This Perfect Pill

Open the flood gates, Manhattan swims in a flash the exact minutes you need to transit, and you arrive with your sneakers like inverted boats on the Hudson. Later, sit on the 42nd floor and watch the storm pummel the sky scrapers, watch lightning dance across the harbor and leave New Jersey in angelic sunset of peach and purple. I addict myself to the window like a drug, try to fill my veins with the lights from Financial District office windows, with the impossible nearness of Ellis Island refuge and the freedom of silence a thousand feet in the air. I walked home through blacked out downtown, through buzzing SoHo streets, through disheveled Bowery remains, and thought the country burns, yet we remain. I remain. The world eats at your guts, but the city feeds you.

I have been so tired, lately, so worn and lost. I stumble down wrong turns and crooked one-way streets to dead ends and haven't the time to gather myself and look at a map, but no matter. At every turn, when I falter, this city picks me up and guides me home; at every misstep, it kisses my bruises and covers my wounds. We sat on a fire escape on a quiet street in the West Village one sweltering summer evening and listened to Bach from the corner and I thought everything is magic; New York was old to me then but it's far older now, it has etched itself into my muscle memory and fastened its vines around my every joint, it sits in my wrinkles and buzzes in my hair, I no longer know where I end and it begins.

And that was all I ever really wanted, after all.