Project

She appears in the door like the months apart had never happened. You know so well the curve of her smirk, the soft way each last consonant lingers in her mouth as though each sentence she says makes itself thoughtful. We wax poetic, laugh too loud into the wooden walls and order more rounds of wine, west village restaurants always magically small enough to know your every whisper but large enough to contain them forever. I think I need to shake things up, she says, and you adore the morsels of adventure slipping off her tongue. The Universe conspires to launch you into orbit, it's leaving virtual pennies for you to pick up, it's winking at you through the diamonds of your friendships and you see it now, you feel it vibrate just behind your eyelids. Here are the fruits of your labor,  and they are not what you thought they would be, isn't that what all the wise ones always said?

The journey is the goal. 

Every day you win.

Monday

The rush of spring floods stirs around the back of my head, swirling past my ear drums, takes up space like a wind might, it is soothing and exhausting all at once. I go to sleep early, like a child before her birthday, thinking the sooner I sleep the sooner it will be here. Wake before alarms, quiet sunrise over water towers, it is colder than it looks, what a gift. A day spreads out before me, a week, in nothing but creative brackets and literary swirls. My head continues to swim, a constant hushing like I had forgotten what peace sounded like and have to compensate for the silence. You were in my dreams one night, I woke with a smile, stretching my limbs and remembering my skin. My bones are bruised; I stand in the street and run my fingers over sore spots but they are invisible. There is so much you cannot see from the outside. All this to say I am sand, now, I am chaos in a dust devil, but I will settle eventually. All this to say even chaos glitters at the right angle, and I wouldn’t do this any differently even if given the chance.

Tire

Your words disappear 
in piles of your tired
Here is a kind reminder
What you were doing
   was actually right. 

Lemonade

Hold up
They don't love you like I
love
you.

The night ran too long, the wine list ran too long, bottles overturned and conversation a mile a minute to catch up on a year's friendship lost to social norms and silence. How sweet a honeymoon, how sweet a pat on the head, how sweet this drink at what should have been the end of the evening and why don't we have another. My mother calls and says I'm leaving my country and you've been putting off the process for 26 years so maybe it's just as well to scrape the last of this bandaid off and move on. Fill a suitcase with your grandmother's heirlooms and coffee beans, things you don't know if they'll have in the new land, a hundred years ago a million of your people left and never came back, left to make a better life, how are you any different? You've had stars in your eyes since you were a child, why would you settle for anything less than a
fairytale.

Risen

(You get a moment’s reprieve. News is good from the various ends of your outstretched fingertips. The pulsating heart in your chest, which for days has lied splayed open to the elements, gathering dirt and stinging with the open air on its sticky blood, covers itself, if only a little. You remember to breathe, to rest. It is too soon yet to know what you learned from this moment. Tonight, simply close your eyes, let yourself sleep the sleep that calls no names in the night. Leave it be.)

Process

Waking up after disaster is to relive the blow to your gut. The short moment of lightness, of a day's potential, instantly smothered and suffocating. The news trickle in and nothing is good, I stare in apathy at the street below. Something automated in me begins to fold laundry, to repot plants. The physical act of doing something useful is a better anodyne than wailing, this is why there is never a shortage of food at funerals. Helplessness is a treason against our beings.

I rage at the Universe. Why would you leave me all these pennies if only to pull the rug out from under all those I love? Why should I be given gifts when people around me are pummeled by each breaking wave rushing to the shore? My imagined mountains look like mole hills in an instant. I wonder what deals I've been making and if I can draw up new terms. He says you owe them to live a good life, and I'm trying to remember what that is. My heart is a thousand pounds of love, it doesn't fit in my chest, it floods my edges and swells onto the sidewalk. How life makes us so little, just as it makes us so large. I bought armfuls of flowers yesterday, before I knew anything, they grow and beam everywhere I turn, and isn't that the thing?

Life can be so beautiful it's painful.
Life can be so painful it's beautiful.
Too.

Strike III

She was found unresponsive this morning, the text said. I thought you'd want to know. Tragic details emerge, sorted from lesser points, sifted through fingers that would rather cover ears. Twenty-five years of love sit like a weight in your chest, running scenarios, cobbling solutions. In the back of your head, again the thought, when are we beyond help. You want the answer to be never, every time. You want to call everyone you know and tell them you love them. One night, years ago, I drove too fast through the valley, and really I was chasing your life, one day I held your babies in my arms and didn't know if you ever would again, one night in a cold, dark city far across the waters, I listened to you tell me this was the final straw because you were determined to survive, and I don't know how we ended up here. Weren't you just standing at the precipice of bliss?

How close both sides of the coin sit, after all. How quickly we may fall from one side to the next. The Universe has been leaving me pennies again, I find them everywhere: in the street, on the subway, my pockets are lined with lucky copper and I will take all the luck I can get. This morning I stood in front of a blossoming cherry tree crying, life is overwhelming, and it is short.

We do not have time to fuck around. Make the most of every morsel. And don't ever forget that I love you.

Block

All the stars have aligned, they sit here watching you. The flowers in the vase by your computer bloom and smile, the sun clears the cobweb clouds. Your schedule eases, the coffee brews. Everything is prepped for your page to fill with words, to finally arrange itself in a dance neat and passionate all at once, everything is ready. Everything but you.

I sit staring at the blank, white screen, cursor blinking furiously, imaginary clock ticking. Hours pass. A deadline grows on the horizon like a monster, like a lecture about my shortcomings, like a question mark. I try to force what will not be forced. I try to coax, to coddle, I bob and weave and watch excuses attach themselves to my limbs until I can no longer lift them.

He calls to remind you to sit in the emptiness, and your breath slows reflexively. Close your eyes, picture yourself in the hollow space.

A small girl sits next to you. Reminds you that you already know everything you need to say, because you made her. Because in making her, now you owe her the world.

I take another deep breath. Stand up in the hollow. Decide it's time to make my way out.

Ayudame

Your moments in creative bliss are short now, like little bolts of light or flashes of color in the corner of your eye, by the time you reach out your arm to grab them they’re gone, slipping through your fingers. I wake early, tired, my eyes dull. Emotions float past the edges of my conscious, just enough for me to remember I’m not trying to touch them. I suppose there’ll be time. I sat in perfect stillness this morning watching my breath and all I could think was how many questions I still carry unanswered. It is hard then to rejoice in the ones solved. A calm voice spoke into my ears but I do not know her, how can I trust her peace? I sat on a stool across the river and told truths like shrugs, it is what it is and of course we’re all living through whatever the world throws at us. Most things, after all, are not Death, despite what they may seem from afar.

It’s just things used to look like flowers and rainbows and unicorns. And now it’s like I took off my glasses one day and haven’t been able to see anything at all since. Every day is a blur of shapes and sizes; nothing makes sense.

The voice in my ears told me to open my eyes. Said I had been cleansed and could greet the new day with open arms. I stumbled out, into the world. Held my arms wide, sure. But knowing it was only to catch my fall.

de la Cité

The Notre Dame burns. A world stands by in disbelief, unable to intervene, powerless to save nearly a thousand years of history. Fire rages, beautiful in its vivid orange against a quiet French spring sky, cracking and singing against the breathless moans of its parishioners, a horrific monster. I sit in the window of my writing bar and watch spring titter maniacally, tossing itself between summer sun and winter winds, seeing it play with the people like ants, willful like a pixie but only ever out for a laugh. My body screams its tiredness at me but my head is full of poetry, my heart it full of cherry blossoms, do you know the ginkgoes are coming now and their budding leaves look like a rash on the trees, itching to get out, impatient to get life started, delirious with possibility. I can’t walk a single block these days without smiling, I regret nothing.

Do you hear me? I regret none of this. Life is willful, unpredictable, glorious, strange. One day we will all be over, one day we will burn to the ground. Don’t you want to make the most of this fire while it lasts?

Popcorn

Late nights across the river, your head swims in easy cocktails and hard truths. How when one door closes, so many others do too, and it’s a strange thing to try to pry one open. I’m still here, you tell them, and it’s like the answer is a gift. This morning I got lost in the park in Brooklyn, a dozen times I ran into the woods and let myself lose track of the world, across the street everything blooms, I laughed at cherry blossoms and didn’t care to hide it. We just don’t want to let you go, they say, and you don’t know what the answer is. Life is messy with its shades of grey, with its sticky emotions plastered across rational thought. But it is all we have to go on.

This map makes sense. Sometimes you just have to turn it around
to see it.

Chill

The temperature plummets, each day a roller coaster of incorrectly chosen outerwear and peeling layers. There was a moment, yesterday, in Washington Square Park, where spring was so overpowering it ached in your chest, all bloom bursting jazz playing people milling everybody's spirit floating into the sky and giggling as it bumps into the arch or the tree tops. You take the pain like a slit wrist, with gratitude.

The morning is grey, but without demands. Your mind races, and you let it run itself tired, knowing: when it has run out of things to scream, you can begin to speak.

Rise

Dawn arrives too soon, again, it drags you from a heavy sleep and strange dreams, you negotiate with the alarm clock but somehow win the battle against yourself. Dress in a daze, stumble down subway stairs, see the sun rise over quiet Brooklyn cobblestone. You know a brief vacation approaches, a moment that is all your own, and you savor the steps along the brownstones. 

In an unassuming corner space, in the back nook, a group of writers settle in on leathered seats, make their excuses and laugh in recognition. You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it, a voice whispers in my ear. You relax into the furniture, relax into the sunshine, pry open the tight strings around your heart: for a brief moment you have only this, and it is more than enough. For a brief moment, the breath in your lungs remembers your name, remembers who you are when all the frills are swept away. Time is a gift we give ourselves.

Receiving it graciously is a skill I continue to practice.

Cowboy Boots

A heat wave stumbles onto the island, wakes blinking on a Monday morning, seemingly as confused as the rest of us, commuters mingling in sun dresses and winter coats on the uptown express train. Little beads of sweat form at the small of my back as I navigate the early morning rush. My body feels like lead, feels like the remains of a marathon, my head swims with all the things I don't yet understand and in poetry we are all perpetually children: this is a gift.

He calls from sunshine, from wide open spaces and palm trees, I do not realize until later that I breathe better at the sight. Stow the information away for when I can make sense of it, distract myself looking for other tickets, it never fails. I read a few words this morning, I read another season, another life, how strange that we are made of all these moments and never singular. How extraordinary that when we truly love it is all the pieces and not just the ones that look good on paper. I ran my fingers over the burst blooms of a magnolia this morning, smiling, and I would not have loved the soft pink petals as much if I had not also seen the tree barren, if I had not also felt the heart in my chest sink from its absence.

We are our entireties.

This is a gift.

Is Coming

The point is you’re a placeholder; the point is I am not quite here. The point is spring does with my soul magic tricks that leave no room for shoe horns and extra miles, if you are not running in step you are bound to be a hundred miles behind.

I want to be patient and see beyond the smoke screen, I want to build a nook in my home where you may sit, and grow, and slowly become accustomed to the whimsy of the wallpaper, but I’ve run out of fuel and am propelled by fireworks now, I am all exclamation points and your ellipses don’t even make a dent
in my
periphery.

Botanic

The sun shines, flowers bloom, life returns: there is little else to say. We walk through parks I could navigate in my sleep but I'm not sleeping now, I don't ever want to sleep again, the city wakes and yawns and stretches, and how beautiful it is when it tries. I want to stop rambling, I do, but it's only, the blossoms tickle my funny bone, it's only, this smile is plastered across every side of this island and I no longer have it in me to be sorry.

If you were looking to catch the stars,
now would be a good time to hitch a ride. 

That's all I'm saying.

New

We don’t understand it, but the truth is we’ve never seen you so happy.

The sun beams over the Bowery, you make the flowers bloom, you make the city twist and turn at your will, this visit is your curated charm tour to convince them your life is exactly as you’d planned, exactly as you’d hoped, this city is the significant other you hope they’ll adore because here’s the thing, you’re staying together whether they do or not. The magnolias fatten up along the River, swell in pinks and can’t wait to explode, and isn’t that life? He writes to say all he wants is to make your life better, but it’s like he hasn’t been reading the ticker tape.

I make this life better. I bring this sunshine, I water these flowers, I carry these weights like balloons on my wrists, I am not sorry.

But when the time comes to pick these flowers, don’t for a second think I’m not filling my own windowsills with their songs. If I let myself burn to ashes, don’t think I won’t also let myself rise out of them, too.

So It Goes

April rushes in like a fool, like unkempt Ophelia who consents to her madness only for the freedom it brings. I dance along its coattails and laugh in the streets, what worries could we possibly have now, what fears, what darkness? I can recall a time when winter sat like a weight around my ankles, but I don't now know what that felt like.

Come to think of it, I can recall a lot of times, I can recall all the times, but I don't know now how they felt in my chest, don't remember now how they trembled on my skin, don't see the frequency at which I vibrated. I can only live this moment, one at a time, can only give you the version of me I am today, and you're in luck.

Today, with your purchase, I come with all these fireworks, these sparkles, these piles of sunshine free of charge.

If it's too much for you to carry, now would be a good time to consider your investment.