Comme Un Jour

"Let's go to the Met," says the man in a sing-songy sarcasm, "and lick all the banisters." His partner across the table is not amused, and continues reading the pandemic news out loud. I know I was away, but the second I land my feet are firmly planted again on these streets. The tired swaying of the A train late at night, the constant drive forward in even the neighborhood preschoolers; I woke in jetlag at three a.m. and remarked how even New York City sleeps sometimes. How quiet, how soothing. Two days ago we sat in a crammed bar like we had never lived apart and now here I am on my own again, with only concrete for company. It's a strange and wondrous life, isn't it.

The man returns from speaking with the waiter to divulge that it's his last day tomorrow -- "he's really a photographer" -- and lands a stitch in my side. Everything changes. (Like maybe you have to start paying for your coffee now.) The point is you remain.

The point is we still have the rest of our lives ahead of us. It'll gladly be wondrous, if you let it.

Stockholm Södra

I make it as far as the commuter train platform before the Everything catches up with me. All these lives, all this distance, how the world is one but a thousand and how once you've been torn into too many pieces you never can be put back together again. I wonder if there was a time when I felt whole, but the question seems irrelevant now, what does it matter? I stand in tatters on train platforms, crying silent tears into ancient pillars underneath an island where I once lived and think only how in New York they let you cry in public without feeling bad and I think everyone deserves a place like that. I am homeless forever, but isn't it like losing a limb, losing a love, eventually you have to go on because what other option is there, eventually you have to build yourself a life on top of your own ashes and nobody else can do it for you. The pain of separation only lies in too much love, the pain that keeps you constantly on the move only tears you apart because you were given more than your share of blessings, you lucky, lucky girl. How dare you cry on train platforms, how dare you ask the Universe for anything other than exactly this which you have been given, the chance to keep the whole world in your pocket, as they keep you in their hearts. I am homeless forever.

But if that is all, maybe now you dry your tears.
If that is all, maybe now you step up on the ashes and get to work.

But Soft

It sinks in slowly, but firmly.

You are not at home here, but this may still be your home.
You do not belong here,  this may still belong to you.

You spend a lifetime looking for home. Maybe that is not the question, after all.

the High Road

The author speaks of meditative states of being, of letting Nature take over your train of thought and of how if you’re bored enough, eventually you will find your way. You think of your parents, honeymooning on Scottish mores and naming their firstborn after the endless fields of heather, and how the firstborn grew up to throw a second wedding when the first wasn’t eventful enough. You think maybe we’re wrong to pave every last inch and maybe there is something beyond New York.

I sat in their kitchen late into the night, long after the baby in my arms had been moved to his bed, and for a second I remembered what it was like: family, friendship the kind that lasts forever, knowing people to the ends of the earth. We spoke of that first party in the pasta factory, sitting in a Brooklyn window and seeing the whole world spread out before us, how suddenly the years add up and one day our children will speak of us as stories, as dreams.

I want you to know we loved you as best we could. I want you to remember we were only human. The world spun without us, without you, there is no magic.

There is
nothing
but.

Lag

Another night wide awake, the jet lag only gets you for a few hours when everything else is quiet. The children squealed at your arrival, they grow every time you turn around but everything else looks the same, it is a comfort. We got married in New York over New Years, they giggle, the whole thing was a surprise. You haven’t words anymore, everyone is living their miracles but none of them move you. Is this what getting older is like?

I rode the bus across the islands today, early afternoon but still the sun set across the archipelago and bathed the old town in fire. We crossed the bridge, saw the tip of the star On the horizon and I thought it is a miracle we live at all, and that was enough. For hours this morning I sat with a baby sleeping in my arms and I wanted to teach him everything, but what is there to teach?

Life is a miracle, your life is a miracle, if you find a home hold onto it tight so you don’t fall away, and if when you are lost and rambling you find someone who is a comfort, that is the answer you were looking for. We are all lost and rambling to begin with.

And nothing remains lost forever.

Islands

Wake early, how strange it is to know everything and nothing all at once. The streets are familiar, the color of the people and the lilt of the language. I remember the sound of the subway, the absence of rats, the scowls on strangers' faces and the uniform design of their ways. I forget the way midday sunlight feels like morning and the fall of your crest as dusk returns before even you realized it was day. I forget how dark the city at night, and quiet, moderation at every turn, how sensible the zeitgeist.

I forget how when I set foot in this land I don't know how to live a whole life without it.

In the late afternoon, I rode the bus across the water, a small island waiting in silence, anticipation. Would you like to hold him? she says but we both know I have never not wanted to hold him. We loved you before you were born, I whisper as he sleeps in the nook of my neck, and I'll love you long after I'm gone. I looked around at what they'd built from so many ashes, breathed in the sad, warm, joyous fear of a whole life and thought alright then. I was wildly happy once, you know, but I am all better now. You cannot break me when my bones are all fractured.

They simply wave in the wind
and endure.

Unforgiven

Slanted sunlight across the terminal, your jetlagged and sleep addled brain reads sunrise into the soft tones and you have time to think how maybe your fear of the dark is exaggerated. But your clock adjusts to local time and sees the low hanging sun in a new light when it turns to midday. This is the North.

Clean lines in the terminal, your bones settle in clean design and long slender bodies; this is how you were made. Everything is made to look light, everything is only trying to endure the unlivable. I sit next to a man on the plane who prepares to move back to America, after 27 years away. Then one day I just felt like it was time to go back. It was time to go home. He had bought a house down the road from where he grew up. I guess it's just in you, he said, and I had no idea what he meant.

Because this light is in me, this perpetually dying, agonizing winter light sits in me and still I do not belong in it. Because in the far west there is a mountain range that can breathe in my lungs but I can never live at its foot again. Instead my soul calls home a dirty, noisy, ridiculous island at the center of the world, and my bones have cracked to fit its mold.

It is no wonder, I know, that airports are so comforting.
For a short moment, you can make believe, that you are only on your way home.
For a short moment, you can make believe,
that you have one.

the Luckiest II

Holiday Mondays, the office is quiet. There is chaos at home and what a gift to have somewhere to escape, you think, before tornados penetrate the windowless room and leave you in tatters again. I heard a sad song this morning and it nearly broke me, sometimes the ice gets so thin even after months of your dancing on it without a crack. I'm alright, you know I'm alright, I have never taken breaths this deep in midwinter so I must be doing something right, but lord if the broken pieces aren't still sharp in places.

The temperatures plummeted this weekend, but the days are still sunny, still beaming in their clear air and if you sang a song now they'd hear it across the ocean. Perhaps that is the lesson: for every pain there is a joy. For every sharp edge, there will one day be a caress so sweet you forgot you ever bled to begin with.

While You Were Sleeping

Slowly, the disease ebbs out. You stretch your muscles and remember again what lightness it is just to breathe with ease. I spend my mornings staring into the light therapy lamp, a new addiction I am not interested in weaning myself off. The gift of aging is learning which battles to choose. The new year barrels ahead, and we're already a step behind. But winter twilight was breathtaking last night, twinkling across glass buildings and singing down the avenues.

As long as we get there, we get there.

That may be the kindest wisdom yet.

for the Soul

I'm coming over, he writes from the subway platform. You need to eat. My head swims, every exertion of energy backfires and I sit panting on the couch, or the bed, or the floor. My pale winter skin becomes translucent, my muscles ache, and yet how reluctantly I accept, nodding quietly at the phone like it could explain the intricacies of my tangled heart. Do better, a voice in the back of my cotton balled head repeats. Say yes please.

There's a certain calm in surrender. Like once you've admitted defeat you can relax, but no sooner. It's easy to seem like you know what you're doing.

It's so much harder admitting you've miles yet to go.

Viral

Illness appears suddenly on the inside of your skin. It happens so quickly you barely recognize it in the dizziness when you stand. I tried to run along the river, long steps in cool air but when I stopped for air there was no room left in my lungs. The hours whiled away.

The greatest grace of disease is that it renders us too tired to think of how useless we are with all this time.

Thought

Monday nights at the bar, your regular bartender is still missing but the other faces are growing familiar and they greet you with a knowing nod. The playlist skews British 90s and your work twists under its influence. The couple next to you are on an early date; he flexes name and privilege all over the table and you think of how many times you’ve indulged self-absorbed men to keep inflating their own selves while you’ve made plans for the second you leave him on a street corner. Today I stared into the light therapy lamp well into the afternoon, but if it works I am not one to jump ship early.

You may have noticed, I don’t even jump ship late.

The book unveils itself in the candle light, a few passages riding across your tongue like a dream but the rest struggling to pass even into your conscious. I leapt, at some point, I leapt into the unknown and I put all my Faith in a miracle at the bottom but I’ve been falling for an awful long time and miracles are becoming hard to come by in this life.

But I’m still collecting pennies. And some day soon I will cash then all in.
Some day soon I will bet all my coins on
this
landing.

Humm

For hours, there was nothing but night: quiet, still night and a cool breeze settling across the avenue, a few scattered cars, silence. I lay awake in the dark, truths wrapped around me like weighted blankets asking what will you do with us? But I don't have the answer. All I can offer is my sleeplessness. All I can offer is truth spoken in these quiet spaces where it can't be heard, I can't let it be heard, I can't stand to hear it. Do you see how January has been kind, thus far? How I breathe, how I somehow find it in my muscle memory to smile? I cannot risk losing all that to truth, don't ask it of me. The weekend was so sunny, maybe that's why I couldn't sleep, maybe I'm giving the demons credit that doesn't belong to them, maybe I'm just happy. I don't need to run anymore, and that's new to me.

I'm not running anymore.

I think that means anything is possible.

and Inhale

The temperatures soar. For a brief moment, the city explodes in incredulous delirium. No one can believe their luck. Outdoor cafes burst forth like mushrooms after a rain storm, pale skin peeled from underneath confused outerwear. I spend my days navigating streets based on where the sunlight will hit, how I can walk staring straight into it. The path along the river is overrun by throngs of fair-weather friends, but how can you be mad? He speaks of the body and it reminds you of yours: a warm blood begins to course within it, a hunger reminds itself. He says if I would have chased you, you would have run away and it's been too many years for the truth to matter even when the answer sits like a quiet peace in your rib cage. There's a truth at the base of your spine that refuses to be moved, and you have stopped trying. The blood paces in, and out, at will, pinking your cheeks and continuing on its way. Just because it makes sense doesn't mean you should do it.

Just because you know better doesn't mean you're not right to try.

Duplicate

Muscles ache from newfound use, a delicious pain announcing itself in each step, each turn. I looked out the Midtown window, a view full of water towers and freezing sunlight, and I fell in love all over again, as I always do. How many years, New York, will you cause my heart to flutter thus? It makes me believe in forevers, despite myself.

I try the moves again, stretch my limbs and feel my body mold itself to new futures. Winter is long and endless on paper, yes.

But maybe sometimes you can let yourself go off script.

Medi(t)ate

It’s getting lighter, she writes from an afternoon trek across her new campus, I can feel it. You send out tendrils of your own, try to smell it on the wind, but you know all the worst is yet to come and the storm hasn't even taken a deep breath yet. You pace in racing heart rates but know you signed up for this. You’re supposed to be able to bear it.

On the uptown train, thick with rush hour bodies, I read a book so tragic it mauled at my insides. Perhaps this is not the time to be reminded how bleak a life can be, you think to yourself, but are we really allowed to turn a blind eye? My Monday bar remains, attempts to lull me back into Faith.

It’s an uphill climb. But damn if I ain’t putting one foot in front of the other.

Make Believe

Old music sifts into your conscious, memories of sleeping on tour buses, on crying in embraces that you thought would last forever but which crumbled shortly after. As much as you’ve ached in this life, have you not burned more? Have you not raced into the night in a giggle? I think when the time comes to tally, the answer will be yes. I hold on to that idea, like my best defense against January, whenever it decides to strike. You’re too happy, you hear yourself whisper. Winter hasn’t even begun to dig its claws in. 

The bar is calm when you arrive, late afternoon quiet, but a din builds while you sink into the manuscript at your fingertips. There’s a comfort in routine, too. The thing about tour buses is there’s routine in rolling stones, too. There’s predictability in madness, calm in fire. A new year arrives.

You recognize yourself, all the same.

Jan

(there is life yet in you
remember that)

Land

At last, you begin to catch up with yourself. See your reflection along the river and remember the sound of your shoes against the pavement. Sleep for hours, days, strange dreamed sleeps and spend hours awake before dawn for no apparent reason. Everything aches, except you feel untouchable, what a strange way to barrage into a new year, you find you do not mind it. She writes from across the ocean and all I can reply is I'm happy. It is simple, when it is.

I bought a light therapy lamp at last, sit staring straight into it in the mornings, singing sighs of relief with every breath. January sits like a canonball at the very edge of the precipice, as though still unsure which direction to go, but a weapon of destruction when it does.

Strap yourself in. There's nothing to do but follow.

Jan 2

If in in the end
You always wake up with
Yourself

Hadn’t you best like that person
As is
After all?

Blank

And then, how suddenly it arrives. You close your eyes briefly, watch your breath build in your body and when you open them again everything is new. The streets dance, your heart too. Everything is impossible until it is not; everything is possible until proven otherwise. A new year spreads out before you, clean, hopeful, already better than the last. You don’t believe in fairytales but damned if you don’t believe in fairies; who else would be whispering this magic to you? And what could you possibly lose by listening?

I built this life, brick by brick, I built this home.

It’s about time I lived in it.

Happy New Year.