Bad Hair Day

The outdoor tables at the White Horse Tavern were all full, the evening sweltering. When it began to rain, we sheltered in a little, dry nook as all the other seats emptied and spoke of useless nothings. It was the perfect birthday. The rain passed quickly and by the time I reached Morton street, it had dried out. 

Promise not to worry, he said. Tomorrow I may wake up and find this all to be Russia. Your thinly veiled promises can't keep his voice from melding itself into your veins. I went out later, to a dive bar on 23rd street and it was easy enough to carry on conversation, but didn't my skin tremble a little more than usual? Was my gaze not just a little more distant, in the breaks? Your chest reels at distance, as the silence to come creeps into your periphery. 

You can't help but think the impending fall

may be worth it. 

32

Cajsa, darling, we know nothing of this life. I don't know if this decision was a good one, I don't know if you should be done with New York, or should settle down, or just get over it. I don't know if you'll ever find the answer you are looking for, write that book and make something of it, nor if you'll ever find a home for Forever. 

The thing is, we can't wait around while trying to figure it out. We have to Live, and fucking Try to make something of this existence. Yes, you want the kids, and the cow, and the man you can call home, but living in Stockholm made your skin crawl most of the time, and I don't think it's supposed to do that...

...I have no idea what lies in store for you but more clueless wanderings and struggle. But here's the thing, I believe you do it for a purpose. I believe if it wasn't worth it, you wouldn't do it.

So go to New York, rediscover your word, find a purpose. Be the best person you can be and be her deliriously.

Happy Birthday. 

After Midnight

(Jesus was just a year older when he died, she says, and you both laugh about the upcoming year of Jesus. They ask what the plan is, but all you want is to drink beer at White Horse. They ask of presents, but you shake your head.

Although I will take you,
if you offer.)

from Your Sleep

Sunday night arrives, how quickly it sneaks into your system. You check your work email and see it spilling over into every crevice of the week ahead. Your poor body falls apart from the alcohol that was supposed to mend it. You know you are going about this in all the wrong ways. The days and weeks pile up ahead of you and you haven't the time to think of what they mean.

He books tickets to the African hot zone, to the ends of the Earth, the terrifying adventures tug at your seams and you wonder at the choices you've made. Could you not also have dived into the great unknown? Should you not also be living a life that involves more than ten hours in front of a computer screen and five hours of heavy sleep in a tragic loop? The homeless man on St Marks on Friday said he knew enough friends along the way to make it to Boulder, if he wanted. You thought we can make it to California, if we try, and rolled him an extra cigarette.

The pieces of the puzzle make themselves clear.

You decide when you are ready to put them together.

Rubbish

You write words and they disappear somewhere between 7th avenue and 5th. Drown the rest of it with red wine and stories that mean nothing, after the fact. But you attempt to laugh in all the right places and ignore the images that trickle through your mind. You tell her how the ground dropped from beneath you, but there isn't much to say anymore. It's not long ago, but it feels like a whole other life.

He disappears from the radar.

You do not know how to keep the pulses
from scanning the great dark
beyond.

It's Only an Interview

Here's a crazy idea, she writes, all exclamation points and half-finished sentences, rambling with excitement. Why don't you come out west with us, have a ball, while you're figuring it all out! Their vagabond menagerie moves in waves, attempts to settle, rolls along the crest. My guts tingle with the prospect of getting swept up in the tide, but I work longer hours suddenly than ever before. How amusing the hamster wheel when you do not believe a word it says. You long to write them back, say yes! without hesitation and ride off into the sunset. The front line looks scary from afar.

You dream of it every night,
anyway.

Cosmos

Sunday night

walking down Christopher Street,

rolling a cigarette

    (no filter, all out)

and feeling like

Everything

is okay again,

because these streets under your feet,

this air in your lungs,

a group of kids

    twerking

    and laughing

the air of the subway

    like a slap in the face

and Morton Street quiet

    sweet like a serenade

they are why you came back

they are worth

    your every sad

        separation

and tear

over what you have left behind

They are worth leaving his breathless

    skin

You forget you ever doubted

a hundred nights

a thousand sad miles away

a million other ways your life

    could have gone

but didn't 

because your limbs knew

    (your heart, your gut, your lungs)

that this was the only place

that could only

ever

make you Want

for Nothing

(and it is.)    

Terminal 5

(At some point during the flight, I looked out the window into the vast, black night and saw an immense city grid spread out in all directions, until abruptly cut by the darkness of water. It seemed so human, somehow, the earth viewed from space and did we create all this?)

Peach-colored dawn over Howard Beach in Queens. I'm on that red-eye again, always flying the red-eye into New York and landing as in a whole new world where morning just has broken and all the day lies before us. The A train is full of tired people going to work on a Sunday, and you see the structures, the makeup of the city but you love them for sitting there anyways, because they make up this city and you doubt you'd love it as much without them. The West Village sleeps when you reach it. 

I read a book this week, a delicate piece with unfinished edges but a fine polished sheen of sweat and desperation on it. You adored every word, let them sink in to your pores until you longed for your own words with a beating ache. Late August-New York beckons, with that warm lush air and the makings of a future you've missed since before you knew it existed. 

What dreams could you have?

You are here. 

Pre

Happy Birthday!  they laugh, and the gifts are old running shoes wrapped in fancy papers. We eat lamb, everything from the garden, and she brought the wine she just bottled in California. Life doesn't seem so rough in poverty when it looks like this. Your skin has turned so brown today, and you ran up the mountainside until no oxygen was left in your lungs. Your father asks what your biggest dream is and you narrowly avoid the answer. The stars shine brighter out here; the crickets sing louder. But you miss New York and know that better things are to come.

Because the truth is,
chasing the dream,
is worth more
than knowing what it is
to live it.

Cascade

I put my running shoes on, headed to the edge of the reservoir, where a dusty trail winds along the hillside until forever. But at the last turn I veered, made my way up the trail that is closed in winter, the steep snaking trail that goes straight up the mountain and into the valley beyond. I parked the car in nowhereland, met not another car, another person, only the occasional chipmunk or hawk. It's so quiet out here you can hear your mind scream. Sometimes I think what I love most about New York is it drowns out the voices in my head. I'm proud of you, she said, and you realize you've built a family around you that will not disappear, that you will not lose even as you run to the ends of the earth. 

We cannot change what has come before. 

But we can make our own trails

to follow. 

Hide Your Fires

There was a storm brewing along the mountain peaks as I made my way through the pass. The air was sweltering, unusually humid, pressing. The radio played songs from more ignorant times, but it kept coming and going in waves of static. I kept it on; sometimes silence is too encroaching.

It is too hard to say the words, sometimes. I spent most of the evening staring into the hardwood floors, trying to choose my steps wisely, biting my lip to keep calm. I imagine what finally came out stung unexpectedly, and I wish I didn't have to say it.  He would not speak to me, after.

They ask why you are broken.

But you are too busy picking up the shards,
to not think the fault is yours.

Grace

(You say, you have no home. That the years spent tearing from one place to another pulled the home right out of you, and that you spend your days desperately drifting to reclaim what was never yours. But it is not true.
It begins when you cross that last mountain range, and see the familiar valleys spread out underneath the plane. It's in the smell of damp earth under midnight sprinklers, in the sounds of crickets, in the way the sun shines so impossibly bright but the air is dry like desert. It's in the slight lull of your accent, a lingering twang that appears with the first stranger you meet.
This is the land where you grew up. This is where you found a voice to speak with, a soil to plant your roots in, a strange tapestry into which to sew your heart. For better, and for worse, this is the place: this is home.)

Far Rockaway

Two minutes before the alarm rings, you wake with a start. 03:58. How you tossed and turned in the dark last night, counting hours and subtracting minutes of precious sleep. Try it again, with feeling.

The west village lies sleeping outside your door. The last scattered remnants of drunk Saturday night youths lie strewn around pizza slice joints and 24-hour tobacconists. The lack of tourists is gratifying, the abundance of empty seats on the train. The construction reroute doesn't worry you; you've gone in and out of these airports a hundred times already. Last night looking at old pictures and realizing just how long New York has painted itself as the magic backdrop to what you thought was such a useless life. 

Dawn rises slowly

over John F. Kennedy airport. 

You decide to forget everything

that has come before.

Paint your life

only

in magic. 

Allez Retour

You'll never make that connection, she says, and you know she is right. I can put you on the first flight out in the morning. So you take your bags, your new slip of airfare paper and make your way back through Queens. The streets smell of unknown foods, the store signs in strange symbols; you think perhaps you do not need to move to the ends of the earth--it's enough just to move to Queens. New York is your pearl, again it redeems itself and you never doubted it would.

A voice travels to you from across the ocean, with that velvety lull to it that softens your resolve and makes you smile at the ceiling. You vow to save your pennies.

Whatever happens,
an airplane ticket can save your life,
every time.

In August

Asocial isolation ends with a bang, much sooner than expected. Every night is a new round of margaritas in the velvet evenings, and you stumble home to your messy room and fall asleep with your clothes in another pile on the floor. You see yourself building a life in New York, again, starting at the bottom with the scattered bricks that remain from previous attempts and glueing the base with endless optimism and maybe this time it's all different. Perhaps without ignorance you would simply resign yourself to passing out in the mud, so you allow it to create your futures for you.

They write you from their new life, with a void the size of New York City in their chests, and they do not yet know how to fill it with anything else. How long ago it seems now that the City was new and our every step on its pavement delicate. Now you walk like you are invincible and can never fall off. It seems an impossible prize. Try not to think about it. He sends you pictures of sunset over the open sea, but you no longer know what it means.

All you know is concrete.
All you need is here.

And You Had Time

If you look at the lamp posts in the park, and you find this number here, you'll always know what street level you're on. Her young voice trembled with excitement as she ran circles around me in the Ramble. New York is hot, again, I recognize its air now when I walk home late at night and it feels like a sweet concession. They offer me a job over margaritas; every day life is a new twist and turn to follow. I booked an airplane ticket yesterday but it didn't leave the usual ripple. The addiction deepens.

She says she'll come as soon as she can. That she will live in my room of teapots and work a dive job and we can spend the nights creating and practicing our tobacco habits. You can't help but think it an inviting idea. You think perhaps it just might be the best way to live a life.

Just look at the lights. You'll always know where you are.

Upon Your Shore

Every morning I wake, too early, with a panicked feeling in my lungs, and do not know where I am. Feel the window fan across my feet, hear the dog pacing outside the cardboard door, fit the pieces together until the image is clear. She writes to say that they are sailing around the world but are landing in the city for a week and would you like to come out to play. You consider stowing away in their boat, instead. He writes from Morocco, but you've dulled your senses now, and you refuse to paint the pictures in your mind.

I return to the little room on Morton like an inert whirlwind, desperate to commit but perpetually torn from its comforts, rasping my nails against dresser drawers and crumbling walls at the gusts. You belong here, they say, but you don't know what it means to belong anywhere. Some days you think perhaps you don't actually need to.

Always keep your bags packed, your storages cleared. Never be weighed down by the comforts of a familiar bed. Run madly into the world and live to tell the tale. Perhaps happily ever after, is a sacrifice worth making.

Burn everything
to
the
ground.

4 July, 2014

You are whole here, in New York. 
We see it in your face. 
The note lay in an unassuming white envelope, among the piles of credit card offers and mail addressed "to resident". They're gone, now, but it's too soon to understand what that means.
Days pass in quiet exhaustion, as I begin to reinsert myself into the treaded paths that are mine. I walked along the river and saw the city covered in a heavy, brown haze. It looked almost like the end of summer. And there, at the end of the pier where it seems the city and the sea lie both at your fingertips, I realized.
I do not fear fall.
I do not fear rootlessness or my own
impoverished future.
I do not fear anything.
Because I am here.

Welcome home.