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.