Nearly

He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion...

New York was his town, and it always would be.


 (Woody Allen, Manhattan)

On Cold Feet

Winter is coming, but you wouldn't know it from the sweat dripping down my back as I pedal past the herds and up the hill. Winter is coming, but you wouldn't know it from the blue skied mornings or outdoor concerts in the park. It's only there, just before dawn, when it is still dark and the last of the street cleaners are out, when my feet stick out from under the covers and the windows are open, it's only in the chill over the soles of my feet that I feel it.

The great Tired creeps up on me. I sleep, for hours and hours on end, I cannot get up even to brush my teeth and too soon it is morning. Still it is not enough. Friday night texts roll in and I roll over, hugging the security of quiet and darkness, reeling from the thoughts and questions that remain without.

It's so close now, I can smell it.

Pull your toes in.

Prepare for the chill.

31

So when you read this, I hope you are there; I hope you are Home... I hope this coming year, you love the hell out of what's good in Stockholm, but do not fear the leap. That you love your friends, but trust they will be there even when you leave. That you find money, and purpose, and means, and that you go back to New York... You never succeeded at following paved paths, but did you ever want to? This life is yours, and you can never live it any other way than that which you do. It is perfect. 

I hope you travel. I hope you sing. I hope you meet new, mad people and say Yes, when asked. I hope you remember that age is just Life, and you are still the Mad Soul full of passion and fireworks you always were. I hope you embrace your Darkness, your desperate need for solitude; they are You... Right now, you are only 2 things: New York and the word. They are your constant companions, they are your roots. 

And your friends, any potential man, or House, or job, or Routine, they are lovely, they keep you alive, breathing, they are indispensible. But Cajsa, and I cannot not say this, when you read this, I only hope this: that you went to New York, that you wrote,
and that you loved every single moment. 

I pray you smile when you read this. 
I wish you have a Happy Birthday.

One

A ticket lies in my inbox. Waiting, biding its time, singing its sweet siren songs. We sat in their courtyard drinking Coke and speaking of jazz clubs, and the spark in his eye ignited my veins. There is a certain hum in unexpected evenings, there is a reminder of Life to live and mad souls to bring along for the ride. 

The Escape key on my computer has fallen off. 

I wore it down. I regretted nothing. 

Itinerary

How easy it is, once you step off the ledge. How effortless to abandon an entire life and know nothing of the ground on which you land. But now you have committed to the fall. You have booked the ticket, paid your dues. There is a date, and a time, for your leap, there are official documents and baggage limitations and in the end it doesn't mean a thing.

Because once the ticket was finally booked, all that mattered was the little ember of mad joy that began to smolder in my chest. The stinging sensation of a million sleeping cells beginning to wake, to hear the call of adventure and stretch their senses towards it. Because once that ticket was in my hand, did I not feel, again, that I was alive? 

The windows are wide open tonight. A half moon begins its late August path above the houses; it shines straight at me now. Every moment is suddenly precious, suddenly so obviously fleeting. It is as it always was:

Life
is best lived
mid-air.

Raze

It ends as it begins. An empty canvas of a life, washed clean of all that came before and ready to start anew. I tear the winding plants from around the windows. For the first time in months I can look out, but sills are barren, the corners. Perhaps that is the price we pay. The canvas looks a little tarnished, around the edges.

Behind me, I know it, you don't have to ask me to look, are nothing but bridges burning. I can feel their hot sting on my cheeks. You leave with no goodbye and I don't think we will ever have what we did. I don't miss it. Or at least I won't. And I won't be here when you return.

This city is beginning to lose its shine. These streets are losing their promise. A nasty taste rises in my mouth, and I am ready to level the whole thing to the ground. Such is the nature of this disease, you don't have to remind me, I know full well the ghosts that chase me, the shadows that keep me running. But fuck it.

It's not life if you're not terrified. 

Cul de Sac

Apathetic eyes stare blankly in the mirror. I crawl out of my apartment on trembling legs and arrive sweating at the office hours too late. Your face is green, a colleague snickers, and my stomach turns. There is a cramp in my leg that will not go away, a mauling ache in the back of my skull. Outside, late summer is still warm, the sky filled with those fluffy clouds that look so great in photographs. They ask questions and I still have no answers. I still haven't the slightest idea what I'm doing.

It doesn't help to run to the ends of the earth, she writes. You never can outrun yourself.

But I ran and ran this narrow street; I knew it was bound to curve into a dead end and I thought when it inevitably reared its ugly face I'd be stuck, forced to backtrack down so many tragic nights of unknown fog and end up no better than at the beginning. Yet when the dead end came, it ended not so much in a brick wall as in a steep dropoff with blue skies above. Just one more step and you're off the edge. Irrevocable, yes.

But I am free.

Novel

There was a time when this was all new
and we had all the time in the world. 
I wish you would hurry.

Words return when the bar opens again for the fall season. The bartender plays that song and you want to go home. I have only the Word and it has to carry me to the ends of the earth. There is no other way.

I know what you smell like
in the morning

It's over.

Infect

Words evade me. It occurs to me that perhaps feelings do, too. I pass out exhausted every night but numb, gratefully numb, the days will pass and the life and you will not have had to feel a thing. She passed in her sleep, they say, it was perfectly painless. If it does not hurt to die, you weren't really alive when it happened. The August night lies dark outside, it snuck up on us when no one noticed even as the days remain warm, sweltering. I hear your voice but it's not the same now; we look the other way and wonder what happened. Traffic is a bitch every morning, a lethargic snake draped around the island bypass. I laugh in the face of every sad, gray commuter I pass on my bike, I am free.

For years, I've said that New York is the drug I cannot quit, is the urge of which I never rid myself, but perhaps it is the other way around. I go back, again, again, I rub myself against its concrete and fill my reserves with its madness, that one day I can no longer run out. One day, New York will be sufficiently etched into every fiber of my being, every cell in my skin, every vein in my limbs, that no matter where I go or who I am, it will remain in me. That no matter what I do, I own a little piece of that place that can never be taken from me, again.

We will never be whole, you know.

But we can fill in the cracks with magic,
and be better off than before.

The Other Side

The days pass, I do not write. I can not explain it. People wear jackets in the streets now; it gets hard to bike home in the evenings without the lights on. I go to work with my head safely on my shoulders but oh how the nights fall apart. My apartment takes on the air of cardboard box underneath the bridge, all piles and hoarded potential.

The Escape key on my computer keyboard has fallen off.

I have no idea what I'm doing.

Facing the Courtyard

The subletter fell through, she says.
If you want your old room back,
it's yours.
 
The days count down quickly.
But the stars align
at a speed
all their own.

Forecast

The sea was perfectly still, a silken peach lull over the slow currents drifting to shore. We looked at the sunset: vast, quiet, setting fire to the cliffs across the water. August is impossibly beautiful like that. What is it about summer, she said as her baby fell asleep in my arms, that makes it so happy and sad at the same time? Her husband stared cynically at the last returning sailboats and said, That is the essence of what it is to live where we do. In the life of summer lies the promise of approaching death. It is the same, every year.

I went to bed alone in the dark cabin, the sea black and ominous outside. The peaceful quiet suddenly more a sign of abandonment than of urban escape. I slept a heavy sleep, again, filled with strange dreams impossible to interpret. Come morning, the sky had clouded over, meeting the ocean in a pale shade of grey. I pace impatiently, wait for impending rain.

Wait for the summer to die.

Vindö, Revisited

My grandfather turns 90. He is old, he takes innumerable naps, we have to speak twice as loud and half as fast, but damn if he doesn't love that akvavit after lunch. We crowd into my aunt's house in the country, first cousins once removed, second cousins, great-aunts and in-laws, an invasion of flies and unlimited cookies. By nightfall, the secret smokers sneak onto the back porch. I hear untold stories of my father's youth, where we would stand on the balcony and spit on the passers-by, and jump on the slide so the crystal chandeliers rattled on the neighbor's ceiling. Detect similarities in our faces, trace lineage through a curvature of the hip, a crinkle in the eye. My parents call from across the oceans and lament their absence, but they spent most of my youth avoiding these things. When the devil grows old, he finds religion. My cousin in New York Skypes in and everyone crowds around the screen to make jokes and express longing. There was a low marking on the doorpost, 1987; how we have grown since then, and still we are the same. She feels closer now than ever.

We repack our bags, escape to the archipelago. I lie for two full days on a cliff and watch my skin turn brown. Live in a swimsuit and try not to get webbed feet. Write lists and count down days. What am I doing with my life and should I be doing it differently. I read small press anthologies and see nothing but dystopic futures painted on science fiction-esque backdrops. To be a good writer you must be an avid reader. I fall asleep with the pages plastered to my cheek. Sunscreen glue.

Thunder rumbles in the distance.

I am not afraid.

Journal Excerpt

...And in the midst of all the uncertainty, in all the things I adore about my life in Stockholm, I long for New York so my heart aches. Like if I just come home, maybe Everything won't be okay, but at least I'll know the soles of my feet are burning.