Boxing

The temporary reprieve is over: second avenue roars again with taxicabs in rain and youthful choruses beneath your window. Life returns to the city. 

Are you ready 

for what it brings?

Love Letter

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 

I dragged myself out of bed this morning, I'll admit. But the work load ahead was light, the day meant for sauntering in flannel pajamas and drinking countless glasses of bubbly before dark. Rumors came of warm winds, but you couldn't believe it from inside the Christmas lit apartment on East 4th street. When I finally made my way outside at dusk, nothing had yet prepared me for the tropical air that enveloped the city in summer songs.

I made my way south along Allen, turned at Delancey, where the Scandinavian restaurant with a seedy back room behind the kitchen had been replaced by an oyster bar. Walked with determined steps up the unending slope that is the Williamsburg bridge. There is a spot in the middle where the two sides meet, you can cross over and stare unabashedly at the city skyline so long as you mind the speeding bicycles. A man stood above the train tracks playing his saxophone. Perhaps he was self conscious for the sounds. The ground shakes here every time a train passes. It feels like a reassuring rocking in your belly. 

But here's the point I'm trying to make, New York, however ineloquently, and it is that I love you. It is that no matter the day, or year, or weather, I am happier with you than I ever have been without. That no matter the money in my pocket or the success on my papers, ever day I live here I have won. That I can look back fondly on the violent sorrow of every time I've left, a sadness that tore the organs from within my body and drained the light from my eyes, because they seem now a maudlin recollection of a time when we did not know better, of a threat that will not reappear. And however lonely, or mismatched, or confused I may find myself, simply walking your streets will make sense of the world again and make the pieces fall into place. I sleep sounder in your crazy cacophony than ever I did in the quiet darkness that is everywhere else. You make me a better person, you make my life unequivocally worth living, and I will spend the rest of my days attempting to deserve you. 

Faithfully, 

Yours. 

Turnpike

We'll never get out of here

Darling.

It's hard to listen to your words, still, I pick such terrible times to hear you and the words rage through me like an infection. It scratches my skin from the inside until the fever rises in it. I cry when I should be happy, shaking tears into my hands and echoing empty sadness into the quiet apartment. December is unseasonably warm.

I left New York this morning, sunrise over glass buildings and an ethereal mist around the Manhattan skyline. New Jersey is pretty when it doesn't try. When someone can appreciate it for what it is. Sometimes we run and run without reprieve. But don't worry. 

I just need to catch my breath. 

Rot

Their concerned faces stare at you like in dreams. Teeth fall out of your mouth. There are pains you daren't ask what they are; your body decomposes slowly, but not slowly enough.

We drove through the tunnel just as the sun was setting, and resurfaced in Battery Park where the buildings are so tall. As we made our way up the East side of the river, Brooklyn lay glowing in twilight, the bridges majestic and the skyscrapers of midtown vibrating in a welcoming hum. For a second I couldn't carry on the conversation. I just stared at each piece of this life sized puzzle, tried to memorize every square inch of the scene. I thought This is the only place I ever wanted to be and the thought of not being here seemed so impossible the future was made simple. My heart swelled with gratitude. We weaved back into the Midtown maze, gathered our things, carried on with our lives.

But not one corner of the image did I forget.

Ends

The river is cold, there's a wind from the East. Your sneakers are new, they have that soft swing to them. It's the first time you run this stretch since the girl was dragged off the path and raped last week. You brace yourself. The bandshell where it happened is eerily illuminated in flood lights. Stage set for a show no one wants to see. You run past it alone. 

The world falls apart outside your window. At every turn abyss. Perhaps it was always the end of days. 

You should do something worthwhile, with yours. 

Di Pesce

Freezing cold. The cab driver flies down the FDR. Inside the apartment, the heat is just starting to come through the risers. You open the vent and your room smells of old dust. Large trucks shuttle past outside your window. A calm sinks into your belly that hasn't been there since you left. 

That It's All In Your Head

The whole thing is seamless. You're at your gate within minutes of leaving the house, it seems. Your eye doctor makes jokes until you are on a first name basis and the neighbor across the street waves every time you leave, every time you return. Life in the country is so endearing, and you have to work hard not to boil it down to its exoticized idylls, bottle it up as the next great romcom for thirsty urbanites. You sleep like the world has ended, awake heavy and disoriented. Miss the noise of second avenue, the reassurance that you are yet alive. What's in New York? he asks with incredulous eyes, but you know it doesn't matter what you answer. 

I cried driving through the canyon the other night. Before all the snow, when the mountains were dark and towering. That the world can be so beautiful, so close to where you are. That there is a moment when all is still. 

 

Soon I'll have all the answers, I told them. 

But I'm only ever kidding myself. 

Gratitude, Year V

Life gets tricky, sometimes.
Old wounds tear open  and bleed in daylight; years pass but nothing has changed. You fear you've gone nowhere, and life spreads out around you in a muddle.
I look back at previous words and feel hollow. It's so hard to remember gratitude when the world falls apart. The air outside is cold.

But make no mistake
I am
as ever
grateful
for you.

Holding Pattern

You wake with a start, convinced the alarm clock lies. The room is dark, quiet like a vacuum, and it takes you a while to remember where you are. The incessant noise of 2nd avenue is nowhere to be found, the constant rush of sirens and brawls. You tip-toe down carpeted stairs, to begin a work day in another time zone, as the first streaks of sunrise hit the mountain tops outside your window. Every time, even 22 years later, every time that sun rises, or sets, across the mountains, it fills your heart with song. Your mother agrees to string lights around the house, even though it's technically far too early for even common decency. The nights are cold; it is winter.

Home always overwhelms me with its simple beauty. That something can feel so easy, can hold you so calmly, no matter how far away you've run. I make plans with friends so old they knew me before I even belonged here. Drive routes into the valley I could snake with my eyes closed. Home is a refuge.

But it never holds for long.

Mill

It has snowed in Wisconsin. A great white blanket stretches as far as the eye can see, dotted with wind mills and little farm houses. One per corner of land, a cluster of trees huddling around each, protectively. The clouds make ripples like a pebbled beach. You marvel at the impossibility of flight, while in your book a man loses his entire family in a fiery crash. 

When you wake with a start, you're almost there. The endless stretches of land nestle against mountains towering ever higher, like sheets of crumpled paper beneath the plane. Home hits you like a starburst in your chest. The sun is bright. 

Your mind is wiped clean. 

Lift

The street is quiet as you run down the stairs; it's the only time of day there's any peace and you would savor the moment if you weren't half asleep. The car winds its way through lower Manhattan, navigates SoHo cobblestones and dives into the tunnel. You never take a car -- the ride reminds you of teary goodbyes and a reluctance to look back. You delight now in the ease of transit, the lightness of your carry-on. The sun glitters on the glass houses as you lift off. Children of today know a different skyline; the city's existence is fluid. You love it a million new ways every day, and you cannot wait to tell it. You wonder how many times you will leave it. 

How many times you will come back. 

Black River

He says, I want you to be happy, but we both know what he is really saying. There is a giant clock over the bar but its hands don't move. You find yourself missing misery.  

Your words feel stunted, weighing each syllable against its own defense. The point is you'd choose misery and creative storms over peaceful sleep any day. And he doesn't know how not to encourage that in you, because it burns where few see the glow. 

You remember what the fire feels like. 

You miss its rage

against your skin. 

Mart

(There was a moment 
today
when I stood in the basement
of the discount department store
all sad, windowless minimum wage
and Made in Taiwan
disposables
but they had rolled out 
the Christmas trees
and colored lights
and glittering ornaments,
that I breathed in the 
idiotic scented pine cones
and my whole being 
capitulated 
to one, short break

from the tragedy that is

Life, 

and I was exempt. 

New

I wake shivering. The riser has gone cold overnight; angry notes for management to turn on more heat litter the mailboxes downstairs. Strange words float through the silent apartment, plans forming along timelines of foreseeable futures. There's a tickle in your spine where May lies, and you imagine the delicious gratification of running when it bids you. His smiles sound trite, suddenly. There's a ring now where there wasn't one before, he looks happy. Things that kept you up at night seem centuries away and buried underneath a thick layer of dust.

Sometimes when I'm returning to the city, it just scares me, she said, as the last washes of dusk lingered at the top of skyscrapers, and a deep dark black settled around its edges. We roared into Manhattan from above, the city spreading out ahead of us and me with that giggle that always swirls through me upon homecoming. How could this city ever be frightful, how could it ever wound upon re-entry? This city that cares for even the most lost and weary, simply by letting them hold on.

I hear your words, I know what they're trying to say. But they cannot touch me here. I am fine.

Beacon

Bright blue skies, the last of the fires of fall piling up along the parkway in mounds and swirls of orange and yellow, flying across the George Washington bridge in the early afternoon and miles of road underneath our feet. A week washes from my system in our wake. I breathe. 

In the small hamlet upstate, decades of questionable art spreads out in the giant factory. Crowds of intellectual urbanites wading through the commentary, trying to add their own but not creating much more than an Instagram speck. Your head roars suddenly with familiarity, with things to say and memories of once having tried to say them. Your commitments strangle you without compensating for the damage. They write from far away, so far away you can barely hear their muffled invites, reminders of an art you've lost and a world you fought so hard to let embrace you. 

The pretenses fall away, their carefully curated Saturday art gallery fashions become blurry in your eyes. Outside there is a bright sunlight in the cold wind, raging storms inviting you to dance again. You miss them terribly. 

Drive back to the city in silence. 

Schedule

The porch swing has a gentle creak to it, it cuts over the steady lull of cicadas and rolling trains in the distance. The trees are turning, but autumn in the South is warm, humid, it reminds you of late nights in Alabama and how thick the vines would grow along the road. You're not sure where you thought you were going then, on that long trek across the country, but it's even harder to say if you made it there. The smiles of strangers are quick to come, their eyes inviting and easy. You hear the lilt in your voice return to mirror theirs, feel your cold New York exterior relax against their manners.

You remember how you love to travel. How you love to feel a different soil beneath your feet and another air inside your lungs. There is somewhere else you've meant to be. You forget, sometimes, but the Somewhere Else does not.

It waits for you, quietly.

But it will not wait, forever.

Tennessee Nights

It's over, he says in a moment before takeoff. I don't know what they'll do now. And all those dreams of New York, of a life together after years apart, they drift into the mists of things that no longer are. A Ludlow street apartment suddenly cramped and unforgiving. She asks me later if we can fill the days, take her mind off what awaits behind the door.

You board your plane lightly, happy again to be traveling. The lights of an unknown town spread out below, a warm southern wind whispers welcomes into your ears. Put one foot in front of the other. 

Eventually you'll end up anywhere but here. 

Hello

You know it's there. You can feel it, hear its raspy breaths and labored steps approaching every time the air gets quiet around you. The Darkness that owns you, that carries your truths when no one else knows them. So you run, you turn the music up and order another drink. Keep the waters calm for another day. 

There was a time when you relished the pain of tearing open the wounds, when you would lock the door and let your body sink into the rushing blood. It reminded you you were alive. It gave you hope of a bigger purpose. 

Perhaps the scars get thicker every time they heal, perhaps I'm just old and tired. I abhor meeting again those demons, content to simply walk these streets and believe it is enough. 

But paying the rent

isn't worth the sacrifice. 

Sleeping well

does not mean you are alive.  

Conditional

The line crackles, the call drops every five minutes and you mind your words, knowing unwanted guests listen in at every turn. He hears the weariness in your voice, and you've never found yourself wanting to be in a war-torn country at the other side of the world as much as you do now. How you long to raze and run, to weigh no more than a single suitcase and clear your own cloying narcissism against despairs a thousand times worse than your own. His voice is tired, he longs for home, but how addictive the satisfaction in his voice.

I crept into a bath so hot it burned my skin, scrubbed every inch of my body until it tingled, tried to reach that point where my insides aren't numb and ignorant. You know there's something else you're supposed to be doing, something better you are supposed to be, and it doesn't go away simply because summer ran around with you in insipid gratification. The leaves turn brown outside your window.

Let your insides burn, instead.

Before Dawn

I wake in the middle of the night with a start, my hand along the riser and the heat cycling on. Early in the morning, feeling the lingering pain along my finger and not sure if it was all a dream. There's a metaphor for life in there, somewhere. 

New York thrashes in the changing seasons. I sweat in wool jackets and freeze in bare legs, each new day a polar opposite of the last, but damn if the sunny days don't blow your mind after all. My sister comes to town -- after a week of casual togetherness, we get caught in traffic on our way to Penn, and we say our goodbyes in mere seconds before the train doors close. Next time we see each other, everything will be different, she says, but nothing is ever the same.

You never step on the same street twice, and the certainty of uncertainty reassures you. There's a metaphor in that, too.

Ludlowland

It's not the quaint coffee shop down the block, she scoffs, it's that I step out into this city and it makes me happy. 

All day I made jokes with the waiters, smiled at strangers and tried to breathe through the ravages of the season's first illness. New York was cold, but sunny and quiet, it reminded you we are all still subject to the turning of the earth on its axel. The idea of defending the city against some potential lover in summery California seemed ludicrous, perhaps, because why bother selling the city to anyone who didn't want it, but you were grateful she was willing. You think you could bottle this day and it would sell itself. 

But you'd buy all the reserves,

if you could. 

On Her Blue Eyes

I can't stay here no more.

Suddenly, how cold the Manhattan streets, autumn winds whipping around every corner. You cross the south end of the island in determination, moving through buildings and architectures, listening to stories and looking up answers to questions you didn't know you had. We made friends with the young Brooklyn waitress in TriBeCa because none of us belonged, and when she left, I felt an inexplicable loss at the fact. You smiled your warmest Southern smile at the waitress and thought New York is the kindest city you know.

But as the wine wore off, the whirlpool that drained behind it scared up demons long asleep. They claw at my throat and tie my legs to the floor until I end up a catatonic deadweight, stuck staring into the void and unsure of what to do next. The cold creeps in through the cracks in the floor.

You should never have stopped with the drugs, the poverty, the terrorizing mental anguish of a life on fire.

At least it was a life at all.

Susto

Early in the evening, the floor is empty. An unknown singer croons for a handful of patrons. She came all this way. We drink our beer and wait for the next act. They get on the stage, all mid-twenties angst and their lives as failed musicians ahead of them (or not, it's too soon to say). The dream is alive and well. 

I stood there, swaying quietly to the music, cheap beer fizzing in my plastic cup, watching my life flash before my eyes, and it occurred to me. I'm perpetually poor, but I keep saving my money, a hidden pile slowly growing outside my line of vision. I'm always saving my money. Perhaps my subconscious knows me better than I know myself. I'm preparing for the unknown. And the road lies open ahead. 

On the flight home, a late red-eye, everyone uncomfortably aching to get home, a young man's mind at last cut him loose and broke. We dove quickly into an unexpected airport, lights on and everyone scrambling to get a good view of the debacle. The story made its way back through the rows, how they had to restrain him, how they shouldn't have let him on board to begin with, and someone two rows ahead filmed what little there was to see, flashing lights steady on the tarmac. And all I could think of was how terrifying a world must be that you do not comprehend. We scream at these visions in our dreams, but we wake. 

I say if I'm going to gamble, I have to be willing to lose my hand. 

But maybe I'm just looking for an out. 

FireSky

The nights are quiet, mild. The air grows cold like a desert, but the streets are lined with palm trees and you feel like maybe you're in another country completely. The time zones confuse you, the hotel blackout curtains, you wake disoriented and forget to smile at people you're supposed to know. But strangers say "I'm sorry" like you're used to, the AC is freezing like your every grade school August and the city is wreathed in mountain horizons. You try to tell people how much it reminds you of a home you once knew but realize it counts for little. 

She drives you to the airport in the early evening -- it feels like the middle of the night -- and as the car flies into the valley, the city lights sprawling around you and the peaks silhouetted against the last of sunset, your heart beats a relentless ache for adventure. You want more stars in the unknown night sky. 

More foreign places to feel like home. 

2 Year Itch

From afar it looks like a fairytale.

They paint the scenes in movies, in magazines and war stories, they make it out to be a place for the wildly succesful, the impossibly beautiful. They make it the unrechable dream, and they put it in your head that perhaps you only imagined there was a place for you in it, and that you would fall off the edge if you stepped onto its land.

I walked up the avenues last night, the 9-5 crowds making waves around me and the afternoon still sweltering. Stepped quietly into the Park and climbed up onto those cliffs, the same as last time and the same as the time before that. Seven years I've been coming to this spot and it wrings my heart every time, I wanted to tell the people around me, as they Instagrammed their iced teas. The sun began to set over the West Side, little beams streaking through the buildings and all the skyscrapers had that certain, incandescent hum about them.

When the evening grew dark, but still with that Mediterranean humid heat and little beads of sweat made their way down my back in sheer surprise, I walked down Sixth avenue in a daze. Every street corner, every twist and turn into the West Village nook that is mine, was a familiar scene, was an unconscious move because I have done it a hundred times before. And yet every time I looked up, did I not lose my breath just a little, did my eyes not twinkle a little more than before?

They make you think this place is not for you, that there's no bother in coming. But they do not know how New York concrete under your steps make you a little more steady on your feet, how the scent of warm cigarette smoke and restaurant exhaust perfume in your lungs make your back a little straighter. They do not know how yellow cabs in the corner of your eyes and cop sirens in your window as you fall asleep make you a little calmer, a little safer in this life.

Years pass. 

I still feel exactly the same. 

Such Better Days

The nights grow dark much earlier now, you feel winter creep quickly, so quickly into your veins. She says she loves November, and you can't begin to imagine what that would feel like. Every cool breeze around the avenue corner stops your heart for just a split second, so short no one would see it on your face but it takes you several blocks to recover. 

At the bar, your drinks melt abandoned, even as the evening is young. Twenty years of tangled messes rear their ugly heads in just one question. You were not meant for family, he says. Everyone seems to know you better than you do. 

A young psychic on Broadway locks her eyes on me, begins to babble wildly. I see it. I see you. You've been very confused. This is life, I tell her. We're all confused. It begins to rain again. 

You'll be sorry when I'm gone. 

64 Morton

You rattle the address for delivery like you could do it in your sleep. Remember to turn the faucet the right way, though it seems wrong, and handle the trash cans with one hand on your way out. Walk down Bedford Street easily, even though it's the wrong direction, because shouldn't you be heading up the street this time of day. The old apartment remains your home, though you've shed your skin of it long ago. Return to the East Village soot out of habit.

Old wounds take longer to heal
than you give them credit.

59F

Ashes,
Ashes

We all fall down.

Plunge

The evening is busy; early sunset confuses you and the streets are still filled with people, even as the temperature drops. You shiver but take determined strides to the edge of the island, longing desperately to pound the fuming storms within from your chest. Equinox is Wednesday, someone reminds you, and while they consider rebirth and renewal, all you see are days darker than the last, the arrival of death.

You follow the narrow, straight curve along the water's edge, watch Midtown Manhattan spread out like jewels ahead of you, feel your tired muscles beat themselves into a rhythm at your will. You consider the things you do not know, put words to all the things you lack and the meaningless drivel that makes a life. When Sylvia Plath was my age, she had been dead for three years. You have to buy yourself time before sticking your head in the oven.

There's a stretch of pavement, just about level with the ConEd plant, where there isn't a lot of light. Nevermind, you've run it a hundred times, you know where it leads. But there's a crack along the shadow, there's a moment of absent-minded tumult. I threw my cares to the wind, my limbs to the ground, swore loudly and paused, as I watched my phone fly over the railing, into the deep, dark depths of the East River, and when he asked if I was okay, all I could do was laugh.

Burn everything to the ground.

Rise again from the ashes.

(Enough)

Familiar empty feeling
in your chest
like the heart is
but
deadweight, 
just a sinker
to keep you steady in the depths. 

Perhaps it should make you sad.

But you are numb. 

Roof

The mornings are milder, now, a slight chill in the breeze and you relish in the fresh air, all the while seizing in panic. It's a reaction that will not be assuaged with the years. Across the ocean, your grandfather recovers, miraculously, and you don't feel a thing.

You were not meant for marriage, children, family. It's not in you, I don't think, he says across a faulty line. War continues, another country to mend, but his words stick with you, and you can't figure out if they linger as daggers or as an open door. There is freedom in mobility, in never being tethered, but you seem to hear hear a lengthy sentence in his words. He straddles the same eternity, himself.

I walked down 6th avenue, late last night, outrageously drunk and with no words left inside. Jefferson  Market Library towered beside me; it felt like home in my ragged state. Greenwich Village carried me a few more blocks south, reminded me there have been years before this, there will be more years to come. Perhaps a life untethered, alone, but free to walk these streets night after night, season upon season, perhaps that is the greatest gift of all.

Sometimes I think you've forgotten why you're here.

But I don't think 6th avenue ever did.

Shell

Your grandfather lies dying. His only son sits by his side, playing him Beethoven's ninth and Handel's Messiah. He hums along, as best he can. The old man mumbles in his haze, speaks of skiing and is this how it ends, then? There are no answers, because we do not know.

You sit around the camp fire, roasting marshmallows and listening to Americana. Raccoons run in the trees around you, cicadas color the sky in sound. They speak of Africa, of Vietnam, of the life of perpetual expats. The car comes to pick him up for the airport, and it seems a rude awakening. You seem forever rooted to inertia.

But the salt water colored your hair white today, the sun turned your shoulders a speckled brown. She jumped and swam in the surf by your side, pleading for just five more minutes, and she laughed the way only a three-year-old can. The pebbles on the beach are worn smooth by the eons. A message comes from across the waters: we hold our breaths, but the baby is due in May.

All in one day. Life continues, unabated.

Rocky Point

The city wears itself out in heat. Every night is a struggle for sleep, you sweat into your dreams and awake in the night confused. 

But by the end of the week, you pack the car and head east, until the traffic dissolves and the concrete gives way to lush wilderness. The road ends in ocean, the evening turns into a sky full of stars and you remember what it is to be a tiny, insignificant human in the cosmos. The air is thick with cicada song, you exhale. 

On the other side of the ocean, an old man takes his last breaths. He knows it, you know it. Your father sits by his side and doesn't know how to put into words the sorrow of loss, the sadness of letting go of one who saw your entire life. You sit with a cigarette in the dark night and try to speak the words for him, but all you get is: life is what it is, and then it is over. It is sad when it goes, it is miles deep of empty, but here we are. There is no God, there is no straw to grasp after this, and therein lies the comfort. We have but these stars, this wilderness, this tiny speck of life in an ocean of space beyond. It will not matter to space when we go. But it matters to us. 

Therein lies the secret to life. 

And that is full well, as it is. 

33

Another year passes, and yet, because of just one small detail, none of the days, none of the years seem to matter so much. I came back to New York, and all the things that ever hurt me were suddenly secondary. It seems impossible, ridiculous somehow, and I remember so well those cold nights in Stockholm, doubting what Elysian Field I had left behind, convinced that it couldn't possibly be this beautiful place I had made it up to be. But you know, being here... It really is Everything.

I hope you do things that terrify you this year, that you dare to beat them, and that you rejoice when you do. I hope you say Yes when asked. I hope you travel, see something new. I hope you make new friends but also continue to love the ones you have. I hope you read. I hope you love New York City and that you do it proud. 

You always did, me. 

Turn

The evening is cool, for the first time in ages the air doesn't make you sweat yourself to sleep. You turn down the fan, let the constant bustle of 2nd Avenue wash over you. There was a moment today where you felt sorry for yourself but this city washes it right off of your skin. Nothing changes with the passing of a night or a day. 

But with the seasons, sometimes we can turn a leaf. 

Press

I like her, but you just get this feeling she's headed straight for a crash. We turn the pages, discuss prose and story arcs, laugh at the discrepancies of rough drafts. I look my main character in the eyes, hear her bottomless despair of so many years, see the way her smile sparkles in the upturns. She's waiting even for herself to betray her.

But the words have been here for longer than you've known you needed them. You revel in them, float dreamily along their streams and rejoice in their homecoming. The words have stood by you when everything else has crumbled underneath your thumb.

You vow not to betray them, now.

Circus

I saw an image of her, I couldn't help myself, I scrolled through a hundred, I'm sorry. Part of me hates her, you know, it isn't her fault at all, and just as big a part of me wishes I was more like she is. That dark hair that drapes her, the thin voice that'll break if you love her too hard. If my crooked smile was wistful like hers, perhaps you would think of me still.

There's salt water in my hair still, wisps of sand in the curves of my skin. They help etch new lines across my memory where your face used to lie. The days, they help, the summer songs and bottomless cups. Your voice still rings in my ears, I think I'd do anything to make you laugh, but maybe I can put one foot in front of the other for another few days, maybe they will add into years, maybe one day I will look at your smile and be happy just that it is. Maybe one day she will walk past me and it will not knock the air out of me.

But not today.

of Earth and Sea

Early morning, second avenue is still quiet after the storm. A young man in last night's suit walks home. We escape the city before it begins to boil. Head east until you can smell the ocean. Stop and feel your lungs begin to breathe. 

Summer races towards an end but you still feel invincible. Still make plans for sunny adventures and cold drinks in late summer evenings. You were always slow on the pickup, so perhaps it isn't more than right. You count your blessings to live in a place where there's time for you to come around. 

You are perpetually counting your blessings to be here. 

Wear

The heat refuses to break. It pushes itself into your pores, it mauls your senses and makes every breath heavy. You seem to recall a time when your skin was not drenched in sweat, but it seems so distant, a time when you did not long for a change in season. The only thing to cool your fevered nerves are the countless margaritas you order, and by now the waitress looks at you with a familiar face.

We sat at the quiet bar and watched the Monday night patrons trickle in. East Village, they all came and shook our hand, made friends. The bulldog you brought greets them in return, with impropriety. Friendship 20 years in the making, you still remember the small town in California where she was born, when she tells your about her Nana, you remember those crinkled eyes and how they would smile; when she cries because he's really left, there's nothing uncomfortable in the air around it.

The years add up in your muscles, they build a life inside of you that can only be what it is with time. These people are built into your veins, these seasons wire themselves along your spine. Your joints ache more than they used to, your skin loses its tightness, but there is a quiet calm that rests on your shoulders that wasn't there before.

Perhaps the summer will pass at last. Perhaps another year won't be the end at all.

Short Message Service

…it just feels like I've grown this 
extra limb and 
I'm trying to rework my body 
with it
so everything is 
coordinated
and can work
ok 
together

(and you can't help but think
that you still wreak havoc
everywhere you go)

Still

I have the window open to Second Avenue, a round fan in the window, no screen. The street is loud, so loud every night and thick layers of soot trail into my room, but here's the thing. 

No matter how broken I am, how lost and entrenched in the war that is being alive, when I take my glasses off at the end of the night, and look at the blurry lights through that open window. 

Nothing is ever wrong that is not made right by the sight. 

Against

Images of an old-school train bar car, Southern California in the late afternoon sun, no one ever has to worry about what to wear in Los Angeles and everything's just the right shade of comfortable. Outside my window, a restless New York summer races past while I rot away in a mess of my own making. Flip through the pages of my youth to see nothing has ever changed, nothing was ever different. Perhaps that should be a comfort. But if we have 60 years left of the same, what's the use of even one?

Sometimes the futility of life will hit you like a misguided firecracker on the Fourth of July. It's stupid to even risk, stupid to get so close when you know what can happen but you think you're invincible and suddenly it's pierced your very bowels and you spiral into the inevitable abyss that is enlightenment. There is no point to any of this. 

What do we do with our lives, knowing?

Capital

The evening sun is warm, velvety like molasses: August sun. It hangs lazily near the horizon, licking the tree tops and trickling into the clearings in the woods. Everything is lush, delicious, rural. You manage to snag the last available window seat on an entire train, way up front, an insufferable group of college bros around you with their beer buzz and terrible choices in music. For a second you regret your treasure seat. 

But as the train rolls out of the station, as it flies past the Hudson River and lulls you into solitude, all the disturbances and annoying itches that exist without, begin to roll off your skin and onto the the tracks behind. The conductor walks by, a white-haired man with that twinkle in his eye and he looks just like one would imagine a conductor in a children's book, in a 1930's movie; he makes jokes at you and you just smile. America lies gentle outside your window. All is well. 

Springs

Early morning, your alarm rings: you haven't stirred once in the night. The room is dark, and quiet, and cool, and you sleep like a child. Outside the window, it's a whole other world, the air is fresh, albeit industrially tough. You drive through winding highways, discussing trivia, looking up answers in pockets of reception. Stare at the cumulus clouds and revel in sunlight without jungle heat. Walk through the little town, entirely content with life. You realize that the city nears again; you feel like you are a thousand miles away. 

There was a moment today, at the top of the great waterfall, when I thought to myself that life is that current, that smooth pure cool current and at some point you'll fly down the rushing falls, and it'll terrify you to no end, but at the bottom, isn't it all twirls and mist and perpetual rainbows again? It was the most zen I've felt in ages. 

The heat can't get to you, then. 

Terminal 5

You rush past the Friday evening slowpokes, all the time in the world and a week's work in their shoulders, you haven't the time for kind words. Sweat begins to stick on your back, a heavy pack pushing into the fabric of your shirt. You're late, so late, why were you so cavalier in leaving work and now you'll be late and then what will you do? 

But you step onto the AirTrain at Howard beach, and the cool air washes over you, the clean floors and wide open spaces, and you haven't a care left in the world. You follow the anxious murmuring crowd through security, smile as the guard picks at your tragic bags, move calmly, confidently through the mazes. Nothing can touch you now. 

The plane is late, after all. You sit at the window seat -always the window seat- and watch the late evening sun turn to fire on the runway. Silently keeping your fingers crossed of the flight route, that it will carry your side of the plane across the skyline, give you that moment which soothes your soul more than anything you've yet to know. 

The best part of leaving this place

is knowing you will be back. 

Thrown

To compensate for his ordinary shoes.

The weather forecast frightens for no reason, the early evening is blissfully mild, and a gentle breeze sings through the crooked streets downtown. I started walking, aimlessly, because the best kind of walk is the one that doesn't tell you your goal until it is in you. By the time I reached Chinatown, smelling of fish in the late summer if course, twilight had laid a deep yellow hue across the bricks and the gingko trees; everything seemed silent. I curved under the Brooklyn bridge and veered back north, narrowly avoiding the throngs of classes and tourists making their rounds. Zig-zagged through the outer edges of an unknown neighborhood before reaching Delancey just at dusk. I climbed the Williamsburg bridge slowly, painstakingly, it is like one long slope that never ends, a mountain in miniature, and the sky grew dark. The M train passed, shaking the foundations and offering just a moment's glimpse at the lives of others, like watching them in a fish bowl, or like walking past a warmly lit house in winter. 

There's a small section in the middle of the bridge where the bike lanes and pedestrian lanes meet, a short tunnel for going to the north side and staring out over the Manhattan skyline. I stood there in a trance, there's no telling for how long. A group of graffiti artists pulled up, cracked open cans of beer and discussed the climb. A J train crept by slowly. I stared at the skyline, at my beautiful home twinkling in the near distance, so close I could touch it. So close I could belong. My legs were tired, my feet, my head, my skin. A police car pulled up to talk to the graffiti kids. I wanted to protect them, somehow, but in the end the cop just fined them and laughed like he wanted to join. 

I felt my love for the city spread again into my sad limbs, felt it wet my eyes even though I tried to hold it back. My heart filled with gratitude. 

Carried me back home again. 

No Decorum

The heat broke, at last. I went for an endless run along the river, under all the bridges and past the Wall Street crowds with their evening drinks. Past a hundred Chinese couples out on their late-night walks and quiet contemplation. Past the Pasta factory across the river, until my legs grew accustomed to the dull ache and my heart slowly beat every last thought out of my mind. The days are beautiful and painful all at once; you stumble into bed and wake at sunrise, there's no sense to make. She calls from the hospital, alone and waiting for the surgery to be over. You can't bear to think of that hospital. You still wish you were by her side.

When you come home, late, too late, too disheveled and you can't seem to put yourself together, your bed's been made. You tuck yourself in between crisp, stretched sheets. Sleep soundly without nightmares. Welcome the reprieve.

Jukeboxed

I cried today. There was a moment after an early morning run, when I sat stretching in the shade (because it was already a hundred degrees and unbearable) and it just came over me, unrelenting but unapologetic and in just a minute was over. My senses continue to be wrapped in cotton, everything is dulled and my responses are slow. I try my best to wade through with a machete, desperately holding on to the clearings where light trickles in, but it's not always easy to see the point. 

Imagine it would be easier to fight for life if I did. 

Your Rolling Stones Records

The heat returns, the humidity. Sweat runs in rivulets down throats, along hairlines, it pools in the smalls of backs and darkens cotton threads. The New York City summer nights are wild with life, people peering out from their air conditioned isolation chambers after midnight, moving tables into the streets and catching up like after a religious fast. In a corner apartment in the East Village, a small tornado runs amok.

It is too easy to tear everything apart, to scratch and claw and succumb to the overwhelming darkness; it is too familiar, too comfortable. She curled up on the couch and said it's my safest space and my most encroaching prison at once, and you remember now exactly what she means. The days, the weeks, the life, they catch up with you, they stuff your head with cotton and make you afraid of the light. Your roommate dashes in and out, in breezy summery outfits and freshly painted bronzer, trilling about her various engagements, and you don't know how long you can smile and nod in her direction before it becomes clear that your insides are performing a nuclear meltdown. You search desperately for airline tickets and are at a loss for what to do when you find them, because he said not to run away and you can't imagine the alternative.

You are determined to take the difficult track instead, to stare your demons in the eye and ask them what they want. It's just that there's a heat wave outside, and a roaring fire inside, and you're pretty sure the demons wouldn't mind just a moment's snuggle before they let you send them away.

They are such old friends, after all.

Post Title

His voice comes clear over the line, for once without lag and confusion. He speaks of jobs he's applied to around the world, we speak of the Southern Hemisphere in fall and apartments in the north. You are reminded that this is the life you still crave, that airports are your home no matter the world beyond or the company at your side. They speak of returns, of a city that has changed like the river but maybe there's a way to swim back into the current. Or maybe we take our family to Africa, build something else completely. 

You consider a life moored to just the place you were born, a place with no unknowns and no overwhelmig adventures. You reaffirm your devotion to a different life completely. Decide to work like hell to belong to the world.

Exit Strategy

I wish I had done this more, you think regretfully. I wish I had gone there, if only once. Your bags lie packed in the corner of their guest room, you refuse to pull the blinds because it's the last light night you'll see, and your early alarm already makes the travel jitters tingle in your body. There's a sense of home that lies in hearing voices and movement behind closed doors when you're trying to sleep. 

Your lids are heavy, your breaths already slow. Tomorrow everything will look different. So let it. 

Just be here, now. 

Express

You wake up too early; the morning is late but the hours you slept are few. There is a dry sheet of sand paper in your hung over mouth, and your skin is too warm, still too pink from the previous day's sunshine. Smells of an open fire waft in from the living room, as you slowly make your way out into the quiet house: a gentle rain falls on the grass, into the lake. You still go swimming, after the fire has died down. After she tells you of all the things she saw written in her veins when winter was dark. After he tells you what it's like to carry on when nothing turned out the way you had thought. But I'd like to think we're the kind of people who can change our minds. You see easily your own crooked paths winding unsteadily behind you, and realize that you haven't a single answer for them. Your only redemption lies in every morning you still wake up, every day you can put behind you that you survived. Some days that is well enough. 

The little clearing in the woods looks the same after the last words have dissipated, the water lies just as still and just as quiet. You think there should be a way to tell them that. 

Imagine the best way may be to just go for another swim. 

Tigers

It's there when you wake up: sunlight, streaming through the shuttered windows. In your heart you already know: there will not be a better day than this. Go for a swim early, the water is cold, but impossibly refreshing. Drink more coffee than your tattered body can handle. Run through lush green fields and count the flowers. Trace lineage through the wrinkles of those around you. Go for another swim; dive deep into the lake and resurface brand new.

We wrapped ourselves in warm wool sweaters, stuck our feet in boots three generations in the making and waded through the deep grass, past the pastures, to the little clearing at the end of the woods. Took our clothes off and stepped carefully into the water. I have to swim naked here, she says, because this place is mine. We swam out to the middle of the bay and looked at the house where she dreams they'll one day live. One day, and the door is always open. By the time we made our way back, shivering with cold or with magic there's no telling, the sun took its few minutes of respite before climbing back into the sky. By the time we went to bed, the clearing in the woods was already light, the trees alive with birdsong. My skin was warm with sunlight, my chest full of exactly the peace I came to find. All the worries of the year, the stress of the trip and the heavy burden that is life, were suddenly all worth it. The sadness of mortality washed off my exhausted limbs, and I crawled into bed to sleep the deep sleep of the countryside. Tomorrow, all this will be a dream, but no matter. 

Dreams are life, too. 

Without You

The car winds through narrow dirt roads, you lose track at the third turn and only recover when the house appears at the other side of the hill. This little cottage where so much of your childhood unraveled, where they measured their heights along the door post and you thought the narrow strip of sand was an endless beach by the water's edge. You remember how warm the summers, how familiar the dialect, and the silence of the night makes your head buzz. You long to sleep the heavy sleep that only the countryside can produce, and you think all the worries, and all the questions, and all the unease of life will wash right out of you. 

There's a monotonous pounding in your head. 

You hope it'll break you at last. Prepare the ground for building something new. 

Carry Me Home

I hear you're happy now. I hear she's everything you thought you'd never find, and everything has come so easy, where it never had before. I suppose you won't walk the streets late at night anymore, contemplating the twists of solitude and heaviness of life like we used to. I suppose come sunrise you'll be light of spirit, and that's great. I just miss you, that's all.

(The rain lifted today, for a minute. I tried to remember the last time I looked at you without sadness, but it's been so clouded over by everything that came after, and maybe if I saw you today I wouldn't know your scent from a stranger in the street. And it's just easier to not think of it at all.)

Elusive

The endless summer days end in a cold rain on Monday morning. I ran around the royal grounds and met not a person in the woods, as the weather ran in tendrils along my cheeks. Walked back down the main street and tried to see my reflection in the eyes of people I'd meet, try to find my belonging.

We sat in their living room, drinking coffee and smiling at the children, their newborn baby still resting in my arm, as the evening grew sunny and warm in the late hour. I looked at these people who live in the very core of my heart, people whose mere existence makes me second-guess my home across the ocean, and I thought what an immense blessing it is to love. But when she says I miss you, when she says she'll stay here if I return, I do not understand the words. The mere idea that I exist in their world when I am not here seems preposterous. How could anything in me, possibly mean anything, truly, to you?

The nights carry on with their blue skies and birdsong, oblivious to the struggles of humanity. It's reassuring, when everything else is so hard.

vs. Nurture

Early morning, Stockholm quiet in the slight haze and no people in the street except dog walkers. I ran across the square --I'm always late-- and rubbed my tired eyes as I made my way onto the boat. We sat in the wind, snuggled under a blanket and giggling, as it made its way out of the city harbor and into the archipelago beyond. 

There's a silence by the sea that permeates your every pore. There's the rhythmic lapping of waves against the cliffs, the screech of gulls a hundred feet in the air, the low murmur of boats between the islands, but beyond that, there is nothing. We made our way to a quiet cove, with a few stray boats moored at its edges, and remarked how we weren't made for cities, after all. Spent a few perfect hours finding each other again, remembering who we are with each other, relishing the few moments we have before oceans of time pass between us again. You curse your vagabond heart for always leaving them, for always being so lost that you don't see love when it wraps its arms around you. 

Summer is devastatingly beautiful. Your skin is warm, smells of sunscreen. There is nowhere you would rather be, and you don't have to. 

to Ashes

Speak louder

than the words before

you. 

The days continue in a haze. The sun shines brighter than you remembered, the waters sparkle in a deeper blue than you could imagine. We lay staring into the waves, mesmerized, as he relearned your names and your place in his heart. Later, as the evening cooled off and became a Friday night in the city, you cradled a tiny being mere days in the world and forgot you ever had a life anywhere else. It would have been your grandmother's birthday today. It's your first time back without visiting her but your laugh still rings of her sentiment. 

The streets are quiet when you return to your temporary home on the other side of town, but the sky is still blue, the air still sweet with flowers. 

Life is overwhelming sometimes, and you still don't know who you are in it. 

Twilight

And suddenly there it is, the lush green land bathed in a bright morning sun. A sprawling city glittering in its countless waters, and the overwheing scent of elder flower in bloom. They appear at a turn in the street, at the end of undulating hills at sunset: people you love more than you thought you knew how. They smile at you now in the flesh, you can put your arms around them and hear their laughter up close; it's like you never left. The Stockholm night lingers in the magical moment between dusk and dawn as you make your way home in silence.  You hadn't forgotten how impossibly beautiful it is. You just don't have space for the longing its absence creates. 

Your jet lagged mind tries to sleep. 

Dreams of a sunrise mere minutes away. 

I Thought You Were

The world looks different from the air, the sun shines at a different angle. The blood in my veins still races with adrenaline, with all the pressing tasks on the to-do list hovering over my shoulders, but the list is a thousand miles away now, and that which wasn't done will have to wait. Your phone buzzes incessantly with longing, with images of those whose faces you soon will see, whose arms in which you soon will rest. Anticipation tingles in your every nerve. Soon, soon, below this cloud cover is a land in which the sun will not set. Soon, soon, you will lean into that space from which you came, which still whispers your name. In your chest already beats the bittersweet sting of separation, of not being able to live in two worlds at once, of always being incomplete.

For a short while, in ignorant bliss, you thought it made you a richer person to belong in so many places, to have jewels of people dotted like a fine necklace all around the globe and to fit right in like a spy undercover. But you are tired now, you are sad, and the tears where you've left others behind are still raw, heal jaggedly. You are a patchwork of makeshift fixes.

You are broken beyond repair.

On Pride

We've decided not to renew the contract. We leave New York next year. The bar seems tainted by his words; the sawdust is thin on the ground and unsatisfying. You have such few constants in your life. You eschew their importance. But now the loss hits your breast bone like a missile.

She sent a photograph early this morning, a black and white portrait of a life brand new. She said all's well that ends well, and now she's here. You count down the hours, the minutes until you can hold her tiny body in yours. Count down the hours until those lives that seem so far away will be suddenly near.

I walked down East 4th street today, staring straight into the sun. Summer wins you over eventually, every time. The sunlight burns straight through your skin, warms your aching heart. Weather is your only constant. You live and die by its word.

Pretend the same does not go
for those you carry in your heart.

Say Something

Rain, rain, and the temperature drops. We take an early-morning train to the Upper West Side, marvel at the crowds already in motion with their day. We rummage through the leftovers before their move to wealthy suburbs. They're bringing the nanny. You haven't a single thing to say to her , but perhaps it doesn't matter. The rain continues.

I dreamed of you again last night. I keep waking up with such a sweet, familiar, comfort in my chest, but I'm not sure, if I told you, that you'd know what I meant. Travel approaches, a thousand miles across the waters and greeting the nightless land at dawn, with no rules made for the weeks to come. There's a part of you that has been sleeping for so long, an entire person hibernating, waiting for the right soil in which to grow.

Pack your bags. Sate her sleeping breaths. Reality can always wait for your return.

Prologue

The bathroom smells like a hotel. You love the way hotel beds are made, with the sheets stretched taut across your skin in restraint. The best sheets in the world line beds of a Super8 motel in Moab, Utah. Their bathrooms smell just like this. Like travel and anonymity. You sleep there like under a spell. 

Their Park Slope brownstone is a whirlwind of three years' life. We don't understand it yet, I think, she says, but I think we are ready. You can't dwell on what it means to leave, what it is to tear up the trembling roots of a home, but once the week is over, the space that was theirs will be whitewashed, and the pavement won't remember their soles against its cheek. You carry their vacuum cleaner down 4th avenue. A late June sun runs mild and sweet down the wide street, and the view from the F train at Smith and 9th is the most bittersweet song you know. I cried today over many things. 

But I think it will be alright. 

of the Interior

Days of sweat, heaving breaths and glistening brows, the thunder finally gives way to a light breeze, a peach-colored sunset that takes your breath away and renders the East Village a continuous buzz of movement. You turn the familiar corner at Bleecker street, sit on the Morton Street stoop drinking cocktails as dusk gives way to mosquito bites and sirens. It's easy, it's home, and you realize it always will be. There should be words for that, but you walk closely alongside her in silence. Perhaps that's the best way it could be said.

I took the G into old haunts tonight, stepped off at Greenpoint Avenue and it was reassuringly the same. We walked up Franklin Street, like so many years ago. The barge bar wasn't ready for patrons yet; we stood near the water's edge and watched heavy skies hang across the ceiling of Manhattan, across the projects and the thin sliver where you run. Found again the bar where you spent sweaty nights playing table tennis and escaping the room with no A/C in the linen factory up the street. Do you remember how the ice cream truck would scream insults into your ears? You spent your days on the rooftop, staring at the city across the water. How close it lay, like you could reach out and touch it with your trembling fingertips. You traced its outline with your words, dreamed at night of its quiet halo, longed to journey across the waters and land in its mad embrace. You did, at last, and you never looked back.

Dreams are always so pretty from afar.

How terrifying when they're even better
up close.

Anniversary

Slowly, carefully, open the pages, pull out the waxy leaves within. Tiny stems of little white flowers, arranged like pearls on a string, dried and pressed, lie in wait. The same flowers your father stepped out into the woods to pick, her father keeping him company. Forty years ago.

Forty years ago they promised to stand with each other through thick and thin, to endure the hardships of life without letting go, to grow old next to one another, no matter the storms around the bend. Somehow, impossibly, they did. They look at each other, at themselves, now, and can not recognize the wrinkled, aching bodies that appear before them. But they long for each other when they are apart, and I think they would not know how to weather the storms, how to enjoy the ride, or how to grow old, without the other.

Forty years later you place the flowers carefully in the frame, consider initials, or dates, or simply letting the petals speak for themselves. Wrap the gift, address the package. Imagine forty years with a person who makes you whole.

Imagine forty years
without.

Call It A Draw

The early morning after Midsummer's Eve has passed runs quiet on Second Avenue. The threat of rain hangs in clouds above the water towers, but you don't think too much about it. Weather doesn't mean as much in a country that doesn't rise and fall with a withholding sun, and Battery Park was filled to the brim last night with white-haired people sweating in their summer dresses. You sat there staring at the sea of your ilk and remembered only the reasons you didn't belong with them. Hours later, the strawberries and wine doing cartwheels in your head, what a relief to walk back into the jungle of skyscrapers, to lean into the Uptown 1 train and let it rock you gently back to a sense of home. A sleeping child hangs heavy in your arms, what does she know yet of the melancholy of summer solstice. Perhaps she'll never learn; the streets of New York has many things yet to beat into her. My grandfather celebrates his 67th wedding anniversary alone, and there is no way to measure such an absence in your heart.

The words come out jumbled some days, the thoughts. They stack in your head like Friday night rush hour down Seventh Avenue, and try as you might, there's no weaving between the cars. The street below your window begins to wake.

Promises to keep you safe.

Sweeter Innocence

Thunder rolls across the avenues, drenching pedestrians in the torrents before disappearing as quickly and letting the sun set in a deep peach glow. I find it difficult to breathe lately, but it doesn't seem to be the weather. I ran along the river late last night; I ran, and ran, and couldn't get myself to stop, even though the waters were black and the promenade emptied of people. The bridges of Manhattan contained me, but that was all. 

She says What good is talking? All that's left to say will hurt, but you are already reduced to shreds, what more damage could words possibly do? 

You set your alarm early

sleep until the wolves wake you

again.

Four Dead in Ohio

Regrets collect
like old friends

A week comes and goes, New York bakes and sweats without recourse. Your roommate escapes the apartment late in the night for a drink with an unknown man, insisting she'll be back in an hour but her blushing cheeks give her away. Messages from across the waters say their lives are crumbling, but you knew that years ago. Life is ugly, when you look closely.

Your blood boils, and it doesn't seem to be the New York night's doing.

What the hell
I'm gonna let it 
happen
to me. 

Chelsea Nights

A hundred degrees and the subway platform is empty. Your skin is damp and you pray the AC unit in your window hasn't fallen down down to the unassuming street below. Make a mental note to steal a brick from the construction at the corner to place underneath it for safety measures.

He speaks of heroin addiction treatment centers on the Lower East in the early 90s, and it sobers you more than the mug of espresso before you. Try not to wobble onto the tracks while you wait for the F train. It all smells like piss but you stay at the back because that's where you want to get off at 2nd ave. 

There was a New York before you got here; it was a different city than the one that is yours, and a different one that their daughter will grow up in still. He wants her to know how to break someone's face, while she is mostly concerned with handstands and pulling her own teeth out. We all want the best for our children.

The train announces itself with a gust of wind, long before its headlights appear at the turn in the tunnel. You close your eyes and let arrival cool your pounding veins. A hundred balloons line the ceiling of your apartment. 

You think you have never been as happy

as you are right now. 

Under the Bridge

The summer of 1999, you remember what you wore, and just the way you felt about life and where it could possibly take people. Your short hair was growing out in awkward lengths, and your family had decided that home was across the world after all, so it was best to go back there. You packed your bags and longed for back-to-school sales, for the way 100 degrees feels in the desert air when you step out of a freezing car. You packed your bags not knowing that the journey ahead would tear you limb for limb, would pull the roots from your veins and that you would never again be innocently glad.

The summer of 1999 is a long time ago, now. Your hair has grown out, grown dark, you smile better in pictures and try not to think of things that were.

You ask yourself sometimes
if you wish things had been different,
but the truth is

You don't know.

Scenes from a Breakup

Sitting on the floor of the Amtrak terminals at Penn Station, watching people coming, going, running, milling, sharing their goodbyes and their wondrous gaze of arrival, a steady stream though the Saturday evening and running into the deep of night, feels almost like the sweet familiar sting of airports.

 You think, perhaps, you would like to fly away.

Hook

The last sunset over the seaside village is breathtaking. The water has that soft soothing sound that makes you sleep so well, but when morning comes, your mind runs a hundred races before breakfast. You climb aboard the tiny plane to the co-pilot's seat and watch the mainland approach under your feet. The pilot was overly tan and mumbled carelessly, as I thought of the impossibility of flying, and how sometimes I don't want to ever land. 

Goodbyes are heart-wrenching when they wash over you, but the moments the doors close aren't you elsewhere already and the tides give way to an icy chill. 

Perhaps we are not the masters of our own destiny, as we imagine. Perhaps every day we're fighting the current to reach an imaginary shore, when we'd do better to simply ride the wave and let it carry us to beaches we never knew could be found. 

You end up gasping for air, regardless. 

Fireside

The scent of wood burning drifts across your cold skin. The child thinks instantly of marshmallows, but you think only of days spent in lakes or seas and the heavy sleep that follows a summer day in the country from which you came. The soles of your feet are softened in the sand; he climbs to the top of the dunes and reels with laughter the whole way down. You realize there was a time when your every day was spent laughing at his wonder. Your gratitude over this knocks the wind out of you.

An email in your inbox reminds you returns are imminent, reminds you of Penn Station chaos on a Friday night and the million things remaining on your to-do lists. Vacations are only as good as the moment they're in. Roaring fires turn into embers with time.

Let  the warm air on your skin
linger.

Deal

The rain continues. Your hands and his cheeks grow cold in minutes, but you continue scouring the shoreline for treasures until the eyelids hang heavy across his eyes. He looks at you in a way that makes your whole life worth living for a moment, and you remember again purpose and what it does with the worth in your spine. Tomorrow the rain will stop, maybe the sea will look different beyond the piers and balancing boats stranded on the ebb.

You can't find the right words to tie the strings together.

Sleep is restless, when it comes.

Despite

It rains. In a steady stream it pours down the windows, into the sand and across the waves. The beach smells like the cold sea, all salty and steady. He looks at you and laughs until your tired heart melts, but it drips into the gutters with the rain. Perhaps you are beyond repair.

(Nothing feels real
in life
and sometimes you think
perhaps you aren't actually
here
at all)

In Harvard Yard

In fact 
I don't mean any
of this. 

A sweltering weekend passes in a town you did not know, but which suddenly lingers in the soles of your shoes. You traipse across the neighborhoods to new drinks, new views and you try to sort the perpetual questions in the boxes of another geographical grid. Leave city limits and land quietly in autumn winds along the coast of the Atlantic, salty air in a turmoil around your curling hair. You shiver, but your skin makes more sense in the rural patchwork, and you don't know how to ever belong in just one place, as just one person.

When she writes from India to say she puts her life entirely in the power of the pleasure principle, that adventure and madness must drive her now because nothing else seems worth the struggle and look how far it brought her anyway, you cannot help but agree. You cannot help but feel this life is too hard to not just live the hell out of it.

Perhaps you'll never belong anywhere.

You can belong everywhere, instead.

This Breath

The bus weaves through Hell's Kitchen, crosses Broadway on the upper west and rolls slowly through Friday night in Harlem, all piles of people lingering in the streets: it is summer. The caravan crosses Malcolm X boulevard and your gaze follows its straight and narrow line through the park down to the softly lilting skyscrapers of midtown. Cross the bridge and look back: Manhattan overwhelms you with its beauty, with its untold treasures. You miss it already; an entire life across its avenues do not seem like enough time. 

The sturdy Greyhound ship continues slowly out of city limits. You embark on untold adventures, hundreds of miles of unknown highway stretch ahead of you, America unfolds at your feet. 

Your best days are perpetually yet to come. 

Cleavage, Cleavage, Cleavage

(Because when it's summer

in the city

and you're

long gone from

this city I

start to miss you,

sometimes)

The weather turns sweltering overnight. I run along the water and rivers of sweat make their way down the nape of my neck, the small of my back; I try to focus on how this will work out the kink in my joints, the ache in my chest, as my feet pound the blood across my temples. It works. Not for long. 

He calls from across the waters and you had forgotten how simple the lilt of his tongue, how welcoming the ease of conversation. You do not paint any futures across his forehead, but then, you never paint any futures at all. Your father calls and says Do you really believe you'll leave a year from now like you said, and the idea seems as ludicrous as any mad concoction your poor twisted heart could imagine. I didn't think so, he responds. 

In your heart (of hearts)

You have everything that matters. 

In your heart,

you are whole. 

Twine

Walk east on 12th street, pass a hundred different worlds across the avenues, with reiki energies sinking into the heels of your feet. It's too soon to go home, your breaths are still deep in your chest and you need the quiet streets to settle your beating heart.

Perhaps it is May's doing, this incessant smile on your lips, this spring in your step. Perhaps it's the way the East Village buzzes incessantly against your ear drum, and you want to see every last inch of it, touch every surface and hear every last mad sound of its streets. Your love for New York resurfaces, your love for the Word and you find yourself home on a Saturday night caressing old writings like former lovers you never entirely forgot after all. He calls from the chilly autumn evening while you lie sweating in Central Park, and you no longer remember what it is to miss someone, no longer remember what it feels like to miss a piece, because you miss nothing.

You will walk up and down these streets
(until they fill you)
and they will make you whole.

Holiday

You learn new things about the neighborhood: the East Village is as empty as the West come holiday weekends. You walk down Second Avenue, quieter than it ever has been since you arrived, and you remember again how you love the feeling of being alone in the city, having it all to yourself like a jealous girlfriend and savoring every moment in its gaze.

There's something to be said for being happy to your very core. You imagine it's unreasonable to expect it every damn day. 

But New York makes it pretty hard to believe it. 

To Serve

His girlfriend greets me with a familiar hug in the doorway; I cannot remember if we've met before. His eyes dart across the restaurant, all evening he is elsewhere but when we part ways he holds my hands a little longer than necessary. She reminds me of me, but better. It makes me happy.

There was a moment last night, when the drinks made my limbs so heavy and the pillow so soft, when the overwhelming vacuum at the core of my being reared its ugly monster of a head and with me nowhere to turn to look away. In one lapping wave, it knocked the breath right out of me and it took me so long to recover, as I tumbled down the rabbit hole into the cloying tar that resides there.

What is the point in letting myself roll through the sludge, letting my fingers get pruny with worthlessness and despair as the ghosts of days past devour the scraps of foundations I have built for myself? You look at me like the answer should be obvious, but I have no words left when I open my mouth.

It's just muted screams,
disguised as ignorant bliss.

I Was Prepared

A storm passes over the island. You run across Broadway to meet him in the rain, oh how Saturdays lie sad in New York City and you want to do away with all the cluttering people in your way. Your phone buzzes with unknown feelings and you cannot make sense of the turmoil in your chest, along your skin.

But he puts it so simply into words; you look him eagerly (earnestly) in the eyes and realize that from this giant mad man come the answers for which you've been desperately scrambling for weeks. Perhaps it's the warm thunder outside, perhaps it's the miles that lie between, no matter. The only thing you can do is try. Whatever will be, will be.

Your only job
is to be there, when it does.

Render

(If you wait long enough, 
stay up late enough, 
even the East Village grows quiet, 
with only the rushing sounds
of effortless traffic
along the avenues
to keep you company
-to occupy your mind-
and eventually you will hear
the voice inside your head
you've so successfully drowned out
It had not abandoned you
It was waiting patiently
until you 
were ready
to listen.)

That I'm Strong

Another earthquake hits the little country at the top of the world. His words are few and far between, but you forgot what they meant to say, anyway, and  you spend your evening reading history books about an Alphabet City that no longer exists. I ran along the East River last night, and watched Greenpoint in that magical twilight that only lingers in New York City, remembering a sweltering summer spent on the rooftop of the linen factory, watching the city spread out before us and only thinking When can I arrive at last? All these years later, and here I am, still, safely nestled in the avenues, and I never want to be anywhere else. (I told him I had to choose eventually, and all he said was Why? It seems silly now, but the alternative had never occurred to me.)

The air turns sweltering overnight, textiles stick to your skin and you wonder how you'll ever survive a summer without water. But in your inbox lie jewels of airfare, promises of fresh air and salty breezes against your cheeks. Perhaps you can have it all, and at the end of the day, a bed at the corner of 4th and 2nd, a quiet space that loves you more than you know how to love yourself, and perhaps you don't have to choose eventually.

Or maybe you chose long ago,
and you're living happily ever after
with the result.

(Forever More)

There is something in the dusty air, something about the incessant noise and strange eyes in the streets. It makes you want to write, again. It makes you want to feel, and bleed, and distill every last morsel into words until you pass out, spent and emptied, atop the mattress in the corner of your room. It makes you feel again like if you could spend your days in literate lust, you would want for nothing, ask for nothing, you would be whole and invincible.

It occurs to you again, 

that such a possibility

is worth every sacrifice you've ever made
in its name. 

Any Alibis

It smells like rain; the tiniest drops begin to hit you when you reach the river, and it could just be mist from the sea. You cross at least five worlds on your way across the avenues. You could just as well have moved across the globe as twelve blocks east, but you didn't, and your love for the city grows a thousand times in your heart (repeatedly, incessantly, perpetually) at the insight. Across the water, Brooklyn lies grey and surprisingly industrial, the pasta factory a concrete behemoth reminder of times past.

It occurs to you that this place is becoming a large collection of moments past. You don't understand how you could ever be anywhere else, but it still seems impossible to consider it a possibility to not be. 

You wonder what would happen

If you let your heart take the wheel

For a while. 

Sharpen Your Knives

I cannot read your words anymore, she says in the heavy silence between sips of a drink, it doesn't seem right anymore. You neglect his novel ambitions, forget to submit your own in time. Words slip through your fingers. Listen to what I say, pay no attention to what I do, you hear yourself whisper, but as the days go, you find it difficult to trust either. It is all fun and games until they look at you with that sentiment in their eyes and you bring out the daggers from the inseam of your boots.

The lilacs are in bloom along Union Square this week. You trace fourth avenue and cross the park at the south end, narrowly avoiding the pile of bikes on the steps and staring at the flowers like they will give you new life. (Because they do.) How quickly life takes on a new shape entirely, and you forget it was ever any other way. The street outside your window beats its scrappy, messy noise into your ear drums.

It sounds like music; you sleep like a child.

Apt 5

You cross Bleecker the same way as always, know where the delivery bicycles will suddenly appear, can count the seconds it takes to cross Seventh Ave before the light turns, but when you turn the corner at Morton Street, the feeling in your blood vessels is different. You could walk that last block blind folded, but this is not your home. There are no keys in your pocket; you ring the buzzer and wait to be let in. The dog is confused, but he melts in your palm when you ask him.

It's strange to leave, at the end of the night. Walk east along Third Street, cross Broadway under a thick, full moon. But you unlock the gate at your new stoop, the steep one, squeezed in between the seafood restaurant and the deli on the corner, and something about it feels right. The West Village melts away as the maddening noise of Second Avenue at midnight peaks. You go to bed in a room you do not know.

But it knows you, already.

to Church

The lilacs on 3rd street are in full bloom, and it's barely May. I walked past the Key Foods in alphabet city this morning, remembering a sweltering August day many, many years ago, with our wide eyes and disbelieving anyone could live on this street, in this place, we asked them a hundred questions even though we were only there to pick up a craigslist bid. Somehow, magically, impossibly, it is the street where I live. I walked out to the river, and the whole world seemed so terribly full of promise, of mad adventure and new beginnings.

It occurs to me there is nowhere else I would rather be. There never was. I fear there never will be.

If you've found your way home,
why would you ever want to leave it?

Sing Me Anything

(It isn't much, yet,

Your limbs are too tired 

To speak or tell you their dreams

From

Last night,

But at the very edge

Of your lips

There's an ever-so slight

Smile,

And you can feel it 

Grow.)

I Need a Raincoat

Saturday morning at the Fulton mall, sun beaming down as you wait impatiently for the bus. His playlist makes you all sorts of maudlin, and it makes the cherry blossoms unpleasantly out of place.

You wake alone in your impossibly large room on East 4th, buy your coffee alone and ride the bus without saying a word. It runs past the house on Dean Street where you used to spend your days, where you used to live someone else's life. In your old home on Morton Street, an Italian mother dotes on a new young tenant. 

Perhaps the shaky legs of a person without a hand to hold should make you feel sad. 

But hell if it don't make me feel free.  

Homeward Bound

Strange voices mingled outside my door, too early in the morning for guests but they walked confidently into the apartment and aaahed in nostalgia. This was the stoop where we had our first kiss, she says, and now we are celebrating out 40-year anniversary. She had lived here in the 60s, and how different the neighborhood then.

I walked home slowly through the west village today, spring in its most overwhelmingly beautiful essence. The streets buzz with people, but they are clean, coordinated. You drag your suitcase across the Bowery and feel calmed by its madness, at ease in the dirt it still retains. The Empire State Building gleams in the distance.

Six years ago you turned the corner on Morton street for the first time and knew, instantly, you were home. The cab ride east is ten dollars, with tip, and it feels like a whole new world. You put the last of your things in a bag (there's too many things, always too many things and you weigh a hundred pounds more just by owning them), rearrange the furniture until it looks like you were never there at all. Sleep one last, sound sleep in the little apartment with the teapots.

Tomorrow, adventure begins anew.

Re:Treat

She asks about New York, and you give standard responses as you would to anyone. You have forgotten the city completely -- one endless swim in the ocean washed it right out of you. But it sinks in as you stare at the sky, the sense of the scrambling city bumbling about your insides. You miss it terribly and wonder how you'd ever leave it again. 

Troubles rage against the insides of your eyelids, no 4-hour flight can ever save you from that. But a warm Caribbean breeze strokes the back of your neck, and while New York is miles and miles away, you know it is coming, you know it will return. May lies in wait, adventure in the margins. All you have to do is say yes. 

Like Bach

Turquoise waves over soft white sand. Brown skin and smiling faces. You do not know the language, but you know arrival: it makes you whole every time. They smile such kind smiles and you think how your country beats their kindness out of them, a little each day. Stand at the edge of the ocean with your pale winter skin, and feel again how nothing feels more right than your toes in the sea. Go somewhere new every year. And you did. Metaphorically too. 

Decide to beat the kindness back into your senses. Look upon yourself with new perspective. 

My lips taste of salt, and of sunshine. 

Gone Too Long

A thunderstorm rages across the sky, the first of the season and the lightning bounces off the west village brownstones. You set an alarm clock so early sleep seems nearly pointless. I heard a neighbor singing sweet soul the other day, when all our windows were open and the magnolia blossoms were floating through the air in the courtyard. Everything falls apart around you. She will not look you in the eye. You cannot decide how to feel. The rain pelts on your window pane in a fury, tomorrow you will be thousands of miles away.

If you wanted symbolism,
here it is in droves.

Esc

So many false starts, so many sunlit moments when you've thought This is it, and you've found yourself feeling alive for seemingly the first time in a lifetime. You've smiled with conviction and crossed the island in great big strides that have already forgotten what it is to be cold, and sad, and tired.

But then, when the day actually arrives, when Spring beats its way into the very core of your being, when it tears down every icy brick around your heart and releases that manic laugh from your lungs that surprises you into tears, you realize that what has come before was only a minor reprieve from the depths. Now, you are alive. Now, you live.

I went to 54th street yesterday, to the 35th floor of a glass building with indifferent doormen, and from one corner of the office suite you could see the Queensborough Bridge in the distance. The assistant brought me a glass of water; she was very sweet, unassuming. We signed the papers and smiled that way people do who do not know each other at all, yet have no secrets. There's something about May first that makes me unable to stay on the ground, every year I come untethered and need desperately to run into unknown adventures, and this year is no exception. As my tornado of a soul ransacked the dusty apartment on Morton Street today, high on the drug of separation with a browser full of airline tabs, I realized again the joy in surviving another winter, remembered what it is that makes humans toil and endure every harsh unbearable heartache and heavy sleep.

Now, I am alive.

Now, hot damn, I will live.

Windows

Jag skriver inga dikter till dig
Så gör man inte nu

Oh how spring makes the world look different. You feel the blood course quickly through your veins, and your cheeks flush with stolen moments in Union Square. Every day is a wild storm of giddy highs and terror clutching at your throat. You wake in the night with a toothache, but there is at least one moment every day when you are struck by how inexplicably happy you are that this is your life, and it makes every winter's day worth its despair. The gingko on Seventh Avenue is ready to burst, you already miss seeing it every day. Remind yourself that change is good, that the world is new and that you are young, yet. She says Think of the things you like and try to find them again, but you want to think of everything you've missed, instead, dive in head first and swim around in novelty until your fingers get pruny. May always made your skin burn with madness and that vagabond fever.

You decide to put your prescriptions away, let the disease rage through you.

Pray it reminds you what it is to stay alive.

Fireside

Perhaps it's distance - or proximity - perhaps it is the circumstances that trick you into this convoluted maze. You lose your breath and forget what came before. I still can't listen to your music, it collects in droves and when I get too close, it is like nothing has changed.

I walked down second avenue today, past the buildings that burned down on St Marks and the streets were so much noisier than their neighbors to the west. I thought am I mad to do this? but in my heart of hearts, I leapt a hundred leaps for the change, for the way May will begin with new horizons and other stories in the breeze. These streets show me the way, even when I do not deserve it. My tooth aches again, but I am not afraid.

Tomorrow the magnolias will bloom. Tomorrow, you are invincible again.

The Way You Are

Spring arrives to the island, and it overwhelms and impresses you as much this year as any before. You sit on the roof, drinking wine and staring out over the sprinkled West Village buildings, wondering if the big decisions you're making are the right ones. I'll miss this neighborhood so much, you say, but you do not yet entirely believe you'll ever leave it. Walk carefully through a sunny apartment on numbered streets and try to picture your books stacked in the first room on the right, see if you recognize your face in the mirror. 

My sister comes to town, reminds me of all the wrongs I insist on perpetuating, of the havoc I seem so intent to wreak. I only wanted rights, you know, but they evade me at every step. 

It occurs to me that the only thing I ever got right was this City. As long as you stay in its embrace, how could you ever go wrong?

Post Title

I thought of you today. She asked me about the shitty things that happen in life and all I could picture was you crouched in that window of a seven-story building, all I could feel in my chest was the cool April air against your cheeks and how quickly a body can fall. I missed your day this year; I thought perhaps enough time had passed and erased your story from my lungs, but it never will. You fade, a little, and perhaps the circumstances get a little more condensed, but you are always here. You always remind me to keep going.

I am still afraid of heights. But I am hellbent on learning how to fly.

Anyone Would Be

I have simply wanted an object to crave.

The dog wakes me early, we venture out to the river while the Village still lies sleeping. There's a cool breeze, but the sun was up way before us, the pavement is warm. It must officially be spring, we ran through Central Park in a giggle yesterday and every patch of earth was filled to the brim with flowers. The new year is brutal in its beauty, it forces itself into your every broken crevice and you think, for a moment, you are invincible. But your roommate goes to Connecticut, and in the silence she leaves behind, your every bandage unravels, your bones break and your innards spill across the unwashed floors. The news feed claims Jesus died for my sins, but I think if he knew me, he'd let the dead dog lie. 

There's a reason this city is home, you know. There's a reason I sleep soundly when the currents of a metropolis tumble every face into an unknown and keep no relationships moored around my belly. When subway trains arrive at the platform, I like to stand really close to the edge, close my eyes, and let myself get knocked back by the rushing air at their sides. But the thought of you holding my hand makes it feel like that air is getting sucked right back out of my lungs again, and the whole beautiful city gets taken from me in one fell swoop. 

Don't be so hard on yourself. It's not easy to contend with a magical city. 

It's not easy to hold on to someone who is so hellbent on falling apart. 

Let's Waste Time

I think I want you to be darker and twistier than you actually are, she says.

And the vicious flesh wounds that have ripped through your every muscle, have bled into your guts and wreaked havoc with your frailly beating heart, they seem mostly closed with those Bandaids you plastered across your skin. You walk through your days with a quiet smile and a confident direction.

But wounds heal into scars, into thick, pink bulges that do not give when you move through them. They make your steps less fluid, your laughter stick in your throat. They follow you where you go, always irritating your flustered skin, always reminding you how they tried to kill you.

So no, I am not as dark and twisty as you expected.

And it takes all I have, to keep it that way.

Big City

There's an itch at the center of my spine, it makes me equal parts apathetic and restless. I begin to open drawers, run my fingers along dusty items long neglected and long desperately to throw everything out, start fresh. Only own as much as you can carry. The daffodils I bought yesterday already overwhelm my window, keeping in step with the sunlight. The promise of spring runs rampant in my periphery, all I want is to leap madly into whatever unforeseen futures may come with it.

There was a time, when you longed for adventure and saying yes to the unknown, open to what magic it may bring. For too long, you have allowed yourself to be coddled, in some safe space that only pretended to give you the world, when really all it did was show it through a window. I don't care if you are scared. A new year lies waiting in the wings.

Prove at last you are worth it.

Ring the Alarm

I walked east on 14th street, one block between 6th and 5th avenue, with my eyes closed again today. The spring sun shines so brightly and it seems impossible to ignore it, to walk eyes open, face pointed at the ground, as though sunlight weren't the most amazing form of magic available. I'm sure it looks ridiculous, having to open my eyes now and then to avoid walking straight into oncoming pedestrians or construction scaffolding, but I don't care. My every text is full of exclamation points and giggles, it takes all my strength not to run straight out of the office and leap into the streets. Spring is like that first immense gasping breath you take after diving deep underneath the water and rolling along at the bottom of a wave, and it makes you feel so terrifically alive, with the slight tingling sensation at the edge of you skin that you very nearly weren't, and so the mere act of breathing seems a most gratifying gesture.

There's a large sheet of paper hanging over my bed -- bullet points of a story barely half written. I made a few notes as my mind raced past it, and then, scribbled at the top: Remember: You own this piece. Your imagination dictates its reality.

It seemed as real a statement as any.

Över Isen

There's nothing for you here.

The day beats me slowly to a pulp. Too much silence, I wade around in the mountains of debris I leave around the apartment to cloud my vision. I  consider drowning myself in the bottles on the top shelf but it seems like a further waste of a being already falling apart on her own, so why bother. Various truths drift across the inside of my eyelids and they knock the air straight out of me. You only have this one life, and yet you seem hellbent on wasting it. What was once, somehow, a quirky series of events has turned into a legitimate mental illness, and you see the years spiral out of control in mediocrity. Was this what you fought so hard to uphold? What this what you agreed to abandon all the other paths to reach?

The day is unforgivingly long outside your window, and you have to persevere to outlast it. But life is not a game of who can be stubborn the longest.

It occurs to you that you have no idea what life is, at all.