we spent the day shivering through a medieval village outside Bordeaux, drinking bubbly and traversing cloisters. When they say the Old Town here, they really mean it. I found cherries in bloom, and the simple pleasure of seeing them surprised my heart. We sank ourselves into the mud of the vines as he gently touched the little shoots and explained their futures. The whole world was that new green for which my heart longs every cold, dead winter.

We walked past a lilac in full bloom, uninhibitedly throwing itself out of an ancient wall. The smell hit me in the chest and told me of childhood summers where the grass was always soft, the world was always free. The cold didn't bother me so much then. Adventure will keep us warm.

Pyrénéen

Three hours of sleep before being painfully yanked back into existence. Clean up, clear out. The French Riviera met another sunny day and the remains of the week that passed evaporated quickly into oblivion, as we pulled our bags to the rental car and set our sights westward. We passed the mountains, the spring flowered trees, temperatures on the dashboard rising as the buds along the side of the road grew bigger, lusher. Thirty-three degrees and snow-covered Pyrenees whispered of Spain within reach, but we slowed as the roads grew winding, the villages small. My eyes fought to stay open as we carefully navigated the village streets; strangers, thought the sage residents as we passed.

We did not know what to expect here. We followed our young winemaker on his tour of the various vines straddled across scraggly rocks and mustard-covered fields. There, behind the castle, there is the ocean, he said, as his daughter concluded in her curious French that we must be sisters, because our hair was the same. When he left us at the village square, another group of strangers gladly took us in and tore us along to their barbecue down the street. Everyone was a vintner, everyone brought a bottle of their own to the fête, whether there were labels for it or not. I struggled to keep my eyes open, I struggled to keep my French intact; both were failing.

Hours later, we regretfully made our way up the hill to the guesthouse where we would finally sleep. In the dead quiet of the sleeping village, our eyes were again alert, our tongues loosened, our prospects bright, but the alarm clock loomed large in the near future. Another day, another adventure. The ancient doors gave way, cold tiles soothed my bare feet as they walked those last steps to the bed. Another day, another adventure. My body slept long before my head hit the pillow.

À Cannes

Dawn rises over the Côte d'Azure. The last media marketers stumble home in awkward messes of business and pleasure. The Croisette lies silent, the sidewalks wet with bleach as memories quickly get wiped away with a fresh scent. I help my colleague pack, get to the bus before he crashes. I thank my jet lag for the bright eyes and collected mind, but a minute later curse it for the inability to sleep. Check-out time looms closer, the next step of the adventure awaits.

Suddenly, I am in a whole other world. Cold, windy New York is ages away and here are only palm trees, only warm sun, only people in the business. Like family. The sun rises on our corpses. We are already saying our see you soons.

I love a good adventure.

In Spring

There was one moment, as we walked south on Park Avenue, and the early evening sunlight streamed through the skyscraped streets, with trees just on the verge of bloom and that distinct smell of cigarette smoke and warm pavement lingering in the air, the wide Manhattan avenue stretching into forever, that I thought I love this place more than I ever knew I could.

It was a good day.

On the L train

Okay, we really are both going to be late. I have to get a cab, he said as we stumbled out of the bar into the still soft light of spring twilight. April. The crowds were just beginning to look for dinner tables or opening drinks, and here we were, already too many in. A cab came, we forgot to say goodbye, he jumped into the car and I disappeared into the underground, late for the dinner date in Brooklyn. I dizzily climbed aboard the F train, and as the door closed I processed the voice that said the next stop was Spring street and the train was running on the A line. Damn construction. The doors popped open for a second and I jumped out, made my way to the uptown trains and the 14th street L train instead. Slowly the last of the giddy drink seeped into my system and put my head on the floor. By the time the train had reached Union Square, my world was spinning and my forehead was clammy. So many stairs to get out of that deep, dark tunnel before reaching the crisp air up above. I tripped down University Place, attempting to text excuses and direct questioning tourists, but mostly trying to put one foot in front of the other, before finally, finally collapsing in the apartment and having to reveal to my roommate and her dinner guests what I was doing home so early.

$2.25 to ride the subway around the block and get nowhere, but slowly. Five years later, and I suppose that's where we still stand. Same story, every time. I end up dizzy on the streets of New York, but I always come back for more.

Curbside

The streets look so different from a cab. These streets I walk every day, tiring my feet and soaking up the city, they're a whole other world from the back of that car. How small the city, how easy to digest. How heavy the eyelids and grateful the limbs, to be deposited at the stoop and tumble into bed.

I sleep so soundly in the City that never does.