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.