Retrograde

A month comes and leaves in an rain storm, a new moon rises in its wake. They say things will be better now but you think they’ve been pretty good all along, in the grand scheme of things. He writes to say pick a date, I’ll buy the ticket, and you marvel at what a life you’ve built around yourself. She calls you mid cycle at the laundromat and lures you out for a drink, there’s a monsoon flooding the avenue but no matter. She nestled an entire family into your bloodstream by pretending you could get out at any time and now here you are, never wanting to leave. You think perhaps that’s the trick to loving you, and she had it right all along. New York waved noncommittally in your direction and you felt safe to love it completely. She calls August the Sunday of the season, but you are not ready to give up yet, not ready to lull yourself into the long sleep of fall. Google tickets to the ends of the earth.

Wonder who it is you’d like yourself to be.

Love Letters

Again, again, how many days and weeks and years can it still feel so new, so sweet, how long can I love you like this they didn't tell me this was ever how it could be. I ran down the west side at sunset today, past the throngs of summer dresses and carefree strollers, crossed Washington Square Park with boys holding hands and women in hijabs, the Empire State Building behind them and all the skyscrapers painted in that velvety blue light of sweltering summer evenings. Again, again, the crooked piles of brick buildings, the hum of the avenues, aligned my senses and recalibrated my insides until everything felt just right. Again, again I thought I love this place more than I knew I knew how to love anything and it's been thirteen years don't you dare tell me that shit's not for real. 

New York, my love, it turns out you - in all your madness - are the one thing that makes me sane. That I have found a place that brings me peace, that I have found a place where all my crooked pieces fit into a whole. New York you make me think that finding love is really just finally coming home. 

East 5th Street

You don’t know how long you've been away, it feels like years and minutes all at once. The bartender still knows your order before you’ve even sat your bag down. Her boyfriend arrives later with presents; they share a quiet sweet moment at the short end of the bar and you feel stray daggers in your chest despite yourself. A loud man at the table next to you tells the women he’s with what they’re doing wrong and his loud laugh grates at you, what you wouldn’t give to decimate his kind but yes sure, he also has his good moments. You are not that great all the time, don’t forget.

I sat in the windowless office earlier, with the weight of too many weeks on my lungs. He tries a hundred different ways to lift them from you, how grateful you are for the lifeline, but in the end I know the answer, I just need to hear it repeated sometimes. The answer is always work, the answer is do the thing, the answer is put one god damned foot in front of the other because it is the only way to get anywhere at all and the secret is you want to get everywhere before it’s over. You cancel dates and sit at the bar smiling. A small girl sits next to you, eager to read the next chapter, eager for you to take the both of you into a better future. You feel her little hand in yours, even as it is weightless. This life is bigger than you now, it is bigger than you know but you’re getting a sense. You waver sometimes, you are bound to.

But I know where it is I’m going. And no matter how I get there, the point is that
I will.

Things I Have Loved (I'm Allowed to Keep)

A mad race begins without announcement, you are on the conveyor belt before you've even thought about running. Still packed bags pile on top of each other, the corners of my room are all drifts of sand, I don't know the last time I sat still in this room and remembered my name. But a Sunday afternoon arrives at last, all silent telephone quiet sunlight peace, little whirls of dust settling on every surface, headphones full of beat poets, head full of fantasy, and here you are again. The little voice inside your chest stretches her limbs and tests her range, the big synapses in your brain fire off mad ideas into the quiet afternoon, you recognize everything that bleeds on to the ticker tape and you can only hum in agreement. A small candle flickers in your coat pocket; it looks different now, but then, so do you, and perhaps that is all right. You hold what you've lost in one hand and what you've gained in the other, trying to gauge if they balance out. But in the back of your mind, another song repeats, louder and louder, until you forgot the burdens you carry:

Nothing matters, 
but the words you leave behind.


Monday morning arrives, an empty to do list awaits instructions. You are here now.

Get back to work.

Ocean Grove

The Atlantic Ocean is wild, raging against shore and tumbling in salty somersaults; the beach is full and bears no resemblance to the quiet afternoon before. I stood at the edge of the thrashing waves and remembered a summer looking to the sea for answers: now I have no questions, no storms within to quell, and I had forgotten, I think, what that was like. My skin is pale like April, it pinks and browns in ripples and I allow whatever changes come, because summer sits securely fastened to my senses now, radiates in my muscles and lulls me to safety. We drink wine out of thermos flasks and pull up our chairs every time the tide moves higher, all of August still lies ahead of us and sometimes I think we’ll all be okay.

Hold tightly to the gifts you are given. Relish them, let your fingers get pruny in their delights. When winter comes you may need them. And now you know how to lean into their sunshine, when you do.

The Hydrants are Open

Find them in the early morning, pack tents and water bottles, extra sunscreen and giggles, tumble out onto a quiet Greenwich beach, the tide is low and we collect shimmering shells all the way out to sea. Manhattan lies hazy in the distance, like a mirage in the desert and you already miss it. My pale skin pulsates against the sun, for a short moment I breathe without reminders, the water is cool and I am as close to happy as perhaps I can get these days. On the train home I read stories from a year ago, a July of browner skin but a veritable black hole inside it. My words are better in anguish, I declare, but it seems a frail victory. The truth is I’ve pulled myself back from a pit so deep I didn’t know I’d ever see a sunrise again, the truth is I’ve skinned every part of my body trying to climb out of it and had I known how close to the bottom of Everything I was I would never have made it.

I don’t know where I stand now. I know my accent lilts to the lower east side, I know my feet walk in poetry and this smile is made of starlight and magic. But I know my sleep is restless, and my eyes are forever a little broken, even though you can only see that if you really look for it. Maybe I think I’m back on steady ground but I’ve made a nook halfway up the pit and think as long as I can breathe I’m content.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, they say.

Maybe what constitutes alive is subjective, though.

Schlep

Returns to New York are just as sweet, every time. A skyline appears, a smile across my lips, something vibrates and you cannot put your finger on it -- or perhaps you do not want to for fear the magic breaks when you put it in a box. His outline appears at the end of an escalator, you know the silhouette too well to miss it. Even Penn Station has a sweet comfort to it.

Life is hard, and long, and lonely, the heart lives by breaking, lives and lives by bleeding into streets and strangers, this is how we grow. We nursed a short beer over conversations that need a year, and you wonder, where will I be a year from now? The question seems full of potential, or dread, depending on where you stand.

Today I stand on a streetcorner in Manhattan.

Potential ain't the half of it.

Northeast Regional

The train leaves on time, rolling past idyllic seaside towns and a sunset on fire, and is instantly late. An ex lover writes to name me the one that got away, how it pains him. He says he has not given up hope, despite the years. Life is an endless game of cat and mouse, a chain of chases, the train gets later for each station and the woman in front of me watches movies and checks her email at the same time.

I found a four-leaf clover at last, just outside the house, after so many weeks of fruitless searches. I gave it to the child. He says maybe we should just leave it, I don’t think plants are magic anyway, but when I bring it inside, his mind runs wild with all the power it could possess. Sometimes we are so afraid of our own happiness, of our dreams coming true, that we’d rather believe they cannot and leave them be. I tell him maybe we won’t understand our good fortune until it’s already grown in us, and I think maybe I look for four-leaf clovers to explain the brimming cup that is already there. I’ve done a thousand things wrong but every time I do something right, it’s a little closer to magic. I think I dreamed you into existence and maybe it wasn’t perfect but damn if I ain’t getting close.

The sun sets over the suburbs. My beloved city approaches. I run my fingers over the blessings in my pocket. Everything’s a treasure if you know how to count.

Paint It, Black

Suburban hours spent navigating narrow streets in an updated minivan; I look around and consider if this isn’t where more severe addictions take hold. We approach the beach, but the rich have claimed the sea for themselves and I long for open roads out west, for busy streets back on the grid. When the rains come, they wash the heat wave into a quiet summer evening. The lights flicker. My wisdom tooth hurts, but it isn’t a metaphor. We spent an hour today looking for four-leaf clovers and found none. It’s just as well, I told him they made all your dreams come true: when you and I both know wishes are only ever granted out of turn and at strange angles, how to explain that to someone who still believes in fairy tales.

There’s a punchline in there in the fairy tales I still buy, that I go looking for clovers in every patch of grass. But I’ve taken off my armor now, I’m all soft flesh and shivering skin, just the jab would knock me out.

Connecticut

The train sluggers on through deep, twisty tunnels, did you know there’s a whole world under Manhattan and here we are now like there isn’t an entire cosmos built above our crowns. Emerge in queens, see the skyline dabble against the edges, so small and far away but always how dear. The Bronx River looks peaceful, inviting, but it’s a hundred degrees out there we are fooling ourselves. I went for a run this morning and nearly became a statistic, it was too hard to stay away. His four-year-old mind asks five million questions before we even reach the suburbs, and when the Atlantic Ocean begins to glitter outside our window, I wonder how we teach children to marvel at the world. Do they know to ask for that? The streets are lush, winding, everything is not-of-the-City and you think what a blessing your life has been.

We do not ask for wonder. That’s the magic.

Wonder comes when we, if only for a moment, let ourselves free.

Index

The heat wave broils Manhattan, sunlight ricocheting between glass buildings and residents scrambling to find the next cool oasis. We fight our way two blocks south to an air conditioned corner at the bar, new and shiny but with ambitions of authenticity. He says, you seem taller, and you know what he means. Summer lifts you at the nape of your neck, pushes you from the ground up, we can call it summer but what I mean is happy. There’s a breath in my lungs that hasn’t fit there for ages, now it runs around buck wild, leaping against my rib cage and tickling my senses. I read a story on the plane yesterday that made me cry, and I think that’s something to believe in: I have failed at so many things I forget to count my wins, but it’s like I see them now, piled high around me. I told you I’d take on the world some day, didn’t I? Well we start somewhere.

Now watch me.

Delta Blues

Where are you right now? he writes from the terminal next door. We divvy up moving walkways and meet in the middle, unexpected moments like a gift, and we run through all the things to say before boarding announcements ring out across the carpeted corridors. Is it too early to start drinking, he says as you leave him, and everything is easier with the laughter. Anxiously spend moments calculating connection times and passengers ahead, try to remember the feeling of home in your bones, what it is you return to. Last night, under the starry skies, I thought of shards of glass we keep tucked under our skin. How even when the years have helped us heal around them, they still lie there, chafing, exerting their power over our every move. I asked the stars, what is my shard of glass?, and they, as they always do, remained silent. What did it matter? We all know our pain, we all know that dark place within us that can only soften with the years, never leave. I thought I am forever homeless, and went back inside to pack my bags. I packed the rhubarb from the garden, the new story that had written itself as I sat staring into the sky, went to sleep.

I return, healed. A bag still full of scars.

Sandman

Your flight is delayed, the text read. If you’d like to rebook it, now is the time to do it. Visions of home by morning fluttered around my eyelids, but I saw the reasons tally themselves, and pushed the button. What’s done is done, don’t look back.

I turned off the lights and climbed out on the back patio. After a week in the country of strobe light full moon, at last the sky was black, the millions of stars out of hiding, twisting and sparkling in silence. I sat there a long while, speaking with the universe, until a star fell across the horizon and silenced my chatter. There aren’t stars enough in the sky for all the wishes I have, I whispered, but my heart was full and my skin tingled. Make life overwhelming, wondrous, wonderful, I added, smiling, and a new story wrote itself in my periphery.

We create our destiny, we put each foot in front of the other to get where we’re going.

But you do not see shooting stars,
if you do not keep your eyes out for them.

Rumble

They arrive from the West Coast, damn liberals with their new-fangled ways and a shoddy jalopy heading east ("East Coast", she says, but he clarifies "what we mean is the South"); we spend a sunset discussing the state of the world and our measly places in it. Eighteen years we've been having these conversations, we know the value of those years. One day on a broken down train in the south of France, we said if we could share an asbestos-infested shoebox and come out friends, we can survive this, and we got off in Nice and had ice cream on the beach without anyplace to stay. One night in a hot Long Island house on a creaky twin bed we said if we could make it through Europe without a shower and come out friends, we can survive this, and we moved to Brooklyn in a whirlwind. The dentist gives you his best smile but you're so focused on not swearing in front of his religious sensibilities that you forget what he's saying. The radio plays country music, a slow drawl moves its way into the curve of your lip, everything is roadside watermelon and childhood summers. Charles Bukowski sits in my rear view mirror, shrugging. You remember every single thing you said you'd give up to join him.

The desert reaches a hundred degrees.

That iced drink in his hand looks like a million bucks and a song.

Eclipse

The moon disappears when we cannot see it. Did you feel the pull at your core? I ran so far along the mountain ridge today that I forgot what day it was. There was a vulture circling above, but it really only made me laugh. This country air turns my head around, softens my edges and steels my heart, what a gift it is to wake ignorant. At night, the desert air is cool: the full moon is a spotlight and I can't see the stars, but maybe I don't need to.

I spent an awful lot of time collecting them.

Maybe I have all I need.

Buck Moon

Today a full moon rose above the mountains, casting shadows and beaming stars straight out of the sky. I sat in the desert chill looking for shooting stars but it was too bright and no wishes escaped my lips. We climbed to the top of one of those mountains today, ten thousand feet in the air and all the world at our feet; I breathed in great big gulps of air and let everything go, including the way you felt like, woven into the side of my chest. I sailed down the mountain after, my fingertips running against alpine flowers and the desert surprisingly green. There are no falling stars, no fou-leaf clovers,

But sometimes there is a desert breath so deep, it makes true wishes you didn't even know you had.

And I'm counting that one as a win.

Valley Sun

Doesn't it look like rain? He tossed out commentary as the rest of us sat in silence, immersed in our own worlds and forgetting the outside. The winds picked up, the clouds moved in, soon branches were beating against the windows as they fell and claps of thunder smacked across the valley floor. By the time the storm passed an hour later, the little ranch house sat without power, without water, a small island floating around aimlessly and unsure where to connect. We drank wine and pretended it would sort itself out, until it didn't and we threw all the food we had into the firepit, drinking whiskey in the moonlight and eating dinner after midnight, conjuring ghosts and monsters out of the dark. I woke hours before dawn, the lights suddenly on in the little house, everything pretending it was regular and we were the ones out of sorts.

We drove to the little resort in the late morning, looked at streets washed over with money, looked at history erased by a new wave of settlers; the West puts up a battle but loses every time, eventually everything is tamed. I consider my own migration across its deserts, wonder at my footprint. He shot himself in the foyer of his house, you know, the young librarian says. I can't tell you where it is, but I'm going to point a little on this map and you never saw me do it.

I wander so much in the muck of my history, painting myself with the mud and letting it squelch between my toes; it's a sick pastime, I know, but it unnerves me to see my skin clean, to feel my breath light. What is it about writers that they always turn into alcoholics and kill themselves? he says, and I don't know how to tell him.

The mud is an answer, when you know it as home.

King Hill

The sun set low across distant mountain ranges as we pulled in through the gates, quiet trees looming over the dirt road and a little cottage waiting at the end. Below the house, the river snaked past, and everything was quiet in that way the world can only be at the edge of civilization. We made jokes about serial killers where no one can hear you scream, but the truth is we knew we'd have nothing to worry about, the truth is we knew we'd found a moment's peace and all we had were ourselves and the words we'd brought.

In the morning, I ran along an abandoned highway, alone save for the sound of sprinklers in the distance and birds wild in the trees. The world goes on forever here, and somehow so did I, the space in my chest growing with each step, as the stresses inside it subsided and gave way for something bigger. We settled into the silence then, pulled out worlds we had created in our minds, stories we could not help but tell. I told them this time is a gift you give yourself, and my list of gratitudes expanded infinitely.

At the end of the world, there is little room for your stresses and fears. At the end of the world, there is only the breath in your lung, the story on your lips, and the only thing left to do
is tell it.

Gate 113

I know this gate, this dead end in a cul-de-sac after the cold beer after the hot run through Penn Station at rush hour. I sat here once, years ago now, the gate looks different but the view looks the same; no what I mean is the view looks the same but it feels nothing like it did then, on a day when I sat at this gate and thought my love affair with the skyline in its view was over, when my body screamed for me to get out of this airport, get off this flight path, when I knew, somehow, that I would not be able to live a remaining life without it. You can call me fearful, sure, you can call me hesitant, but you cannot say I do not persist when I know truth in my heart.

The skyline looks different from this angle,
When the goodbye is merely temporary,
When I already look forward to seeing it soon again. 

Tus Huellas

A New York pace buzzes in the periphery, asking you to dance. You remember suddenly a beat that has become just as familiar to you as the meandering river in which you were born. My to do list runs rampant, I race from one end of the island to another, carry a hundred conversations in my pocket and a flurry of check marks in the back of my head. The city sweats, pulses in the July heat but does not sit back, does not relent, so neither do you. (I dreamed about you last night, but it was peaceful, it was all right and I woke soft at the joints.) When I was younger, I believed one day I would slow down, would grow comfortable, would return to the quiet stream, but here's a secret: the trick is to find your comfort in the madness.

Because if you figure out how, the rest of your life is fireworks.

Being There

Holiday weekend and the neighborhood rests. An old curmudgeon complains that Tompkins Square Park is only empty now because the people who live around here are rich these days and leave the city, but I say let them go, good riddance. I run into my neighbor in the stairwell, 39 years in this apartment and she hasn't gotten an AC yet. The birds have babies on the windowsill, I feel bad shoving them away.

We sat in a bar on the Lower East Side, painting the world in our grand plans as if trying to find our purpose. Do you know, one quiet summer evening I started speaking truths to you along a river and I never really stopped. It was like so many years of subtle glitches and suddenly everything had lined up like it was supposed to. Like so many years of walking with a limp and finally I'd come home. Every conversation since has simply been another verse in this melody.

I walked home along Essex eventually, young kinds scrambling to fit themselves inside bars, my headphones in my ears but the playlist turned off, because the city is a better DJ on Saturdays, like a little  gift. I know I write a hundred to-do lists and think I can construct my life in theory first, but that isn't how it works. If you want to really live a life, just do the thing. Put one foot in front of the other, and eventually the magic will catch up.

Exploring

The static sound of white noise quiets; it leaves a dark vacuum in its wake for which you were not prepared, and you spend a minute gasping for air like you had been pushing against it this entire time and now there was no foe left on the other end of the shield. A slow piano melody appears in its place, infused with so many nights of bleeding for answers, so many questions spoken into the dark, empty night. But that was ages ago now, I tell myself, and I think I made it out alive. I let the melody play as I sink into words. Pretend the reminder is harmless.

The day begins in an unknown bed, the room dark and undisturbed. I slept poorly, there was a bright blue light shining in the kitchen and for someone who sleeps so well in the middle of a busy street corner, the light's effect on me was surprising. Perhaps the light had nothing to do with it.
I see the stories I'm trying to tell; I see the forces inside me battle for power, battle for survival. But you know what's on the other side of the chaos you pursue. Aren't you tired of walking these same circles? Let it go, even if just for today, give yourself a moment's rest. Here, I'll hold your worries while you regain your strength. The rains are coming, they will wash clean the streets of our histories.

One day everything will be reduced to rubble, will be ash at our feet. I will be here still, then, standing next to you, unwavering: that is all I know. Surviving the storm is the only thing that never seemed like a fight, when I think about it.

Papa

The writer waxes on about solitude in the Hemingway outback, seeking kinship and finding only the remains of a determined suicide, what is there left to say? We like to paint death in romantic colors to distract ourselves from the finality of these little lives we lead. At the end of the day, you either did or you didn't. Which is it?

I woke in a haze, a boulder on my chest and unanswered messages in my phone. Tell me where you are and I'll drive you home, but don't they know the subway system is the only thing that grounds me, when the fireworks have broken my bones into pieces and my body threatens to float away? The Brooklyn night grew long and windy, the crooked roof with just the slightest reprieve of a wind: it's too easy to be soft in the presence of magic, it's almost like I hadn't forgotten what my muscles feel like around it, I nearly tripped for a second but don't worry. All's well that ends well, isn't it?

The A train rocked steadily westward through the tunnels, a collection of quiet, tired stars and stripes, and I was grateful for the community in solitude. Here is where my skin ends, here is where my feet stand. They are not the answers I was hoping for. But sometimes any answer is better than none at all.

Vermilion

Would you date her? he asked, nodding toward the ragged girl smoking on the corner, faded black tank top tied behind her back and bleached tresses struggling at the ends of her black hair. I shrugged noncommittally, my body a closed shop, my heart a tangle of thorns, but did I not fall in love with her for a minute when we found her later behind the bar? We haven't opened just yet, she said in the beating midday sun, but have a seat. She poured tequila like we were harmless, like the wooden bar would not budge under pressure. We drank like we would not either.

We let the afternoon run away from us, spoke truth into lime wedges and I don't know what the Universe is playing at but for a minute I didn't care. We picked up a roving poet at the edge of the bar and I scribbled illegible phone numbers on napkins and receipt tabs. Everything was a riot, everything was tearing at the seams, I avoid questions like landmines through no fault of anyone: I just don't trust my words not to expose this desperately clinging heart, this uncontrolled wildfire in my veins, this itch at my fingertips that will drag innocents along for the ride if they do not watch themselves.

Yours were the only questions I never avoided. Yours are the only eyes from which I do not turn away to construct quips about the weather. I walk this open book around the city as though it hasn't been a full time occupation to build muscles and scaffolding around the rubble you left behind. It's so easy, it's impossible. The fireflies were out in Brooklyn last night, and all I could think was, alright then.

Garden Apt

Heat roils Second Avenue even early in the morning, I drag a motley collection of survival gear up the numbered street. Fumble with keys to a quiet apartment, with that strange air of abandonment that houses get when the people who should be there leave. I'm here instead, I whisper at the cool floor and clean lines, feeling insignificant. But I open a back door, walk bare feet across rare East Village garden tiles, sit under a large tree and drink iced tea, pearls of sweat forming on my upper lip. I sigh in that way women do when they get old and believe they live in the South. I spend so much of my time lately watching the dregs that make up my life swirl the drain, and I can't figure out if I should try to catch them or not.

An alarm interrupts my meditations. Tell me it's time to zip these frayed edges back up, paint on a smile, step back out through the doors into unwavering streets, and carry on like moving forward didn't require your full attention.

Up That Hill

He writes again, soft with humility, to marvel at how your minds think alike, how the air is thick with magic. You think only how you are back to your usual ways, how kittens play with dying mice, how badgers will bite down until they hear the bones crack. The sun set in beautiful stillness tonight, twilight foliage thick with fireflies; they fired off their neon greens in choreographed chaos and I had to stop to look at them. I couldn’t help but smile. The four-leaf clovers have all been mowed into oblivion, but you’re not so sure about luck anyway.

Life continues to be overwhelming and confusing at every turn. You put crackers in your boot. Think perhaps it’ll sound enough like crunching bones and the badger can give you
a moment’s reprieve.

Make Happy

We're halfway through the year, she says, while the group stretches Monday limbs into the ceiling, and a breath gets caught in my throat. Halfway marks mean everything is racing towards its end. Halfway marks mean summer is almost over, mean life is almost over, mean you are running out of time and what do you have to show for it. She reminds the group to breathe, collects the frantic threads of our minds and the cellular phones in our hands, switches the sign on the door. I settle into a strange hum at the height of my temples, forget the space outside, and return to work.

Halfway through the year. Where were you in January? Where did you think you would be now? I look at my piles of lists, my pockets full of checkmarks, the unchecked tasks hiding in shame in the linings of my clothes. The truth is I don't think I'll ever be satisfied. The truth is I don't think I'll ever see my progress as anything but failed attempts at perfection, and I don't know yet how to measure that metric. An astrology chart lies crumpled in the corner of my room, mocking. What does it matter how we assert dominance over our own demons and feign freedom against the dark, if the puppeteer gods will pull at our strings any way they like and send us reeling across the Universe at a whim?

When the time was up, she chimed a gong and opened our doors again. I walked into the sunny Soho afternoon, blinking into the light and wondering at the warm air on my air conditioned skin, wondering at the strange and curious life inside of it. We break and we put ourselves back together again.

Where will you be six months from now? What will you have to show for it?