Another Round

Summer bursts onto the scene, Manhattanites emerging from their hiding places in flimsy outfits and pale skins. I took the train to the Bronx to see life in action, but all that happened was my falling apart in the lilacs (they were beautiful). I slipped little pills out of a side pocket to ease the pummeling of my soul but they only dusted the sides of the vicious edges.

We went to a bar later, her dancing around happiness and my trying to put together coherent sentences, but I ended up on the floor of the restroom crying silently into the tile words that must not be repeated. Rinsed my pounding veins with cold water, trying desperately to put the pieces together in an orderly fashion. For minutes it works. For hours it doesn't.

Second Avenue spills over with happy people, sweltering Saturday nights and the world is your oyster. I put one foot in front of the other, grateful for the empty darkness at the top of the stairs. I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.

As Fast As You Can

I rode the subway for hours today, miles and miles of subterranean discoveries and sunny, above-ground commute. New York City spread wide in all directions, every oddly cobbled, graffitied, run-down, glossed-over bit of it and a thousand people with it, making their way home, or away. Halfway into Brooklyn I was the last white hair on the train. In Queens, the skyscrapers peeked out from behind dirty buildings and budding trees, new green and unstoppable. Spring returns, undeterred by the changes and the end of the world, it is not afraid of your avalanches or tears; that is a comfort.

This morning, I ran along the East River as it awoke deep in a fog, the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges buried in its sleep and the sharp edges of the buildings softened. On my return, the sun had broken through and gleamed off the steel, impossibly romantic. I took a snapshot in my head to keep for days of doubt.

Love is a great gift. When you find it, hold on like hell. It will tell you, at last, who you are.

Sakura

You wake early again; it's unclear if it's a curse or a blessing. Take three trains out to Brooklyn (as a reminder to never go to the boroughs on weekends), in a dark cloud (literal, too) on empty Flatbush avenue. It's too early for activity, the park lies quiet, but you turn a corner around some still-sleeping hydrangeas to find the grounds erupting in people. Push your headphones further in, turn up the music and let them melt away to the periphery. At every turn, spring buds dance around and explode in color, irrepressibly joyous and undeterred by, well, anything. The magnolias shake their large petals onto giddy children, the lilacs hold their breaths like little popcorn kernels of sweet scent until they burst, grape hyacinths carpet the entire grounds. And there, at the epi-center, rows of cherry blossoms parade around, basking in adoration and carefully curated social media profiles. I held a ball of blossoms in my hand, soft, cool, full, their beauty somehow soothing against my rough, unmanicured hand.

Later that night, with some beers under my belt, I stared again at my aging skin, stared at the ink drying on it and considered the marks life puts on us, the ones we put on ourselves. Second avenue was busy with spring Saturday revelers, the happy hum of their lives knocking on my closed windows. My skin yelled something about freedom at me.

I pulled down the sleeve, the words grew quiet. A voice in my ears repeated, Home at last. 

All I heard was homeless. 

Here Comes the Sun

The weather changes twenty times in two days; your closet upends itself trying to do right but you still end up sweating in winter boots when the school bell rings. Little hands nestle their way into yours, little hearts attach themselves to your disposition and you sleep so soundly at night again. There isn't time to drink, though you long for it desperately, there isn't time for falling apart entirely because tomorrow the alarm will ring again so early and they need your smiles and your patience more than you can justify your angry solitude. At night, too tired to write, I bookmark artist residency applications at national parks and dream of weeks at the edge of a mountain, at the edge of the world.

All I wanted was to be left alone.

I can't be mad when I get what I ask for.

Sheath

They say to let the bad days just go, commit them to the waste basket and start a fresh leaf tomorrow.

But we have such few days in this life. Each one wasted breaks my heart.

And it isn't much of a heart to begin with.

3rd and B

I don't see enough people, I know. I don't go out when I should and spend sunny weekend days inside scrubbing tile and drowning in melody. But people exhaust me, they drain what little heartbeat I have, so that none is left over for the typewriter in my writing nook and I want to give it every last drop of blood in me, how do you explain that to a brunch crowd? You paint yourself as the other again. After 35 years of fighting it perhaps the time has come to call the elephant by its rightful name and bring it along.

We sit on the wood floor of her empty apartment, Good Friday in Loisaida and the Hispanic Catholics march around the block wailing. We drink housewarming wine with the windows open and consider possibility. She says "but the house and the job and the family would have been easy. What you're doing is hard," and I don't understand what she means. The only thing that ever mattered was New York, and it makes every step along the way easier than any that keep me away. She looks at her leaning walls and smiles. My heart is light at the reminder.


...but when they ask you how you are, you say fine, because there aren't words enough for how good they really are.

You failed at every
single
thing you ever hoped for
and dreamed of
except this
one
thing.

And it makes all the difference.

Apart

You know it's just sleeplessness; you know it's hormones and sunstroke and circumstance. But you stand over the kitchen sink with salt water pouring over dirty dishes, working quick to escape the public space before roommates come home and see your dissolving defenses. See it written that not all things broken can be fixed.

I sat in the shower later, on dirty porcelain stained with years of neglect, what pathetic irony. My skin still beats warm with summer sun, the cherry trees are in bloom but when you look at the world it is from a void, from space, from the sunken place and you can't tell how far away it is.

Everything you touch turns to rot.

Words for a younger self

When you hit rock bottom,
just keep hitting and hitting it
until your skin is immune to the pain
and the darkness no longer can
catch you. 

Wanderlust

You wake a dozen times before the alarm aims to, nervously counting down to departure and wondering how to fit all that stuff into carry-on bags. When we finally leave, impossibly there is snow on the ground, the mountains are covered in bright white, the Great Lake lies quiet with frost. The cherry blooms sleep.

When the plane lifts off I cry. It happens more and more these days, the beauty of the valley overcomes me, it nestles its way into my veins like chlorophyll into a leaf, I am no longer without it. Waves of gratitude wash over me, three decades of America in my blood, three decades of desert and mountains and the kindness of strangers, we drive out of the canyon and it's breathtaking every damn time. My mother says she feels superficial sometimes, asking me about the weather, but I think it's the most meaningful conversation we could have. Three decades of recurring sunshine do not erase 65 years of a northern land in your lungs.

We are where we are from.

Your roots stretch and bend across the continents. They mend and grow with the years. 

Uinta

The sun comes and goes over the valley, freezing nights and scorching days, the snow melts to reveal red earth underneath, the air is dry, your every cell knows it. Cowboy hats walk the aisles, it takes a day to stop wearing so much New York black, it takes a day to say please and thank you and smile at strangers but it sits in your rib cage and comes out eventually. I raced down an empty canyon in the sunshine today and knew at once all the answers that had evaded me for months. Dharma sat by the wayside and watched me pass. We smiled at each other, and that was that.

(F)light

A hundred times I've lifted off, a thousand maybe, basic 30-minute skips for a job and long, life-changing journeys that all begin with that rumbling along the tarmac, that first incline that never ceases to seem impossible. I looked down at the Nebraska plains today and wondered again at this little tin capsule full of people drifting across the impressive vastness that is America. Felt again that immense pride of a land that lives within me. The clouds were storybook cumulus puffs today; I remembered an entire childhood of longing desperately to get out of the airplane and hop around on them, feel them spring underneath my step and disappear into the sunset on the horizon. I once drove an hour into the mountains when the clouds were low to chase them, just to feel what they were like but they are forever a mirage, untouchable, they slip like mist through your hands.

The immense awesomeness of the world lies at the surface always. Some days I remember to skim it.

Re:Jazz

Don't use the telephone.
People are never ready to answer it.
Use poetry. 

Saturday Light

Pack a haphazard bag, all you need is pen and paper; the expanse of the West will provide the rest. Board up the nooks and crannies where the mouse may holiday on your behalf, water the plants. Book a cramped middle seat on an overfull flight. Keeping a body in constant motion is the only way to keep its brain still. In Brooklyn, the cherry blossoms start to bloom. In Glasgow, a band plays a sold out show without you.

I ordered a pair of new headphones, big over-ear shells in tacky design, and played Bach cello suites and Mozart symphonies until every last sound of the world was drowned out. I went out into New York later, but like an alien drifting between the happy Saturday night masses. How easy it is to fall out of humanity. How hard to remember why you try.