White Snow Red

A book closes. I go through the motions of day but in a daze, running lines in my head, testing my muscles against opportunities for improvement, seeing how the threads and storylines ache for polish and knowing some time you have to let it go. What an ebb and flow is this work, is this life. I ran along the river and the sunshine was bright but the wind so cold, I reckon the point is take the good with the bad, make lemonade and allow yourself a shot of bourbon in it. I found mistletoe in a box of Christmas ornaments and I suppose it isn't too late to pick up pennies in the street, she writes from the Arctic to say the sun has set for the last time in months now, here is polar night and all the strange, dark magic it brings.

I flip through handwritten pages, thoughts from a time when that was all I had to have, a time when I could stare at the skies for hours without a goal and trust that something would come of that, too. (And how it did). I take a deep breath, read the lines again, look back at my story, and begin to wrap it up.

...I don't know everything, and I don't control everything. And that's okay. I've learned that I can roll with the punches. 
I don't like the pain. 
But I like seeing myself pick myself the fuck back up 
and live. 

Note

(The November winds are cold.

You do no one any favors

facing them alone

Least of all yourself. 

Trust me.)

Purpose

You spend hours circling it, run yourself out of excuses and tire your muscles in doubt. The bar is quiet, Monday night and rain, no one can find it tucked away on the side street; this suits you. Spread out at a table where he told you of the daggers he’d twisted in her heart, you vow to wash over the stories with fits of your imagination: the bar is too dark, the playlist too good to not return here simply because your heart bleeds. On the page, an adventure plays out before you: you know it like you wrote it, and you did but only literally. He says you have a lot of tricks up your sleeve, and you remember it’s true, remember you are more than your fear. How difficult it is to remember sometimes.

Your heroine twists herself inside out to survive a game without rules, she fails and grows and you watch with amazement as she comes out the other side like you thought you never could. The bar fills up with laughter, with drunken banter and a rising playlist. Nothing else matters, you scribble in a margin. There is no plan B for a reason.

This is the only thing you were ever meant to do.
This is the moment you choose to do it right.

Gethsemane

Quiet sinks into your bones: a season of gluttony and consumption spreads out around the dirty tenement apartment above a busy bodega. We play jingly music and comforting movies, discover hidden dumpling spots and unknown breakfast quirks; the devastating cold takes a break and I ran to the end of the island at twilight without losing my breath, the city is a gift all of its own, wrapped in sunlight and promise. My roommate asks for rent money and I see again the waste of my life's potential, the gilded security nets of my contemporaries fortifying around me. Today I sat with an old, worn copy of a revered book, and remembered a teenage self so enraptured with its twisted, sharp wordplay that it changed her own words for years. It seems a selfish pursuit, this, spending all one's time on creative rollercoasters, hanging on for just a morsel of something pleasing, when one could be out saving the world or similar, building up that savings account or enrolling in the society approved rat race, but here's the thing: we live entire lives on hope alone, because if one day we could string together enough words that meant something, there's a chance they could make a bigger difference than you ever could in that 9-5, however comfortable, however good it made your parents feel. Sometimes I wonder if Jesus was just a mortal hippie, whose parents shook their head that he refused to live in the box, when he was simply trying to find a better way to spend what little time we have in life. Religion sprouts when we refuse our insignificance.

let them hate me, hit me, hurt me, 
nail me to that tree

My money runs low, disappointment high, this isn't the life society would ask me to live. But if I do not write, I waste away. And what is fifty, sixty years of emptiness, to even just a flash of fulfillment?

I return to the word processor. Whisper my gratitude to the blinking cursor. Remember again (again, again) why I came, and
more importantly,
why I stayed.

Gratitude, Year X

The years pass in tumbles of valleys and peaks, some Novembers pummel you with their dark matter and others glimmer with hope and overwhelming affection, these are the rules of the game, and if you want to play you must consent. The ways the dice fall are out of your control; this you must accept, too. The newspapers scream about the coldest holiday in a hundred years, the metaphors scare you in your feigned bravery, winter lies impossibly long ahead.

But for one short moment today, I took a deep breath, looked at the rubble of my life, and saw little spires of life twist their way out of the dusty ruins, new green like the shoots of spring. For one short moment, I remembered to step back and see past the storm, past the encroaching polar night, and I saw that I was grateful, for everything that led me to this point, and everything that leads me beyond.

I accept the rules.
Thank you.

With Windchill

Morning is quiet, sunny, an icy wind dragging across the alphabet avenues. The city lies still, you breathe deep cold breaths into your lungs as your feet pound known pavements in sunrise. Large, old bridges span impossible waters, the city tells you stories while you run, how sweet the moment between you. We open the bourbon early, wrap ourselves in sweatpants and cinnamon scents, he writes from California to say your pie tin is in storage in New Jersey, and you make do with a cake pan. Some work-arounds are easy.

When the wine runs low, we bring out the holiday decorations, change the music. Life is long, and hard, and the days are cold, and dark eventually. But you don't have to accept everything just as it is.

Sometimes you can circumvent the real world,
sometimes you can rearrange the narrative:
give yourself a chance.

No Me Diga

Same train as ever, how different it looks as it snakes through other boroughs, there’s only a slight unease at the nape of your neck now that reminds you of something untouchable lost in another tunnel under the river. A small weight next to you on the empty train car.

Your map of the city tumbles and bleeds, twists itself in curlicues, cherry picks colors from a new palette, but the new coats of paint don’t really matter. At the end of the day, no matter how tainted, how dirtied, how washed with nostalgia, these streets remain your own, this city remains a story of your own making.

This is your home.
That doesn’t get lost with the subway system.

Complicit

Stand on the Bowery, he says under his breath. If the cops come, you tell me right away, I stop. We giggle and shake our heads, disperse to our lookouts, remain on the line, hear paint cans shaking on the other end. Soon, the masterpiece appears. All it says is marry me.

He speaks of the first trembling moments. Of how he didn't appreciate the city's rowdy artists, of the busy fumes of Second Avenue traffic, of strange Russian vodka that made his southern head spin. Now, here he was, in love with a girl who saw only magic in the messy city, who had made him move into the thick of it, who would walk down this street on a chilly November night and see her name spray painted on a shop gate: here they were, and Everything was yet to come. The artwork was secondary, but it was there.

We giggled our departures into the mild evening. I rushed home to my to do lists, short sweet moments still lilting on my lips. New York gives you fairy tales in the midst of its grime.

All you have to do is see them.

Side

It looks different from this end of the borough. The sun sets early over skyscrapers you know, the wind blows cold through streets you don’t. Everything is quiet, dark, sleep is a heavy break from all that you think of. Everything is new, except you.

You look at yourself in the mirror.
Wonder if that’s the problem.

Sweet

(In the late afternoon, at an empty bar, in a corner seat, a story returns, begins to speak again, reminds me where it was I was walking. As the room filled with Friday freedom, I sank into the peaceful stillness between printed pages, and I remembered instantly how I had missed them. I fall off this wagon a thousand times.

The thing that matters is that I climb back on.)

Flurry

And in an instant, the blizzard has arrived. We wade through heavy, wet drifts on the corners: me pulling the hood tighter over my brow, her sticking her tongue out to taste the snowflakes as they fall. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. The air in my lungs is so tired, the blood in my veins, it always took me a minute to catch up, I know the woman who lives in me, how she sways around her thoughts and her moves before landing, how you cannot rush her. A day spreads out before me in freedom; once this snow passes, I will be left only with letters and ink, once this snow passes the city will be different than it was. I cannot stop the world from changing. The mice find new corners to chew, to make their way into this home where the heat doesn't work and the rent doesn't make sense: this heart was not made for clean lines and checked boxes, it lives only for passion and delirium, I cannot force it to settle for less. Life is much to precious to accept complacency.

I go to bed early, try to ignore the mice in the wall. If I sit in this chair for long enough, eventually I will remember what I came here to do.

And I will do it.

Snow

The forecast howls with freezing temperatures and gale warnings, the threat (or promise) of snow staggers across the screen, we brave the Brooklyn winds to condense our farewells into appropriate soundbites. Sometimes there isn't more to say; all is well.

I return to my village, wrapping my coat tighter, but light of heart. We speak of the holidays, and he says you never really have the city to yourself, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sometimes you walk a street in this town, and every other person melts away, you can whisper your secrets into the sidewalk and know the city will hold them. On the other side of the country, the evening is mild, and warm, and tomorrow it will be sunny again, but no matter. Sometimes it isn't a competition:

all is well.

Notes

I pick up pennies in the street, I don't care if they are dirty
I sing songs where none exist
I cannot speak before coffee
in the morning
even when prompted
My optimism is intransigent

Nothing will ever matter to me
more
than this town
not even you
But don't take that as
bad news
It just is

There's a month
or two
or three
when winter buries me
and I will not remember my
name
nor yours
It's okay

Come spring I will
drown you in
flowers
in sunshine
and the giggle I save
for special occasions
and here's the thing
You'll be it

I am a hundred degrees of ridiculous
(I know)
But I am one degree that makes sense
It'll make your pieces fall into place
And I think
you'll ignore the
copper coins
then

AUA

Morning arrives with strange dreams and stranger realities, you begin to work them into your muscles and wonder at how strange this life you have been given. One day when I was 14 I rode a horse straight into the jungle and saw the world spread out around me from a mountain top; I knew then, too, that our days are gifts whether we take them or not. I unwrap them one by one, sometimes gently, sometimes with wanton disregard, they scatter behind me in drifts and trunks and paths of years, how each one has lead me to the one I open today.

I pack my bags, prepare for arrivals and returns, for cold November air but warm November promises, my skin is brown out of season, my heart light out of turn, one day I wrote a line so sweet I thought someone else must have written it; one day I opened a gift and I dared to believe it was
for me.

Klor

The painkiller wears off and your cortisol races. How many hours left until you can turn it off? There’s a wide sky full of stars outside your window, the tropical evening is warm but what can I do from inside a palace? There are journeys we take that do not move us anywhere, and sometimes just standing still will change the heavens around us, how strange it is. My roommates write new tales of invincible mice and all I can think is how I long for that wretched, dirty old tenement room that is mine.

It’s a blessing to see riches
Where no money lies.

Island Time

I forget the time, the date, the day of the week. I forget reason, and habit, and any thought beyond the present. I consider my life, consider what it might look like wrapped in a suitcase. I consider the road, what it does to me and when I should start to listen. If I buy a one way ticket now I still have the rest of my life to get back. That may not always be true. 

We walked in the sand late in the afternoon, the light a ridiculous shade of happy, chasing little waves and letting the tide make fools of us: everything was easy, everything was now. I didn’t think of you then, didn’t wish you were here, I sat on a roof on an island in the Caribbean one morning and tried to breathe the sunrise into my lungs but the secret is the sunrise already beats within us. I know that now.  

I twiddle this ticket between my fingers. Feel the sunrise whisper the answer in my veins. 

Still

Wake early, sounds of an island asleep drift past your window, it’s another world and you wish you could see it. One morning I sat on a roof in the Caribbean and spoke to the sunrise; everything was bleeding then but I think my skin has healed now; the scar tissue makes it hard to stretch like I used to but I am alive, I am still breathing into the sunlight and asking it questions. There are strange lines of color along my body, I had forgotten it in the melee, I am still here although I am further away than ever.

Open the door to the morning. See what comes of it now.

Equate

How quick the change. One night you lied in the back of a school bus shivering as a full moon rose behind the pines, and suddenly one morning you watch turquoise waves slowly roll to their tropical shores, it’s a ruse, how is this life yours alone. I sat by the edge of the ocean for one still minute and looked at the water, quiet, steady. My grandmother always marveled at how we stepped into the same water as Cleopatra, as dinosaurs. They say you can’t step into the same river twice but my grandmother, she knew. The ocean follows me to the ends of the earth, every time I turn around here it is: reliable. We build homes around our hearts from whatever driftwood we may find, pray they will keep us safe, sheltered. At some point you let go of the house that burned to the ground.

At some point you decide to build anew. 

Fall

Last weekend of peak foliage, citizens of the city spill into the parks like they’d never seen a leaf before, or like kicking them never gets old (it doesn’t). I walk with my eyes closed straight at the sun, and it’s a sweet gift if you remember to see it. Behind the trees, a city spreads out: a strange, wondrous city you will never know fully and yet vow to never give up attempting to. She sends an itinerary, and you pack your bags before you’ve even unpacked them. A new voice lingers at your fingertips but it’s too soon to trust the whims of the season. He sends you a picture of a home in boxes. Says I’m free, and you know it’s true. The heart in your chest grows and grows, a year ago you wouldn’t even have known it could do that, but here we are.

It’s not up to you to know the way.
It’s only up to you to walk it.

Elastic Heart

Early morning, Queens, N.Y., the first commuters fill the train while I squeeze in with bulging bags and tired eyes. How deep my breaths, how light every step, pink sunrise over a world so different from the one I left behind. I sleep on the train, and there is no sleep as safe as the neverending A train, there is no soothing sweeter than that of being home.

We sit at the fancy restaurant later, ordering bubbles and dancing around the inevitable, until we both sit crying; our French server handles everything across his bar with a comforting steadfastness, you cannot ruffle a feather in New York that didn’t want ruffling. If you want to tell my story, it’s yours, she says, and she doesn’t know I’m already telling it. That every word I spin is a love story, and so, in the end, is hers. Sometimes we don’t see the answer for all the questions in the way, but such is life.

The street is loud outside my window, there’s a wide gap where the November air comes in with the traffic. I sleep not like I never felt fear.

I sleep like I felt fear and lived.