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.