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.