The Wild Hunt

A giant cockroach lies dead behind the toaster. I can't believe we haven't seen it; perhaps it's been there for weeks. 20 years in this apartment and we've never had roaches, she gasps, but they might just have been here all along. The evening ends in dispute, doors close in silence. I realize one of my bedroom windows is open--all these days of arctic cold and I had no idea. 

It's getting harder and harder to sleep at night. The alarm clock rings regardless. 

Dis:connect

And then one night, it happens. The poor old computer breaks down, gives up. I am lost, confused, roaming the apartment and nervously eyeing my phone. Nothing is as it should be without it. 

But in the radio silence, airplane tickets are booked; they amass in my inbox like scintillating promises. The season spreads out before me in adventure. Did I not just say that I travel too little, that I must make this year different because to travel is to live? Well, I will. 

The days without my electronic lifeline don't seem so painful, then. 

August

Fade in: America. Widespread lands, the kind that tickle your heart and remind you where you grew into being. The room falls silent, and cold, but the characters sweat through the humid summer, you freeze. When at last it fades out, over receding Midwestern highway, over unending spaces and suggestive mile markers, my limbs tremble.

Oh, but how much darkness lies in our veins. How the blood runs dark, and thick, and poisonous within them and moves in its viscous trails along the limbs of the family tree. You end the night with tears, but they are not selfless sorrows for the characters you believed; they are self-centered cries for a family you could never heal. Not at six, not at thirteen, not at thirty. All you know is you gave up one day and decided that running was the only way to keep your head above water. You've been breathing well for years, but then, you never even get your feet wet.

We drowned the moment in beer, afterward, White Horse on a Saturday night and you allow yourself to resent the 20-year-old drunks and their ways. It is easier than resenting the unanswered questions within. There is no solving this, you hear a voice say. Why create a family when all you know of it is pain? We get too drunk, in the end, I half-run down Hudson to the warmth of my little room in the village.

See the plains spread out around my rolling list of credits.

Deny every word on the page.

Hell's Kitchen

New York is frozen stiff. Layers upon layers will not keep the chill out of your bones, and how the people scurry to their lairs. The radiator has been on for days straight; it no longer seems to make a difference. Everything downwind from the draft is painful to touch.

An old friend writes to ask if I'll be around in March to grab a coffee, because he'll be in town. But the town he is referring to is Stockholm, and I realize he doesn't even know I've gone. The absurdity of neglect. Well of course you moved back, he says, in the voice of a person who knows me too well to be surprised. Is it everything you hoped?

The day's shift is long, and by the time I make my way home the train is full of Friday night tipsies and Theater District playbills. When the doors close, an odor spreads, its epicenter quickly discerned by  emptied seats and by 42nd street we have all moved to the next car. Every stop it fills up with people who realized last station that somebody shat themselves next door.

Yes, I say, without having to think about it. Every day it's like I fall in love all over again.

The numbers don't add up. I know this.

The point is: they don't have to.

Skeletons

...and then, after that day of fog dragged into evening and quiet night, how suddenly the mind cleared and began to speak. Another pot of coffee seeping, as papers spread across the floor and post-its amassed along the walls. I leave the cave shortly, starving, but the night runs on for hours as the alarm clock towers with imminence. At the edge of my skin, that slight current of electricity I know so well. The old friend that means there will be ink on these pages come morning. Thick, black liquid: my veins run dry.

Suffer the expulsion gladly.

Oh the Vultures

The slight pocket of unplanned time; it appears on your horizon like a beacon, offering refuge from reality and the promise of Creativity, so you long for it and craft a schedule within the tiny room.

But the day appears with ominous clouds in your gut, and you pace the floor in a voiceless vacuum. Drape a long overcoat over your nonexistent dressing and descend the stairs but the dog is cold and tugs backward before you even round the block. He coughs in the dry heat. You choke on your own ambition. Terrified of opening doors because of what may lay behind them.

I wrote an old friend today, my shivering fingers reaching out to California sunshine because what fresh air runs along that Western Coast and the people impossibly beautiful. Her reply was prompt, comforting like sunshine and I smiled in my solitary filth.

Hours wasted are never that, she wrote, we throw the term "wasted" over our process like throwing everything into the closet so that we clean up for "guests".  The masterpiece is there, it just needs a place at the table and a warm bath. 

The evening was still numb, the screaming terror still raging in my gut, but a slight, soft wind blew across my brow and at least I could breathe again.

On Fire

Did you make yourself worthy
of your dreams
today?

Weathers

It is much too late and much too close to the ringing of the alarm, but I cannot sleep. A heavy fog lay at the edges of the city today, damp, wet, ambiguous with its intentions. Still I walked to the subway as the sun began to lift itself this morning, and it spread a soft golden light on the water tanks of the city in that way that makes everything magical. I worked a long shift and smiled the entire time. Rehashing on the subway how many steps I've taken in other people's shoes, because it is easier to reap their rewards--or wallow in their miseries--than be true to oneself. Scribbling notes: The trick must be to live one's own life but how is that done? After 31 years not even that much figured out.

Time, it turns out, doesn't guarantee you anything.

The answers disappear in the mist.

Lo Press

Incessant rain as I make my way to the subway. Commute on half full trains; going too early, returning too late, and the relief in always finding a seat. The book lies open in front of me but when we've crossed the water to another borough I realize I haven't understood a single word. Meaning gets lost in sleeplessness.

You are not tired
so much as you are
hollow.

The train lets you on,
regardless.

Like Rain

Riding the Late night F train

Two a.m.

Nothing but lovers and drunks left

But I got the last car all to

Myself

And wanted to run straight through 

The whole damn thing

Like that time in 2006

Do you remember? 

I'd say it was youth but

I'd do it again

Now 

If you were here to 

cheer me on

The night wasn't so late

And tired

When I thought of it. 

Keep Me

A terrible cold passes over the City. We leave all the radiators on and shiver in the corners where the heat does not reach. I pile on layers of colored knits to brave the cold but I arrive late, flustered, and must peel them all off in an instant. Their kitchen window fire escape is washed in the kind of sunlight that warms your very soul; I see days and days of spring time naps spread out on that wrought iron and I long. Suddenly there is a future ahead; it builds itself slowly, but surely. The little child laughs at my nonsense, and his trill makes me believe there is nothing to fear. A wedding invitation comes from across the ocean. We make plans of summer nights together. Has it really been that long? But the truth is of course that she is closer than ever.

I don't hear your voice in my head like I used to, don't see the ways your eyes would crinkle when you smiled. I'm building a new life now.

This cold will pass,
eventually.

Eve

Already tired of being back at work. Lunch? The weather outside is like some scene from an apocalyptic ghost story, all black ice and torrential downpour, but how irresistible the temptation. They are back after weeks away; at last the City fills back up with familiar faces, with dear voices and endless anecdotes. I shuffle in with the crowds to Midtown, navigating treacherous streets full of careless umbrellas ready to take an eye out in the fall and am, as ever, grateful not to be as gray as the suits that surround me. The hours while away as I listen to his stories, catch him up on my own. When he says it's so good to be back because he missed it, it warms me. As though when people love this city, they must love me, too. I will take it. I didn't realize how much I'd missed them, until they were back.

The evening stirs like the last night before school starts in fall. Eager anticipations mix with anxious folding of clothes, packing of bags. And somewhere along my spine, the sense that this is but a soft step in already warm waters, that it is a welcome stone in the building of my chosen path. For one, short moment, the faith that it leads in the right direction.

There's a few crooked turns in its wake.

But the path wouldn't be, without them.

Wake

The newscasters speak of the cold, how the schools and roads and lives have shut down, how it is impenetrable. But I step out in the sunshine and it feels like a mild spring day. The snow thaws in puddles. My lungs breathe deep and let the illness dissolve into the Houston Street fumes.

We moved the rocker to the kitchen, while the Christmas tree lights up the living room. I rock in it awkwardly as she tells me of his fall. You can see the bridge from her kitchen windows.

There's the most beautiful sunsets in that view.

I just wish the last time I saw him hadn't had such a terrible end, she says. It reminds me suddenly how I close every conversation with my parents by saying I love you. An old remnant from younger years where I feared every meeting may be our last. No matter what, I always wanted my final words to them to be that I loved them. It seems an insignificant consolation, after the fact.

I cried into the rocker, clutching my phone and her words in it. They will say there is a lesson in this. To pay closer attention, to love more.

But it is only sad, now.

Shards

He killed himself yesterday. 

The text comes in early, I'm still sleeping, and it takes a while to sort out sender, sort out the story, but the pieces fall into place much too quickly in the end. He is dead. The January winds too cold to bear and I don't know if the story could ever have ended differently. She is quiet, too quiet, all day my heart aches for her and I want to make it all go away. Erase his face from her scar tissue.

It is too real, too permanent. They will always have lost you. I see your face before me and don't understand what it means that you are gone.

This life is precious, beyond clichés and Carpe
Diems; this life is precious. It is yours, and yours alone. It will drag you through the mud, beat you when you are so far down you can't believe the Universe would kick you harder, it will grow despair in your chest and teach you often to doubt everything you ever thought made tomorrow worth waiting for. But it is the only one you have. And whether or not you believe it, people will find ways to love you. Whether or not you can handle it, something will make this life good enough that it is better to stay in it than not.

Whether you want it or not, your premature end
will hurt those you thought you were saving
more than your staying ever could.

But I do hope your pain is gone.

2014; a Beginning

A  new year begins. We toast in bubbles and remark on the tenacity of Times Square revelers. The city-dwellers leave first, but the express train comes quickly as we make friendships out of mutual confusions. But oh, how this year will be better. Still I spend the year's first days confined to my bed, writhing in fevered restlessness and unable to do anything else. By the time I muster up enough energy to brave the streets, the winter storm is just arriving; it beats cold snow down Seventh Avenue as people scramble to their homes. I get winded just walking down the stairs. My roommate stirs in excitement, longing to go out and see the West Village buried in the avalanche.

Somehow the illness works itself through my system, purging the sludge that accumulated over the year that passed. My clouded mind writes lists, sorts priorities, attempts to interpret the pulsating core within to see if it will reveal its passions. One more night's rest and I will this disease to pass, and with it, all infections of the time that was. It is a new day, now.

Something will come
that is better than you ever knew
you could hope for.