August 31, 2006

We tripped out of the subway onto a sunny afternoon tarmac, last of the summer travels underway and that special scent that rests in your shoulders and speaks of transit. We melted into the clean lines of a bygone era, drinking martinis and looking for the cheapest ticket to anywhere, as long as it left right away, everything was a riot.

Thirteen years ago I landed in this city and knew my life had changed for good. Thirteen years I've walked up and down its avenues, I've shuttled back and forth to this airport, I've breathed that sigh of relief as the A train makes its way back, takes me home to the island where my soul rests. In thirteen years I have never loved anything so much, and I've stopped believing that I might. We looked at the departure board, but the truth is there's nowhere I'd rather be than here.

New York, my darling, how many times have you not held me when I've stumbled? How many times have you not smiled at my joy and carried me through my fear? I know I was a person before you coursed through my veins but I cannot now remember who she was, and it really doesn't matter. At the edge of the river lies an island that knows my name when I forget it myself.

For a moment,
for a minute,
I am whole.

(ends)

(I woke this morning with a sense of clarity
with a sense of these to do lists aren't spelling it 
out 
right with
a sense that at last I could remember
what I have been missing lately.
When all the projects are peeled away,
when all the superficial markers of what
your life is supposed to be like
are rendered mute,
there is a small voice in you that has carried on speaking
unperturbed.
It's been whispering to you for as long as you can remember
and now you can hear it again.
The voice says only
follow the magic
and she sounds like you. 
You look at the road map.
It looks brand new.) 

There is Quiet

Roommates cycle in and out, suddenly the apartment lies quiet again, the long weekend spreading out in solitude and silence. Even the dog has left. I eye a calendar, full of sprawling notes, errands, potential, and wonder what would happen if I just crossed them all out. Erase their demands on my time, shut the door, pretend there is nothing but the silence and the page. (Maybe I'm the one who can decide there isn't.)

I woke up this morning and for the first time in I don't know how long, consciousness wasn't immediately followed by a crushing weight of the world on my chest. I woke only to find piles of paper in my bed, remembered words in my blood stream, how I had stepped into the river and how fine the water always is in there.

There's a magic still floating around this town, this life, we forget so often and busy ourselves with tickertape and mortgages. Charles Bukowski sits on my shoulder, a manic pixie dream girl behind his eyes and a drink in his hand. I toss the calendar aside, lock the door.

Summer ends. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Watch the ashes around your feet
simply blow away.

Right. Rite. Write.

An entire day washes itself through your sandy deltas, filters its sunshine and hours and distractions, the dog sleeps on your bed while you writhe in the agony of reaching that still place at the center of your being. It is not quiet there, it is not empty like the vortex of a meditation, I do not close my eyes. In the eye of the storm there is merely a moment where nothing else can reach you, where nothing exists but the words at your fingertips. All day, I see my little boat torn in and out of the hurricane, pulling to reach that stillness but failing, trying to sit in words but tumbling about in raging whitewaters. Anytime I reach the page, I can exhale, I can see the narrow path towards enlightenment, I can see why I scratch these marks into my skin so I bleed.

This is the process. This is the maelstrom you always must navigate. You write your lists and attempt to optimize, but these tricks are just your attempts to pretend you don't know how the magic works. You have to wade through the waters, you have to pace around the process. Eventually everything settles, and the words stream from your quiet place.

Stay on the boat. Be here when they do.

37

("you asked for a challenge, a voice inside you repeats")

Life is so fucking short, and heavy and sad so much and you've been dealt such a melancholy disposition, but fuck, that makes your highs so beautiful, so out of this world. This year I hope you capitalize on that. I hope when you read this letter you feel hopeful, grateful for the year that passed and even more excited about writing the letter for the year to come.

When my knees buckled, New York held me. I didn't have to leave it, and I think now more than ever that I maybe never will... I realized that the greatest strength is that we have to love: friends, lovers, enemies, ourselves... My heart is still too worn to envision new love, and too scared to ask for another challenge, and still I do. I hope you keep writing. Keep reworking. I hope you stay soft, vulnerable, loving, in whatever way that means.
 
You get better every year, remember that.  
Happy Birthday. 

and the Living is Easy

A morning arrives, heavy clouds on your brow and light springs in your step, is this what the new age brings? I feel like a bag of bricks,  I feel entirely reborn. A birthday passes in mad dashes: diving into the ocean in Queens, collapsing in a hungry giggle in Brooklyn, drinking our way up the Bowery in Manhattan. I said why don't we go up to the top of the Empire State Building, and he said yes. I asked, but is it ridiculous, and he said yes, what better spirit could you ask for at the dawn of a new year? When I stepped out of the door on the 86th floor and saw the midnight city spring to greet me, every uncertainty of our adventure blew away, I smiled and cried at once and thought I have every thing I could ever want in having just this one. He smiled and nodded, in return.

There was sand in my hair when I woke this morning, salt on my skin and drinks on my breath. There was freedom behind my eyelids and potential at my fingertips; today is the first day of the rest of your life, what on earth will you do with these gifts you've been given?

You get out of bed. Put one foot in front of the other. What a strange life, you think, and then you walk straight out into it.

on Rivers

The bartender pours ice behind the fan, jerry-rigged air conditioning on a day that requires nothing of the sort: fall is alive and well in its disturbed slumber, testing its roar in little bursts and preparing for the long road ahead. I know it is still warm, I know the sun still shines but lord, how that eternal fear grips me without effort at every blustery breath. I ran along the river and felt little whirlwinds play around my ankles, heard the crinkle of dying leaves, and something within me died as well. It's only age, I feign, but the truth is it is entirely the opposite: it is as much as life.

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking, I have comfort enough for a small army, this is the heart I was asked to own. The years tear you down but the life builds you up, he said I am not the same person now as the one he first met and he is right. I am a thousand pages turned, a thousand sheets folded over, twisted and turn in the dimensions, I am more complicated by the day and look how many more angles I have to understand this world, to write these words, to love knowing full well the fragility of the endeavor. I am an ocean of sorrow, but don't you ever forget, I am worlds of love and I have committed to this circus now.

I will hold out for every Spring that promises to return, I will keep folding this paper until it turns into the stars.

the Wilderness

The horoscope lies, I mutter under my breath, while she just laughs and said I'm only reading it wrong. The dog returns after days away and the familiar patter of paws at the door is reassuring; you don't know what you've gotten used to until it leaves you. The weather turns, the season flips against your will and suddenly the evenings are dark, the winds cold. The fear grips me before I even reach the river and I think it's too soon, but no one listens. Another year dies. Another life is buried under your piles of knitwear, your weary uselessness. I woke in a strange bed and stumbled down quiet streets, something feeling crooked inside me like a violin out of tune: was I playing it wrong, or was the melody never mine to begin with? All I wanted was a moment's respite from myself. Instead I buy my time on credit and waste my life trying to outrun debt collectors, is this what I was hoping I'd be doing with my days?

The horoscope said this is the month when my dreams come true but I think we're running out of time and everything inside me still cries when I wake in the morning.

There was a time when I thought I had magic in the palm of my hand. I'm beginning to think now they were just matches I set aflame, and now winter is coming. Now we pay for the dreams we entertained. No wonder I'm so afraid of the snow.

The Time of Your Life

We tell all the same stories, again and again, it's strange how you can know a whole host of another's memories when the ones you have together are so few. We hash and rehash, try to find new gems in piles of sand, but the secret is the sand is what builds your castles, and all it takes to glimmer is shining the light just right.

I woke early this morning for a meeting, I went home from the bar for a late return to the midnight oil. I looked a young child in the eyes at dawn and whispered apologies for my negligence, apologies for my shortcomings and the way my priorities have twisted themselves to pay rent, to live a little longer in this dream. He sells his home to afford saving the world while you cobble yours together to create another. There are rights and wrongs here but you've lined your pockets with justifications and you wonder how they'll fare once winter comes. I play rain sounds in my headphones as though I can fake connection: the truth is some days we run on empty. The truth is I can run myself into the ground if you give me enough room to really make a go of it. Every now and then I read a piece of poetry so true I think nothing else is relevant.

I said I regretted nothing.
I'm beginning to think it was true.

Advertising Space

Your days are planned down to the minutes, you race from one box on the to-do list to the next and forget to remember you are tired, was it always like this? Summer careens towards its cruel end, it is hotter now than ever but the light is different in the sunsets, people's tan skin taking on the same feel as the leaves: a little exhausted, a little overdone. It feels like minutes since the new green of spring pressed itself through your eyelids and words spilled from your fingertips in gratifying curlicues, how old they are now, how tired.

But I sat in Washington Square Park today, college freshmen outdoor piano playing crazy bird people sweltering fountain romance Washington Square Park, and I knew. There is magic still to be wrung out of this season, there are late nights still to whisper and warm waves still to swim. There's an entire life yet to live though sometimes it dwindles in autumnal ashes, it rises again, and again, and again. You will rise, too.

I'll make sure of it.

Block

(Drag yourself through muck and mire. Scrub your knees against the rocks of your resistance, sand your eyes with doubt and indifference, fill your veins with paralyzed apathy. You know this is just as much a part of the process as everything else, you know excuses are only windblown trash on a street you must cross regardless. Sit in the dirt for a minute, let it seep into your pores and grab you by the throat, feel the air leave you and everything turn black. 

Then dust yourself the fuck off.  The only way to survive, is to live. 

The only way to get something done is to do it.)

Missed

I dreamed of airplanes again, of lives in transit, the comforts of home. I don't know why I keep having these dreams, I suppose I should be listening. A friend asks how I'm doing, and I answer working too much and working too little in the same breath. It turns out to be exactly the truth. I try to scrub tingles off my skin, try to wring myself out of this body to try to save it in the fall, this life would be a farce if it wasn't so tragic and once my work is done I realize I scraped the magic right off. Maybe there's plenty where that came from, I suppose we might find out.

I have this heart full of love, you know. I have these arms full of comfort, this head full of song, I try to use them on myself but I forget so often. In a dark room in the west village, I sat with a small child wrapped around my body, taking gentle breaths and thinking of eternity. We can all be reduced to humans. That is a magic that cannot be scrubbed off.

Come. I dare you to try it.

Mist

The bartender plays a new soundtrack, some sort of mellow bluegrass Americana, it weaves in and out of your consciousness and you forget where you are. She pours your beer as you walk in the door, the bar smells of old alcohol and mumbles: would that you could live in this space always. You think perhaps that is all you are trying to do with these words, build a line of credit that will let you live along a bar forever, and you will not be sorry. You always dreamed of being a recluse belonging, and now here you are: the drink has your name on it, the table in the corner, you make no excuses anymore.

We stood in the ocean this morning, last night's storm whipping up seaweed and shrimp carcasses around our ankles, a heavy fog rolling across the beach noncommittally, and all I could do was laugh. What a dream this life, after all, even as fall threatens on the horizon, even as old age sets in and everything is different from how it once was. Two years ago I sat across the river with a stupid smile on my face and thought how everything was different, and I had no idea. How many waves would I ride, how much terror would whip up from the depths below: how grateful would I be one day for just a moment's peace in the sun. I know every inch of your skin, every fold of your heart, what a tremendous gift is that?

The river looks the same now and yet completely different. I approach it carefully, feigning courage. Remember what lurks beneath. Believe in the wave that will make it all worth it.

Doors

Morning arrives too soon, already sweltering and relentless. I drag a heavy head to a kitchen table, to a coffee cup, to a pair of running shoes. Arrive at the river long after it's become unbearable, stumble a few miles and land on a patch of clover, letting the sweat drip as I search for four leafed promises underneath my skin. The phone stirs relentlessly, Sunday chatters and yet not what you're looking for, it's a practice in patience. I stare at the river and dream of the ocean, I dream of a lot of things but I don't sleep nearly as much as I need to. Play the reel over again. A to do list circles your drain, you are tired and impatient at the same time, you know the only answer is work. Watch the cursor blink at the edge of your screen, the minutes race around your watch. The obstacles writhe and stretch and build themselves in front of your nose.

The only way to get over them is to start climbing.

Thick Skin

Another cycle begins, she writes from the north, endless summer drawing impossibly to a close and everything beginning and ending all at once. I don’t know what to make of this life. I stand on the platform late, trains running rarely and the air thick with August, how was my skin so cold so recently? We sat in a restaurant in the midday heat, calculating dates and remembering times when everything was just beginning, it seems a lifetime ago, and I’m not sure anymore I remember who I was then. I tell him I’m better now, better every day and I know I mean it: for a short moment I forget the gashes across my lungs. A Hasidic man next to me takes off his large fur hat, a source of pride, a symbol of repression, I don’t know that any of us are as free as we like to believe.

Still, any moment breathing is better than not, this short moment before stepping onto the steaming platform is a gift and you swallow it whole. A train runs express in the depths, the workers blow a whistle and step off the electrified rails. The Hasidic man puts his hat back on. I smile despite myself, and it feels like this is the greatest gift: belief that everything may one day start anew. The train arrives, I make my way back home. Everything ends, I am still here.

I am here, again.

13.1

Around mile four, the sun set over New Jersey. The evening was cool, and gentle, the plaza brimming with romantic strolls and just one more effort to capture the particular peaches and pinks that sink into the ocean on August evenings. At mile six, a familiar view of midtown from the west side sparkled and glimmered in the twilight as if to remind me what this was all for (I do anything to stay here, to earn you, that's what it's all for and we both know it), before I turned around to head back home again. At mile nine, my legs grew weary, pleading with my brain to calculate remaining distance and admit the futility of the effort, give up. My brain knew that if it took a second to think, it would never get back up on the damn horse, so better to hold on tight to the goal and carry on.

By mile ten, I had stopped thinking. There was only the next step, now, there was only the familiar sights of bridges to Brooklyn, of black waves in the East River and the comforting weave around scattered tourists. Somewhere around mile eleven, a full moon came out from behind the clouds, as if casually offering support it would rather have given enthusiastically. It carried me the rest of the way.

After thirteen miles, the promenade was dark and mostly quiet. My steps slowed, I stopped to look at the full moon and consider obstacles, consider determination. The music in my ears was happy,  the blood in my veins giddy, I longed for the ocean to tell it my joys but the waters were busy caressing the moon and I couldn't blame them. A new day lies ahead, like an open book, like I get to write the pages of my own life, like I clawed myself into the life of my dreams and now here I am, now what?

That's the thing about dreams, after all.

Once you've caught them, you're already chasing the next.

Relax

The hustle builds inside you, gathers steam, roils around and pushes you forward, ever forward, ever counting the minutes left in your pockets and how you best can spend them. Summer is sticky again, but the evenings are dark now and you know it will end one day. She writes you from the north and says does it all start again now? and you know how after school season itches like a mosquito bite at your edges. You land exhausted on your bed, night after night and the alarm so early but the earlier you rise the more minutes in your pocket. The stars prepare to align, the moon fills like a lung, the light along the Bowery tonight was magic and there is never so much storm on my calendar that I cannot stop
for a second
to see it.

Crunch

run run run 
as fast as you can
you'll never catch all the shooting stars
you keep hoping for 

but fuck it,
what else am I going to do?
might as well try and see if I can't
land
at least one.

the Scratcher

In between songs, the bar is entirely quiet, Monday revelers with no need to shout their angst into the void. There's a long stretch of tables to your right sitting empty, the bartender wears a sweater like she always does even though it is summer and you haven't looked in your sweater drawer since March. He spoke of foliage and you thought of it as little more than creative liberties, surely Christmas is merely something we invent in boredom, this bead of sweat has lingered between my breasts for as long as I can remember and were my brows not always so white?

We sat on the beach again this morning, toes in the sand and lungs reaching toward infinity, him with his peaceful hums and me with my mind on fire in the sunshine, everything was perfect and even in sleep we smiled. I stood in the waves later, soft fat waves like playful baby seals, letting them roll over me and thinking how grateful I was to greet them without all that sorrow in my bones, without that desperate plea to cleanse me, to rid me of the unbearable pain I couldn't seem to dispose of myself. The ocean is a playground now, a rainbow, a cloud, my to do list is a million pages long but dammit I'm doing it. Do you hear me?

I'm swimming myself to shore.

Wax (v)

Sometimes,
for a short moment,
you breathe like you never forgot
how,
for a short moment, your skin
contains you and ends where you end,
without edges bleeding
into the intangible beyond.
August evenings are dark,
and cool,
and even as summer ends
it whispers promises
that something in you is
only beginning.

All My Life

I still believe in magic, I tell him, late night in Chelsea and the weight of the world on our shoulders. We woke so early, weekend traffic to the Rockaways and the ocean quiet before the crowds arrive. I speak with the ocean still but sweet now, I’ve stopped pleading with it to bandage these bleeding wounds and giggle in the waves. A ragged man sat on F train with his busted keyboard, playing songs I knew in my youth and loved, this was all before the coffee set in but I still sank into his chords and smiled, despite myself.

The movie was long, but beautiful, all cowboy hats and western Americana, I breathe easier with home in my spine, I can handle every life’s sadness against that desert backdrop. We walked out to discover a concert in the late summer twilight, I wore a sweater and marveled at the temperature but maybe it didn’t cause the shivers, life is strange in its wayward miracles.

I still believe in magic, I told him, 23rd street as the train rolls in and who do we find on the train car but the same ragged man with his keyboard and quiet harmonies, I stood mouth wide open at the door and had no answers to offer. This is New York, was all I could think to say before I left him at west fourth street, smiling at the Universe. The bartender only charged us for half the drinks and the bride next to us waxed on about her black heart, how there is hope still to be had.

We do not know all the things that are yet to come, we wade in our own insignificance. One day I asked the Universe for a chance to fail up and boy did the Universe deliver, I still make wishes at 11:11 and do you know, all of a sudden on the A train at midnight, everything you could think to ask for can come true.

Halcyon

All we want is to succumb to a single kiss
that will contain us like a marathon
with no finish line, and if so, that we land
like newspapers before sunrise, halcyon
mornings arrived like blue martinis. I am
learning the steps to a foreign song: her mind
was torpedo, and her body was storm,
a kind of Wow. All we want is a metropolis
of Sundays, an empire of hand-holding
and park benches? She says, “Leave it all up to me.”

and Then

The days pass with nothing to say. Nothing of torrential downpours and passing deadlines, nothing of street corner kisses and the dull ache in my shoulder that says life is passing by quickly and I'd do well to sit still for a minute and see it. She calls to say he's taken the kids, she calls to say her life is falling apart, again, again, how you wish you could save her against the world. When you were young she told you the bad things happening then were just God preparing her for so much worse to come, and some days you think her premonition strangely prescient, long after that God had forsaken her.

A sun begins its slow climb in the east. You set your alarms, too early, too cruel, but summer rolls into its dying breaths, you want to greet each one and watch it escape between your lips. You are still here, it whispers, you are still here. You are never late to a party you've arrived at.

Post

I woke to the sound of nothingness, to a dark Wednesday morning and checked the time: 3:25 a.m. Hadn't I just told a stranger how well I sleep at night? He walked me home before I could tell him I'm not the sort of girl you walk home; I had to count minutes in the stairwell before coming back out to sit on the stoop and smoke a cigarette, telling a girlfriend the walk home lets me digest an evening and now I didn't get a moment to myself. The evening was cool, as though fall might approach again, and somewhere in the pit of my stomach stirred the involuntary fear of winter. Too soon, I whispered to myself between glasses of wine. This isn't it. I tossed and turned in bed for much too long, seeing the early morning alarm clock race towards me with its promise of struggle. A novel manuscript lay upended around me, it is less a story now than assorted piles of dropped juggling acts and loose threads, I do not have time to be walked home late at night when I have this surgery to tend to.

My horoscope says this is the month my dreams come true.

And that doesn't happen unless you make them.

Tales

Your horoscope says this is the month your dreams come true, she says matter-of-factly. You stand in your Sunday casuals and wonder which of your dreams the stars are getting at, and what kind of net you'll need to rein them in. Do I just stand here and wait, then? I ask her, but the stars do not divulge their methods, so I go to bed and wonder if the tingle in my toes is approaching magic.

Mondays arrive with their usual humdrum in the airwaves, but I greet morning with slow steps along the river and move into the quiet office with my snail shell contents because all that is mine I carry with me and there is no peace in work if I do not live in it. It occurs to me that all the freedom I asked for is at my fingertips, that when I say if I could only spend a life like this I'd ask for no more I'm making hypothetical that which I've already made real. I pack up my piles of paper and my buckets of ink and move into the dark little bar off the Bowery to return to worlds I've created out of nothing.

My horoscope says this is the month my dreams come true.

I'm starting to think they already did.

Elastic Heart, II

Dreams are strange in intoxicated fogs, but you have an unnerving feeling your subconscious knows what it's doing. She writes to ask, if we do not make it, will you take the baby? and I cried on the A train, because it's hard to find the words to say you were already watching over this life as though it came from your own limbs. I said, yes. Morning dragged itself across my open wounds, my skinned knees, do you ever get so used to hurting that you forgot what ailed you to begin with?

The little girl sits patiently waiting at the blinking cursor. Her edges are scuffed, too, she did not ask for you to throw her in the flame, this fire that she did not know how she could survive, but you insisted she would, insisted she must. You pulled her through it by her hair, demanded she learn and grow and get the fuck back up out of the dirt every time she fell, and did she not follow your every vengeful command? Here she sits now, ready for her rewards. Here she sits, waiting for you to pick her up, brush her off, lift her up to a moment's rest in the sunlight. She whispers in your ear, Did you know that all the characters in your dreams are just variations of you?

I step up to the cursor. Begin the long drive home. 

Mi Tierra

August rolls in, fat, yellow August with its hot days and dark nights. You forget to remember the days, spending every morning with your toes in the sand and your afternoons in a fervor by the word processor, aching out twists and turns in the story because soon it must be finished soon, you must expel this sweat to the world. A little girl runs across your pages, but she is not the only one: you see your demons run themselves tired through your ink-stained veins.

We went to Coney Island to see American summer up close. I reveled in a cool breeze, in a short break from the inner madness, but the truth is there is no reprieve. The truth is blinking lights can’t erase the darkness from your heart, the truth is saving everyone else can’t save you from yourself, soon it’s 37 years of your stumbling and are you ever going to walk on that balance beam without bruises?

The Q arrives when you need it to, arcs along the bridge to Manhattan and runs local when your stop isn’t express, it’s a soft kindness to your hard exterior. You sink into the warm embrace of your borough, into the knowledge that however lost you may be, you can always come back home, that you are never so alone that fourth street will not walk beside you. Your demons sit by the bedside, waiting. It’s time to rewrite this story. Give them a place, and then
let them
go.