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.