Delivered

I tipped the waitress a small fortune, I couldn't help myself. The moment had been perfect, tucked away under the BQE with coffee that never ended, I had written all the truths of a life before the old ladies a table over had finished catching up on their gossip.

In Canarsie, a woman on the bench next to me sat eating what looked like jambalaya from a take out container, peeling crawfish with her bare fingers and spilling rice on the street. Out there, the elevated subway train feels like a rollercoaster, soaring through the sky and you can see all the way to Queens if you pay attention. In Greenpoint the streets are crooked but eventually lead to the water, and Manhattan spread out under grey skies in the late afternoon. Williamsburg writhes with its Disneyfication, do you remember when it was gritty and disheveled and you didn't walk south of Metropolitan? The sugar factory stands like an old, demented neighbor now that no one knows what to do with but let disintegrate before their eyes until at last they can say how sad, do you remember when? ah such is life. I climbed the Williamsburg Bridge; a bride walked out to the water just as I reached the top and the pier was a wave of formalwear rising and falling as she passed.

When you get to the middle of the bridge, if you look out into the distance, it feels just like flying. You're a million miles up and weightless, suspended between boroughs, in a place untouchable. The Statue of Liberty leans out behind the bridges, the lights on the Staten Island Ferry light up around sunset, the jumbled buildings vibrate in that hour when all things sort of wait. I walked back to my island, weaved through the grid, stopped to write more truths in the notebook and realize all the things I already knew, but how simple they look when at last you are ready to name them. Summer ends, twelve years end, so many things end, but here's the thing.

You scale that bridge,
and everything that lies on the other end
is only just beginning.