Destruct

You are too tired, the voice at the back of my head says gently. You are running head first into the brick wall, didn't I tell you about it a mile ago? I wake disoriented, a fire rattling in my lungs, a to do list chasing me through every dream. Drag five versions of a manuscript to a quiet corner and watch the happy couple next to me touch each other in that way people do when the early morning is a bubble of their own making. Outside the window, autumn leaves cascade down the awning, some days New York is a film set all to itself. I walked home late last night and played peek-a-boo with the Empire State building, we had a good laugh even though I could hardly keep my eyes open.

If you think I am complaining, let me tell you I am not. Everything aches but my soul is delirious, I cannot keep my eyes open but I cannot stop smiling. Do you know I found the secret to the Universe and it makes everything else irrelevant?

I turn it over in the palm of my hand. It is weightless, and it is everything. Do you know I'm this close to the edge, and I have never been more sure of my footing?

Scratch

The bar waxes and wanes, Monday night before a holiday and we're all trying to fill up on strength and resistance before we are reduced to children who do not know how to fight for themselves. Silverware can turn fatal with the right lighting. My regular bartender is away; my spine crackles at the incongruent playlist but the post-it on my word processor says don't be precious, so I pull out piles of paper and get to work. At home, the cupboards bulge with holiday spices and pounds of butter, the corners whisper of tinsel and light. I know it's just an excuse to hide from the world, but if this world were yours, would you not take it? I worked so much for a while I forgot my own name but nothing lasts forever, not even that storm in your chest: if you just sit here long enough that racing heart will pass. If you just wait at this word processor, eventually the story will show up and let you tell it. All this loose yarn is nothing but a headache now, sure, but eventually you will tie it all together and create a tapestry.

You'll know when it's time to give up on a white whale.

It's not yet.

So keep moving.

Surge

Getting over love is like breaking an addiction, the scientist says in your headphones. See how this part of your brain lights up?

I consider a future in opioids.

The dog saunters in and shimmies herself down on the cushion behind me, fast asleep on her perch and I wonder what it would like to come home at the end of the day and just rest. The video feed from across the ocean shows six and a half pounds with a full head of hair, it's so strange but somehow it's like he always was here, a small girl stands at the end of my cursor and everything that follows is a miracle: I love her still. The days are long when you rise before dawn and return to bed in the middle of the night, but such is the nature of this addiction. We do what it takes.

I break out the bourbon for the season. Take a long, light run in the hesitant winter twilight. Pack my bag and get back to work. I'm turning this brain into a god damned Christmas tree.

Dig a Tunnel

The mornings get earlier and earlier. I become intimate with the Frenchman behind the coffee counter, he gives me free coffee and I have patience that he forgets everything else. Hours while away behind the word processor, stressed Brooklynites running in and out for their morning regulars, other writers or free lancers roll in with the tides. Come midday, I stumble out into sunshine and feel I have an entire day behind me, while another lies ahead, but evenings are heavy and my eyes grow gravelly before their time. He calls from across the earth and his accent soothes you, the way his voice sounds tanned by African skies, the way his pauses are waves against the shore. I once spent a summer watching him fall asleep in Soviet nights, but that was a different life, I was a different person. Not better, not worse, just different, you know?

You have been someone else, too, many someone elses after all, surely you know what I mean.

I go to bed early, now, my eyes closed before my head hits the pillow.

It's been a while since I watched someone fall asleep.

Dime

I wake early, again, the to do list splits at the seams and overflows even into my commutes; I sit on the subway, productive, running from one ask to the next. Something at the edge of my vision cautions, whispers warnings against the gratification of the manic, but I am too light, too fast, to hear it. Just let me have this bliss. I know it cannot last. On the Upper West Side, in a drab high rise among many, I turned around to see a small sliver of light between buildings, and there in the space, the Empire State shone and sparkled 30 blocks away. This building which sees me and finds me wherever I go, this lighthouse which reminds me no matter where I am on this island I am home. I stood there, dumbfounded, and stared at it for a minute, wrapped the moment up and carried it with me like a gift.

I guess that's the thing about life. Everything is a gift, if you let it.

Mended Fences

(The bar is quiet, winter is here and Mondays are black, rainy. My fingers get pruny with an unruly manuscript: I believe somewhere in here something burns, something smolders but it's still just out of my reach and I am at a point now where I can taste it on my tongue, the addiction is a gift. I have let you go now, I have let go of everything that dragged heavy stones through my chest and it's hard to remember who I am without them. The last time I saw my grandmother, she did not know who I was and still I carry those days like a treasure: death is not a punishment for those of us who remain, it is a roundabout gift. I wonder if I've made all the wrong choices but I know I made at least one or two right ones and maybe that's a batting average to admire, in the end. Tonight I sat at my usual corner table in a bar that feels like home, and swam in magic until I forgot the time, forgot my worries, knew only this story. If I do nothing else with my life but give myself the gift of this space, perhaps I will still have done enough. The last time I saw my grandmother was only the last time, and I had a lifetime of moments before that, if you are sad now, please know that you will not always be, please know that sometimes our boulders turn into balloons and though you will be lost when your feet leave the solid ground, the air is only a
new map
to learn.)

Arrive

We're going in shortly, he writes in a text I see when I stir at the far end of the dark night, her water broke. I fall back asleep and dream of healthy babies with our aunt's face, with a full head of hair and we're already making jokes. I dream I cry, and when I wake again, there are tears drying on my cheeks; I wake smiling.

The day carries on impatiently, with every stir of my phone I jump. He sends videos of her dancing, I make stupid jokes with lots of swearwords and wonder how quickly one could traverse an ocean, if one really really wanted to do it at the speed of light.

And then, while I step away from Friday night cocktails and icy Brooklyn winds to look at my phone again, he is here. I stop in my tracks, wonder at the wonder. How life is so hard, so long, with so many wrong turns and impossible walls to scale, how the wind is cold and the nights so lonely and how still in just one moment, everything can change and nothing is what you ever thought. A year ago, how we were broken, and suddenly how some pieces have melded themselves together, suddenly, how a whole new piece changes the puzzle entirely. Everyone is happy, is healthy.


My sweet little boy, you are too young yet to know what a miracle you are. Too young to feel in your heart the kind of love that breaks us open and drowns us and we do not turn it down. Too young to understand that just by existing, you are so much more than enough, so much more than anyone could have ever asked for. One day you will know that your parents dreamed you into existence, that you are their dream come true, and I hope that day takes your breath away the way you have already taken all of ours. 
My sweet little boy, everything you do from here on out is icing on the cake.
 
I don't know if there is
forever
but if there is
it always belonged
to you.

Overlook

There’s a certain freedom, when you’ve lost all the things you clung so tightly to, a certain weightlessness you could not buy with money, only only barter and sacrifice. Fulton street is cold in the late Sunday night wind, but you’re holding this umbrella now, it tugs at your arm:

it promises to sweep you right off your feet.

Re:Treat

A silence hangs in the air, sometimes life is too big and the space in which to fit it too small, sometimes the Red Queen runs too fast and I cannot catch up. I smile in the quiet breaths, and that is enough for now.

I smile in the quiet breaths, and that is enough
for now.

Frost

The cold moves in like a sledgehammer. Come morning, the gingkos have all lost their leaves before they turn golden; the streets are washed with green. Everything smells fresh, alive, this isn't how it's supposed to go. Dead before their time. I know the feeling.

Deep in Brooklyn, I walked around the park looking for a trail on which to get lost, for a bend in the trees where there is no telling you are in the metropolis. I kept finding my way back to paved wind tunnels, crying into the ether only to be interrupted by groups of school children learning about wilderness. It's not that I am sad, you say to the skies, it's that this body feels like lead and I don't know that I want to carry it anymore. I try to breathe hope back into my lungs, but they are closed to optimism and my breaths are shallow, escaping in little plumes of smoke as I choke on my despair.

Winter arrives in splendid sunlight and a knife to your back. It doesn't seem fair, you whisper to the Universe, but the Universe is silent in return. I find an old penny at the foot of a tree, covered in dirt but visible by a thin outline. I wipe more tears from my frozen cheeks.

Eventually I start walking, again.

Freeze

The temperature plummets, little flurries of snow surprising themselves into existence along the river and your extremities numb. The season of long, steaming showers out of which it is near impossible to step. You arrive at the bar early but your table in the corner is taken, the one with perfect lighting and rickety legs; you nestle into a back nook with orange string lights. For the first time, the Tuesday bartender knows your order, too, and you wonder if this means you have officially moved in. Don't be precious, the note reads, and what it means is don't be particular, but you have turned out to be the sort of writer who thrives on superstition, who craves the known to paint the unknown, you return to this bar because you don't know how not to.

I return to a lot of things in life, circle back and try them on for size, make sure everything still fits. Sometimes I'll leave sweaters lying in a corner of the closet for months when they don't, trying to alter myselt to make them make sense again, but I see now the error of my ways. I'm not the one meant to be changing.

If this sweater doesn't fit anymore, I am ready to leave it behind. The winter is too long, too cold, to go without what keeps you warm.

Honestly,

A bright pink post it note on my computer keyboard reads don't be precious, and I drag the processor across the village to cram words into it at every turn. The bartender hands me my drink as I walk in, I forget that I do not live here, you could have fooled me. In my youth I manically raced into change before it ran me over, but now I revel in the routines, breathe easier in familiarity. They ridicule me for the post its and printed sheets of paper but a story isn't real unless I can feel it, unless I can run my fingertips across the ink and imagine it in edits, I told a story once and it had potential but I want it to have magic so here I am. He asks to read it, you say only yes now, whoever said we cannot change was only too sad to see the beauty of another sunrise.

She tells me she is leaving her husband. After 30 years together she has at last had enough. He'll find someone new, good for him. She beams at her newfound freedom, spends her days looking at designer sofas. I brought it up before, of course, but he never wanted one. We laugh like girlfriends in a romantic comedy, sometimes life is light when you do not think it would be. I ran for miles and miles along the river today, the air was mild and kind like in springtime, and I thought, well it isn't long until it is here, and I can wait, somehow believing my words as they beat out of me with each deep breath. I don't recognize the skin at my fingertips but my face in the mirror is reassuring. The bar gets busy. My story sways but stays steady, I lose my sense of time, I forget to hear the conversations around me, all I know is there are piles of paper around me that are slowly, slowly, arranging themselves like I hoped they might, it took me years of pain to become the person these pages needed me to be but I am here now.

I'm not going anywhere until this story is told.

I'm not going anywhere until this story is spun in magic.

Cosmos

Days race past you in hours clocked in and not many clocked out. Nights are short and moments to process few, but you pay your bills and when an hour appears among friends, you drink the wine: everything is weightless. I went for a run along the river at sunset, the Bay on fire and a full moon twinkling over Brooklyn. It was not fast, or particularly long, my breath slow and steady, mind unoccupied; I lifted my head like I so rarely remember, looked at the oily blues of the water, the shifting colors of twilight, the familiar, reassuring outline of New York City in every direction. I was happy.

Sometimes we do not win in extravagance. Sometimes it is slow, and steady, and remembering to keep your head up. Sometimes it is just putting one foot in front of the other, and in every step, being
exactly
where you
are.

Treasures Untold

Poetry is useless if you're talking about yourself, he rants into the dark apartment. No one cares that you're a drunk. Piles of my self-revolving whisky rants blush in their corners, but what else can they do? They have nothing to say except what they know. Winter arrives in a rage, suddenly every street corner is an assault. I don't recognize the skin at my fingertips anymore but my face in the mirror is reassuring. You got off track for a minute.

But sheets of paper don't lie, when people tell you who they are believe them, when November hits you cannot reasonably be surprised at winter winds, my alarm is set for far too early but my bills are paid, the Universe will not take without giving something in return.

The Universe will not give, without taking something when it goes.  

Clearly Now

Morning is crisp, like ad agency copy crisp, like images of biting into apples at orchards upstate crisp, the air is cool but the sunshine warm, a large, soft scarf neither too warm nor too cold. The French man behind the register is  his usual manic self, blasting Magic Flute arias and tossing out pastries like a hurricane. Sunrise shone down the Brooklyn street like a joke, like we all know it's not supposed to look like this in real life and yet here we are. I went to bed happy last night.

There's a lightness in November that always surprises me. Like I've finally given up my grasp on summer, have consented to the changing season and can embrace the creative solitude it affords me. I sit in this space now, with a heart that bleeds ink, sit in this dark and create my own goddamn sunshine. It will pass soon enough.

The leaves will all have fallen. But let's cross that bridge when it pummels our way.

El

The bright new building sidles up to the park avenue wall. Street level it’s all masonry, but on the 15th floor you can hear the northbound commuter trains rumble by. I sit in the window and watch them race out of the tunnel and into the fresh air, look in through the window at late night passengers, wonder where they get off and what life looks like there. How quiet the train cars look. Midtown Manhattan sparkles like so many gemstones at the bottom of a dark lake: do you know this city is actually a hundred, each one a world away from the other. The 6 train winds through twenty at least before I reach those blocks of low buildings where I am home. People filter in and out, and I don’t know how to tell them what a miracle it is that they are alive, that all this magic coursing through our veins truly belongs to us, did they remember to look this gift in the eye and did they whisper thank you to the universe? We ride past the ghost stop on 18th street that you have to know about to see, spirits of old New Yorkers long gone lingering by the graffiti, waiting for their ride. I whisper thank you and it sounds just like breathing.

I breathe, and the universe nods like it knows what I mean.

DST

They say it's good for something, but you can't remember what. All you know is that you woke with an extra hour's sleep in your system, like a bribe, and that by afternoon it was dark outside and the evening stretched out too long around you. She writes from above the Arctic Circle and asks, is today the last time we see daylight?, her pleas alone enough to make you vow to never visit. There was a time when I did not know my whole self to die for several months each year, and I wonder now what that was like. To not slowly wither at the first slow dusk, to not feel fear with each cold gust of wind around the corner.

And yet, somehow,  it is only life. I've made it through too many winters to think I will not survive this one, too. Living a life does not mean evading the dark entirely. It means walking in it, and always remembering to walk yourself out.

Sera

November. A day so beautiful it assaulted the senses, all crinkly leaves drifting slowly to the ground, crisp wind and warm sunshine, the river beaming in its swell. The dead cat still lies on the rocks; I learn a lesson and let it lie. There's was a lightness in my step for the miles under my feet, there's a quiet void around me. I spent the afternoon scrubbing the apartment, I know the routine. Quiet doesn't last forever so you'd best breathe while you can. Everything is going to be okay drifts past your eyelids like a news ticker: you stow it away for future reference, would like to send it across the ether. We take the air conditioning units out of the window, just as the heat comes on in the riser. Second avenue is quieted. My room smells like dust and winter.

The first few days I have to be careful even in my sleep,
so I don't roll over and burn myself.