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.