Som Vi Sa

Sticky subway pillars, it's a hundred degrees in the underground and ages until the next local train maybe I should have taken a cab after all but Park Avenue is so quiet this time of night and it's like a small gift from the city to have it all to yourself. I drank too much, I can't feel my skin anymore but my tooth hurts. It moves like a weather vane when my heart hasn't the strength to gauge the storms ahead. We spoke of you but nothing means anything anymore, distance makes the heart tired and quiet in the long run as you know. Upper east side building scattered around us in midsummer twilight, I take deep breaths in air you could cut with a knife. This is life. Tomorrow races at me, the train bumbles so slowly through the tunnels. 

I saw scars on her arms this morning. This is life. We get by any way we can. The train makes only express stops to the edge of the island. You think perhaps there's another way you should wander. 

But it's too late now to know. 

Fire

The slope is slippery, you know this, the swirling vortex will take you with it and you have to fight it so not to drown. You feign resistance but slice the knife deeper and deeper into your skin. Relax into the warm thick stream of blood, the momentary relief it offers. Only when it sticks to your skin, plasters against your cheek do you realize it is but quicksand and you only fall further in by indulging it. The weather turns sweltering. 

You know it will pass, a hundred times you repeat it to yourself, it will pass. 

The only question is, who will you be when it does? 

Strawberry Moon

The fall continues across the summer solstice. I tumble aimlessly, hitting rocks and dirt on my way down but unable to grasp at roots or ledges as I go. It's the longest day of the year and all I can think is how tomorrow is darker, and the day after darker still. The air has gotten so warm, suddenly, I sleep naked and gasp for air, perhaps it's just a trick of the lights.

You know the sorrow will pass. You know you will wake up one morning and it'll seem all but a bad dream, look over your shoulder and see receding mist behind you nothing is as scary in the daytime.

It is only life. What harm can it do for it to shake a little.

50p

I dreamed of four-leaf clovers. They grew large and seemed so pervasive as to lose their magic, I wonder what that meant. Afforded a moment's reprieve, I tumble instantly down the rabbit hole of dark ideas. Depression washes over me like a tidal wave, I am tossed and drowned, pummeled against rocks and disoriented. Every time the same attempts at gasping for air and simultaneous resignation at the lack of control. I know this storm, have endured it before. Sometimes I think age will carry me above it, that the tempest will lessen and I will one day learn to float, but the instant I crash I am right back where I've always been. What use is there is in learning how to swim when the current will get you eventually? Every rolling wave etches its mark in your skin, in your bones, the lines grow deeper and deeper until it is unclear where you end and the water begins. Without these thrashing storms, I no longer am. 

I only wish I knew how to ride the surf once or twice. Make a life worth the agony of the fall. 

Pause

(I can't do the words justice. I want to, they linger in my head all day and try to assort themselves in the small spaces in my pressure cooker, but come night time I am exhausted and fall heavy into bed without having spoken. 

I ran along the river tonight, early summer warm breeze but cool air and twilight on skyscrapers across Manhattan it was breathtaking. I felt it sink into my heart with every step pounding across the concrete. He sends pictures of an emptied apartment and you begin to realize it is happening. Whether you accept it or not, the days come and go, and long feared days will all appear eventually. 

But you are here, now. New York days stretch around you into infinity. I looked up at my return and saw the Empire State in patriotic colors, as the last remaining peaches and blues settled along the western rim. I am here, now. 

There is no wound, those words cannot heal.)

Molly

We stumbled out of the bar of sawdust floors, perhaps it was still early evening, but the sky was dark and the air unusually cold. I walked five steps south and fell into tears at the light, I didn't care that the girl saw me. This is the last time we come to this bar, he said, and when the bartender asked us to justify our Budweiser request, we had the only acceptable response: This is the routine. This is the last time we'll do this. The future is bright, in all directions. One day, this will all be but a memory.

I'm too drunk for proper words, but perhaps there were none proper enough to begin with. Third avenue lies reassuringly still as I weave through the slow Murray Hill currents, making their way home. The East Village is warm, I take a fuzzy picture of the fish restaurant's neon sign before they close up shop for good. Everything changes.

Imagine a life without his name in your inbox, without his seat next to you at the bar. Lean against the city. Let it take deep breaths with you in it. It is bigger than you. You are insignificant in comparison.

It's a comforting truth. The city moves on, whether you follow or not.

But it will not forget you, entirely.

Bookends

Standing at the station in the old town, above ground, waiting for a connecting train, and the feeling that I'd scream or cry or throw up, because this storm needed to escape somehow. You know these houses, these streets, it's been years already and seems like only yesterday you were homeless in them and built a life out of the sticks you found. You've had a moment's reprieve lately, you didn't realize for you got spoiled in it but that's what it was, just a minute to breathe and be part of the normal world in their calm and that's over now. You were meant for these storms, for this itch, you were meant to hurt. It is a familiar world, you're not afraid, you just forgot and maybe something better will come of it. Say your goodbyes. Bleed over pages. Run from everything but yourself. 

Erase

45 hours in a blip on the map. The roads are winding, you couldn't find your way if your life depended on it, until you pass the church and the yellow house that used to be the country store. We biked there as kids to buy ice cream, do you remember? We stick together in all the pictures, half dressed, my white eyebrows beaming into the frame and her mouth in a pout. The house looked so different then, but the door frame marked with years of growing children remains. 

We sit with bare feet in the grass, stare at the growing vegetables and discuss life. We take slow but determined walks to the lake, brace against the chill of the water and laugh at its perfection. Drink more wine, smoke, talk, rinse, repeat. Let the summer sun sink into the back of my spine. My shoulders turn brown. For 45 hours there is nothing else, no one else to be. I breathe deep breaths and find everything rearranging itself around me. 

I will step out of this current. And everything will be brand new. 

Measures

The train slows as it nears the city, rolling quietly past the little lake where you swam as a child. How impossibly wide it seemed, then. At the station, smiling faces you've never not known, and you stroll together through a town that on the surface seems to be changing, but which underneath is exactly, irrevocably the same. 

The water is beautiful, the trees, the air, throngs on bicycles already brown with the season but your insides itch and you've nowhere safe to turn. Bike along the old railway, a thousand times you've passed that soccer field, a thousand times you've braced yourself for that hill, you could do this in your sleep and maybe that's just it. 

Everything sounds the same, everything looks the same, you love the way you feel in their arms but it could never last. You go to bed in a room that's dark and quiet, pass out before your head hits the pillow. The next day comes quickly.

You're ready to be awake. 

How

I saw you yesterday. Stockholm is sunny and beautiful beyond belief, the water glitters that way it does and I burn my shoulders traversing the islands. I don't sleep. It never gets dark and there isn't time anyway, whoever called this vacation must be delusional. 

At every turn I think I'll see you, at every outdoor restaurant I scan the crowds for your face, but when it actually appeared, how it surprised me. Everything is still there, every tumultuous gut-punching Stockholm night, every dreary day after, of questioning every word you said. I forget I ever had a home anywhere else, that I ever wandered the earth, I lose my footing on the cobblestone streets, there's the old apartment and it's a lifetime ago I even set foot in it, why do I still pretend it matters. 

The train left early this morning. The countryside billows around it, lilacs in full bloom and the entire season at its feet. Your heart is in the same vise as always, anchored in a hundred places without belonging anywhere. The train races on. Prepare your smiles for arrival.