Heritage

It's your grandmother. 
She's not well.

The sun reflected so brightly in the neighbor's balcony door. Summer evening and the apartment was warm, serene. The words lingered, unable to connect to the appropriate emotion. Rational trains of thought kicked in. They do that when we need them, sometimes. It is coolly comforting.

Later, I found myself in the kitchen, cooking up a batch of elder flower lemonade; we nicked the flowers last night and hoped no one would call us on it. I stirred sugar into boiling water, layered lemons and fragrant blooms into the pot, working mechanically, methodically, considering packing options, travel schedules. The sense of going through motions calms impatient nerves, impending tears.

I have her laugh. It is silly and annoying and will drive people crazy, but it is mine, and it is hers. I always loved that laugh. I always loved what it meant.

Life is long.
It is never long enough. 

Saturation

6.5 years of higher education. 60,000 dollars in student loans to be paid back, in full. A title, a license, a career staked out, an adulthood into which to enter, a symbolic order to adhere to, a Life to be lived properly. 30. I spent my entire life playing catchup, always feeling too old for my desires, always too slow, always with the sense that life was already passing me by and I was Alice, running with the Red Queen and trying desperately just to stay where I was, nevermind advancing.

Well fuck it.

I have a life here, I do. Impoverished though it may be, I have health insurance, a bicycle, a piano, relatives, work, safety nets. I am not blind to its advantages. But since I made up my mind that night mere days ago, my heart has sung a tune no social security can buy. My blood rushes through me at twice its normal pace and I forget to breathe, it doesn't matter. I find myself frozen still only to realize I'm laughing. I know part of it is the magic of a ticket, a change in the weather, of running away, but it can't be the whole truth. It can't.

You are the one relationship I don't want to bail...
...that doesn't terrify me...
...New York.
Please say it isn't over.

It occurs to me that I had no idea.
We haven't even started yet.

to Watch Over (Me)

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark. 

Woody Allen irks me, his neuroticism and severe case of perverted old man, they get under my skin and hinder my enjoying his supposed genius. But the night grows long, my bruised limbs swim in hung over anxieties, the fog of life still lies thick, and I long for a little ease. I jones for a hit of New York.

Hours later, another set of closing credits, Stockholm is as far away as ever. I can smell the streetcarts on a steamy July day, my nerves sing with that restless uncertainty, that relentless ambition that streams through the city's veins. I can feel the exact way the subway trains swing in the downhill to the stop at West 4th Street. It is a lovely drug, pleasant, with the power to remove me just far enough from reality that I am content.

Its only problematic side effect is that I want more, and more, and never to go a moment without.

Chapter One:
He adored New York City.


I could not have said it better myself.

Advent

I pull down the blinds. I never do that; I know I do it in anger. The dawn outside is the most beautiful one I've seen all summer, it is to no avail. The apartment remains dark.

The island was so beautiful, the sunset streaming rainbows across the water, clouds billowing along pine-covered horizons, it was no use. I took long strokes through the cold water, again and again until the sprained wrist fell heavy at my side. It did not satisfy. I couldn't put my finger on it--was this not exactly what I long for, the nearness to nature, the exquisite splendor of Life in its most basic form? I left annoyed.

I am lost. I thought I could always be found on a midsummer's night, but I am numb now. Back in the city, the streets are quietly rowdy, only kids couldn't afford to leave for greener pastures. The wind died down, morning is blood red outside my window. I pull down the blinds.

I don't know what it is I am looking for.

of the Midnight Sun

The phone beeped again. Another picture from north of the Arctic Circle, a valley spreading out under the midnight sun. It must be dawn now, it's lighter than when we came up here. The delicious sense of not knowing if it's evening or morning. The moment that makes all the others worth enduring.

Meanwhile, I sat in a park in the city, looking out over South Island rooftops, and we knew it was evening, if not for long. I spend all my days drunk now, it's too hard to resist, too easy to be swept away, I forget to sleep. Summer is like love and eating seems superfluous, common decency with it. I consider taking my sleeping bag and moving into the grass. Every leaf has the power to take my breath away.

Deciding to leave allows me to love this city, this moment, this summer. Early stages of separation grants me the freedom to embrace without fear, to ignore the faulty steps and failed comparisons. I will leave.

But I will laugh every step of the way.

Sainted.

She the kind of girl
Who'll fracture her mind
Till it's light
She'll break her own heart
And you
Know
That she'll break your heart too
So darling, let go of her hand

in D.

These fingers once danced across alabaster keys. Not real alabaster keys, but we paid good money buying the piano off relatives; I still remember the day it moved into our living room. Now I align sheet music like literature, try to decipher its message. It is no use, I am illiterate. But leaving the strange symbols in my vision long enough, ancient steps awake in those fingers again; I play by memory, it's still there.

15 years and how lost I was, tumbling through the wilderness of what Life had amounted to, I had only those alabaster keys to hold on to, and I held for dear life. How every day was an endless beating against strips of white and black, angry violence and soft caresses to make sense of a world that did not. 30 years now and all I have to show for them is a loss of the melody, resignation to the jungle.

The night grew long, the drinks grew so many. Strangers were made friends in the soft trickle of rain; this is a Monday night, this is the city on its best behavior. My cheeks flushed with gratitude over the people that fill my days. But the song is not the same. Words lost can not be compensated with harmonies and alabaster. My fingers run along impatient question marks.

I cannot answer them.

Misted

The fog crept in early, remains of dinner still spread out over the table. He put logs in the fire, sparks and smoke billowed out of the chimney, with their own life and their own business. The sauna was ready.

Hours later, every ounce of sweat silently run out of every pore, I lay alone in the quiet guest house, clinging tragically to one bar of cell phone service, trying desperately to keep up with the goings-on of the "real world".

A weekend in the country should lower my pulse, heighten my senses. But I am numb to the immediate beauty of nature, the smells of the forest, the cacophony of birdsong in the trees.

Last night runs quickly through my veins, still, the beat of the city heart. It is me, now. I sleep better to the sounds of the streets, I rest. This silence only tries to remind me of the dreams I no longer have.

With Feeling

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. 
The second best time is now.

The apartment floor is a mess of newly arrived baubles, torn out of a storage in the little town, where the entire contents of my former life lie in wait, for the day when they will be needed, when I will be whole and well put-together. These few trinkets, instruments, nostalgic fuzz, I couldn't help but bring them here, begin to build a new life and keep them as my foundation. They make me feel happy.

Perhaps that's why this decision was so easy.

It's time to go home.

And it's a long way to go, lacked funds nip at my heels and demand to know what fairy tale it is I am trying to entertain, reality rears its ugly head and that's only a mirror it's holding, anyways. No matter. I dance around the apartment debris, forget to eat, to sleep, listen to that sad song again and laugh because it cannot bring me down from the ceiling, not tonight. The solution is to always keep an airplane ticket in your back pocket. Perhaps I had to get still enough to remember how to run. When you finish the sentence it seems ridiculous it should've taken you so long to decipher it.

New York, honey, I'm coming for you.
You were always the One, after all.

So You Will.

The bar smelled just like the one on West 3rd street in the Village, the one where we would go and drink on Saturday afternoons before the crowds caught on, and we would stumble out in the early evening, kissing question marks into each other's drunken commutes home. It smelled just like it; I took deep, long breaths to make it mine. A game flashed by on the flat screen, I was not there anymore.

There are days I do not think of the City more than in passing, days when its image does not tear great big gashes across my chest. But they are few, and endlessly far between. It is self-indulgent, I know, the whining self-pity echoes through my empty apartment and the ether beyond, it does no one any good. My broken record scratches my senses. He writes that the job came through, the plans arranged themselves neatly, the move back across the pond has been scheduled for spring. The elation in my heart for their bright futures could only just keep my head over the surface; within ring storms of the deepest envy and sorrow for what I have not.

It turns out, after all the painted rainbows and imagined unicorns, that a life without New York to me is no life. That my words do not sing as pretty outside its borders, that my eyes do not sparkle as bright nor my heart beat as wild beyond its reach. That what I imagined was infantile storytelling of a home and a destiny was, in fact, to be sorted in the non-fiction aisle. That you spend your life trying to find that moment when it all makes sense and finally realize life IS in fact the futility of such a mission. And if there is a place you can rest your weary limbs at night, can rest your traveling heart through the seasons, you must.

So you will.

Only in Dreams

I have learned
it is better
to long 
than to have

You do not miss
what you have.

Sure. Guard.

Three years ago the boxes were packed, their contents sealed in an airtight crate and locked away in a dark storage hall for unknown hours to come. Opening them up today was not so much a trip down memory lane  (old yearbooks, pictures of youth, favorite items of decoration) as a reminder of what a proper life I left behind. Little jars of paper clips, innumerable boxes of a fully supplied kitchen, different sets of bedding for different seasons, and matching curtains for every window. I was not always this bum in the street. I had a proper life, paid bills on time, stored preserved fruit in the pantry for winter.

An instinctual part in me wanted to put everything straight in the car and ship it to Stockholm, make my life there what is once was here, allow myself to rely on that everything I could possibly need could be found in that spare drawer, that attic space. But the more I contemplated it, the more it heavied me, so that even the lightest pillow sham cemented me into the city streets, tied me to a future I cannot bear. When I left those things, and moved with suitcases, I became free. I forget to love that, sometimes.

I need something to make me stay, he said, and I remember how the words attached themselves to me despite the wine fog, I saw them clearly. I built that home to make me stay, once. Now I don't know what could.

Came Home To You

The bathroom stall had that same fruity smell; how well I know it. The lineup of bars along the familiar street had altered slightly, but the scene was the same. Trams run their chartered course, cigarettes taste better, young kids dance on the square, nothing has changed. You adore the tingling in your veins, ignore the signs that say you can't go home. For one night you play along in the charades. A We comes down the line and you build futures together on the solid foundations of having a home. It seems possible.

It will not last because it cannot. It is an illusion of a place you left behind. But tonight, for a short moment, you are whole. You forget what it is to have been broken. You rest.

Bitters

Pimm's cups and cucumber sandwiches, Sunday drinking at its finest and nevermind the rain outside. This, too, shall pass, when the sun comes back it's summer, don't forget. Every minute doesn't hurt now, every breath doesn't feel like the last, vacation are planned and schedules are inked through the autumn winds; it's easy.

Nothing seems impossible now. 
I am not who I was when I came to New York... 
I am ready to take on the world, now. 
Thank You, New York, for that.
(Journal excerpt, June 2, 2011)

A year passes and all the adventure has been spent. The world was never taken on, the possible returned to its comfortable unobtainability. The straight back and proud step layered with moth balls in the closet. It's easy.

All you have to do is sit by and let it.

Year 2

Congratulations! he laughed as I entered the dance floor, a minute after midnight. One year in Stockholm, it didn't seem a thing to celebrate, but somehow it suddenly appeared momentous. We stood out in the rain, perhaps it was an hour, it was too cold but this is summer, June, we were hopeful.

I walked home later, new numbers in my phone, new voices in my ear, and Stockholm lay cold and dark below. It didn't seem to matter. One year on, time passes too quickly. The important bit is nothing is so Real it cannot be moved when you want it.

I can always be moved, if I want it.