Ignite

The night of bonfires appears, an anniversary arrives: can you believe it is May again? Can you believe I have lived here for five years when I never lived anywhere for very long at all? I know there was a time when I was shifty, unreliable, easy to scare but cloaked in alluring mystery and self-defense, how exciting. I am ordinary now, but real.

I'm not sure that's working out any better.

They all react in shock and surprise, but I thought it was clear I was bound for change, I thought it would be insignificant. I change all the time, have you not been paying attention?

The gale made planes land sideways at LaGuardia today. I watched them float low across Manhattan as they made their way down. If monsters in the sky can make it through a storm, cannot I?

Sometimes you just have to let go, first.

Positively

I think about not coming back, she writes from her Midwestern refuge in a parental guest room. I don't know what there is to come back to.

I walk through the West Village early in the morning, Washington Square park abandoned in the cold, gray morning and West Fourth Street hibernating under a blanket of quiet. If the neighborhood is a movie set, shooting has wrapped and only a few PAs remain to walk the proverbial dogs. I take my time looking into crooked courtyards, hypothesize over building years and what the neighborhood might have looked like when this house was new or that. I take deep breaths and do not hurry, tell the Universe I'm out here looking for answers, tell the air it's almost May and in May I itch to move, what will it be this time? They say make no drastic changes in a crisis but I would wager the opposite be wiser. Did we not build the word itself by combining to separate, choose, decide and forming nouns of action or process? Did we not create the language after the tidal wave, did we not attempt to make human that which appeared bigger than us? The drastic change is already here; ride the wave and you will not drown. Enjoy the ride and you need not fear.

This city is reduced now to the size my feet can cover in a day.

Oh, but it is immense.

Changes

The empty corner with the darkened restaurant alters to fit its surroundings. One morning when I wake, a drug sale goes down like a farce in the little nook by the back entrance, the buyer scattering precious goods in the wind. Another day, a young man washes his needle in a bottle of Poland Spring before sinking it into his brown skin. Passersby might worry, if there were any. I dream about the young pandhandler with the curly hair, that I take him home, that he turns out to be a dancer when encouraged. Normally he spends the day yelling profanities.

My dreams are getting weirder.

Last night, I walked home from Brooklyn at twilight, as we anxiously parroted admonishing fairytales about being out past dark. I want you to get home before nightfall. When I reached the middle of the Manhattan Bridge, the island sparkled and glittered in the last of the orange glow, again, again a gift and it never fails to remind me. The bridge was empty, I had the moment all to myself, and I think that is the greatest treasure in all of this. Sweeping out of it at Canal street, I walked up the middle of the Bowery for blocks as the city grew dark, and ominous. I know I should feel uneasy, know I should worry about safety and the missing streetlights, but this city has seen me home on so many late night returns, has ushered me safely to my front doors, has tucked me in and helped me to sleep even when I was thousands of miles away, this city has spent 14 years giving me reason to trust it, so when the lights go down and the people trickle out I do not fear.

I walk across the Manhattan Bridge singing.

I stand in the middle of the Bowery, and smile.

What Would Be My Reward?

And at last there is a break in the dreary forecast. Sunlight streams in through my early morning windows, thaws the quiet city block, warms the homeless collective on the corner. The river teems with people, how averse this disease has taught us to be to one another, how uncomfortable the presence of life. The newspaper tries to explain it interviewing survivors of war torn cities, how long it takes to forget the sniper heavy streets, the idea that life is now and maybe never else. Somehow we are being collectively traumatized, slowly turned over a spit with the heat turned up and we didn't realize when we stepped on and strapped in that we were settling in for permanent scarring.

In my home country, they are building the bonfires, ready to burn out the ends of winter and sing in the coming of spring. But it's only weather. It's only the little ember that carries us through months of darkness, ready to spark into life at the drop of a match, at the say the word and we may bloom again. It's only hope.

Don't worry so much about the scars, my dear, they are no more your life than the rest. We are born to suffer.

But no more than we are to thrive.

Flyktsoda

I once read that I should write something worth reading
or I should do something worth writing about

But did you know you are always worth writing about?
Did you remember that your life being a life at all is a miracle enough on its own to be immortalized in ink, that your spirit is a thousand stories worth telling, that every god damn one of you is the main character in a tale more intriguing than any library may hold?

Because I did.

I held the fragments of your stories, held the snippets and clues as I pulled them from your messy hair and the crinkle by your eye when you smiled, I heard the crescendo in your hook and wanted more, more, more, whatever story you would tattoo across your eyelids I would wait with bated breath for the sequel, I haven't blinked since you were born into my life.

A wedding gets canceled across the ocean. I was trying to condense a thousand stories into piano ballads; I've been trying to tell you my entire heart in a novella, it will not be done. You can never know anyone as completely as you want, she writes, closing the book after 40 years of reading.

But that’s okay, love is better.

Melody

The days melt into one another, the weekends appear like strange anomalies of the same lifestyle, only amended. Unemployment itches. When one means to be a writer, there is no such thing as rest, and yet in crisis how there is competition for the crown. He writes stories so evolved I want only to spend my days trying to compare, this is a gift. The mess piles up around me.

But there is a small voice, in the back of my head, steadily speaking through the weeks. Most days, the streets are too loud, the calendar too noisy, and it's hard to hear it, to not mistake it for an annoying vibration. But in the silence of a world asleep, its quiet cadence becomes clearer, the words forming against your bated breath.

You asked the Universe for a change. You'd do best to listen, when it comes.

Winding

All these ups and down, our little isolated dinghies on the waves, drifting around and tossed by wily seas, and when we reach for each other we are swept out by swift tides, forced to face the swell alone. The rain sweeps in, how cold April this year and yesterday I swear I saw snow falling, but it makes the blooms last longer. I wrap myself in February layers, run along the deserted river, wonder at the city around my skin. A restauranteur around the block writes a eulogy for a whole life, and I cry again. I cry every day now, it's an anodyne, I'm grateful for it.

An old friend speaks of Los Angeles like a ghost town, like it's dead in the water. We describe street scenes, turn our cameras to face our windows. Tomorrow it'll be so hot, she says, but they closed the beach. Where I came from, nature isn't ours to close, but who am I to argue in a pandemic. The rain eases slightly. I moved here for the culture, and what would I find here in its stead? I'm grateful I moved here for the buildings, for the soft curves of bridges, for spirits that are long since dead and buried. They are still here.

After we hang up, I send her a video of the car that passes each night, playing New York, New York so loud it reverberates against the brick tenements of the Lower East. Tell her New York isn't worried. New York outlives us all, and it will outlive this. 

Yes, she writes from her dinghy. New York is a struggle, but it is worth it. We sail on into the night, but the sleep is sweeter, again. 

is Through

I wake early, I have an alarm still but these days I seem to always wake up before it rings, a strange scene I didn't expect. The alarm brings a sense of normalcy into the start of my day. Ten years ago I would have loved the excuse not to have one. I rise before the others, a few hours of quiet before everything wakes, and I can sit in quiet contemplation with myself, with this strange scene of a city, with potential. Once the work starts, I feel tired, try to find every excuse not to tackle a tricky chapter that has haunted me all week. Just do it, my brain yells, but my body moves and sways and slips through its fingers.

This is how I know I am back.

I read another article, write another note, meditate into the waking avenue (doesn't it look busier than before? I don't know that we will remember what the empty streets were truly like, when this is over), procrastinate myself into mandalic patterns around the room. In the back of my head, the chapter paces through my subconscious, aches to work itself out, cries at the lack of attention.

When at last I am out of excuses, the words come to me easily, like a stream, like a poem already written, and that's the thing. I was here all along.

Even in the depths, I am always writing my way out.

Slow

(But every now and then the sun rises,
you wake breathing,
and though nothing is okay,
you are,
and when that's as good a bar as any,
meeting it is
just fine.)

Re:Volution

Slowly, I remember how to smile, how to breathe in a rhythm and to care about brushing my teeth again. I put away the dirty clothes off the floor. Manage to look people in the eye, although how few eyes we have at our disposal now. We turn to the arts, but how cruel to lean on a shoulder which cannot count on us in return. Everybody bleeds. 

I walked uptown yesterday, to look at the spectacle. How quiet the neighborhood, a soft sweep of traffic punctuated by birdsong and nothing else. The grass in Bryant Park has never been so green, the majesty of Grand Central Station never so empty. I walked around the ice rink at Rockefeller Center and lost my breath in the expanse of space. I always fantasized the city to be mine and only mine, and what a grotesque way to have your dreams come true. But a gift is still a gift, if you'll have it. New York whispered to me at every empty crossing, winked in cherry blossoms along Park Avenue, and showed off its buildings like I'd never really seen them before, like we'd never been this naked in front of each other, until today.

Here I am, I whispered to the city in the middle of 5th Avenue, void of even a single yellow cab for blocks. Stripped of every defense I've built up, reduced to my very core, and will you still have me? Fourteen years ago, I stepped onto this island, and I didn't know what it was to love then, but I do now. For better and for worse, is a gift,

if you'll let it.

Sow

The computer plays music from earlier in the year. It seems impossible that this was mere months ago, does it not feel a lifetime? But then, a few days ago you stood with your neck bowing into the noose, does that not feel miles away, too? You come out of it like a food poisoning: your head feels lighter, but any brazen food across your lips has the potential to send you tumbling back to the bathroom floor. You do not recognize your body, do not recognize the weary, pale being avoiding your eyes in the mirror. You know you'll have to deal with that eventually. We'll all have plenty to deal with, better start your to do lists.

You cannot hide from the great sadnesses of life,
simply because you're being reminded of how you miss the joys.

Mask

You wake up nervous. Check to see if it's easy to breathe, look around you and don't trust the lightness, know better than to lean on it. You left a candle lit last night, planning to just let it burn out but here it is, still flickering. It smells like a body you once loved, but memory is so fickle, perhaps that's not quite how it went. I don't remember the last time I put on clothes.

Saunter into the kitchen: you long for morning coffee as early as the afternoon before, but this time it's hard to get any across your lips. If you open your mouth to let it in, you may let something else out; your body is a brick that can turn into a flood. He says I think you need a hug, but the things I need are a chasm, a lifetime of compensation has yet to fill it. Spend a lifetime trying to convince yourself that this shiny new person that you conconted in your limbs, that you sewed onto your skin, can be real, when all it takes is one look in the mirror to recognize the aberration as who you truly are. As of today we are required by law to wear masks in the street, to cover our faces to protect those around us, how's that for a cruel joke. I spent so many years trying to take the other one off.

Outside, it rains. It rains, and it rains, and it rains, she asks you to come by and sit on her stoop, but you have nothing left to offer, you cannot carry another's burden when drowning in your own, the weather report says it cannot rain forever, the weather report says just hold on, it will pass. I sit in the window with a racing heart and a frozen lung. It'll pass.

One day you will be dead,
and none of this will matter.

It'll pass.

and Fall

Ah yes, how comfortable to sink into something so familiar to your muscles. How easy to remember, even after all this time, what it is to bury oneself in despair, to wrap one's skin in mud until no pore remains that knows how to breathe. How easy it is to turn the air into silence, twenty years of work unraveled by a minor global trauma. You look around for evidence of your toolbox, claw at your skin for the tricks up your sleeve but they elude you. Where is your self-righteousness now?

The hours pass. Eventually you can sleep. The days pass, a life passes, you know there is something you should be doing, you know there are four-leaf clovers waiting outside the confines of your black box it's just, for now, let me sleep, I promise I'll get back up eventually, this is only a minor slip and I'm so tired.

The bottom's not so bad
when it feels like home.

Tumble

How close they are, joy and despair, how fine the line that separates their sides. One day you are soaring, staring at spring blossoms, covering miles upon miles under your feet and dreaming life into existence, and the next you lie stranded in the muck, unable to move forward but just as loath to remain. Once upon a time you were writing a story, once upon a time you were falling in love and growing up but it seems now you are just stuck in the mire, walking in circles without moving your feet, now it seems you have lost your faith, and there doesn't seem to be much of a point to any of it.

When you were young, the madness crackled through your bones. Now it seems your race may not survive your generation.

It's no wonder we ask favors of the Universe. We need miracles, where there aren't even seeds.

Queue

Forty-five minutes the line wraps around the block, New Yorkers are weary with custom, it never takes long. Weave through the grocery store, this only connection to the world as you knew it before, in a daze. The list is long, as the absence has been: they are still out of flour but you find vitamins, and pears, how you've longed. The woman on the screen speaks of dreaming a life into existence. Three hundred virtual faces stare back at her, and you wonder what sort of life they are dreaming of. You wonder the same of yourself. The lilacs in the community garden bloom, and every time I come back from the river, I stop, pull down the mask from my mask, and smell them, take deep, hungry gulps of air. I think it's a metaphor, but it doesn't have to be.

The simple pleasures were always pleasures. We got confused in the noise. The lesson is here, when we are ready.

Workshop

It's going to feel like "Okay I can write words, I don't know if they're good words, but they are words," he says, as your attention span comes and goes into his virtual room. Our time is meant to be spent bettering ourselves now, learning the skills and realizing ourselves, but aren't we also trying to remember to breathe? It's hard to be told to be superhuman when it turns out we are all regular mortals in the end. You stare into the early afternoon sunshine, think about budding trees and the itch in your blood, reminscent of every April classroom in which you've ever sat, how the longing also holds a place in your heart, how lack is not without merit.

We're racking up piles of longing in our heart now. One day we'll look back on them and smile.

It's worth getting that started now.

And Know the Place

You'd be lying if you said the hangover wasn't still dragging itself across your brow. A severe rain storm pulls through, knocks out powerlines and fills shoes with pools of cold April water, if any shoes were out to begin with (they mostly are not). She says he begins each day listening to his mind, as though our brains were merely transistor radios, and perhaps they are. He calls his 'Becky'. I spent a moment listening to mine, it said nothing new, of course, it said only the same truths I've sat with all these years. It spoke of a longing emptiness, of untouched skin, it spoke of quiet smiles on Sunday mornings and dreamy fires under the soles of your feet. It waxed on about poetry, about stillness, about how if you had the choice, your life wouldn't look much different and still it is a life based on aching for what is not yours. It said you never wanted to leave New York and here you are, a mouth full of money, here you are. I tell him when all this is over, I want to get in a car and just drive away. But it goes without saying that I want to come back.

There was a time when I ran, and ran, and ran. There was a time when I only opened doors if I knew I could escape through another. There was a time when I asked people to hold on to me and then set their bridges aflame when they did. I don't ask anyone to hold on anymore.

I stand firm all on my own.

(And it hurts too much when they don't.)

Precipitate

I'm a terrible liar. I suppose that's a good quality. I suppose this quarantine reduces us to our most basic tenets, strips our DNA of its fuzz and displays us how we truly are. I am nothing if I cannot bring you joy. I called my mother halfway across the bridge, these walks along bridges such a metaphor in a strange time when we think we can go nowhere but actually our reach spans across the ocean if only we want it. I tell my mother I am happy, and in that silent moment I hear all her pieces line up and rest. I am overcome with gratitude, but I do not tell her that.

We walked past the old pasta factory yesterday, mild sunny Sunday afternoon like nothing was different except they let you take your drinks to go (so we did). The greatest luxury now, is a conversation that doesn't revolve around how the world is in shatters: a short anecdote on the sunny side of Grand Street about 8th grade art, a delightful squeal in the park near Union Pool about the simple pleasure of a good chicken sandwich, a short sweet breath of sparkling river by a house where you think one day you might like to live.

Things aren't so bad, you know. They are different, and scary, and the future looks painfully grim, even at a distance. But you have sunshine, you have people whom you would follow across the rivers, you have New York, which beats in you with magic even when it is brought to its knees. Better things will come out of this.

Everything burns. It's what comes out of the ashes that matters.

Good Friday

You sleep a long sleep, dreams winding in and out of each other, how simply permission to touch another human being can force its way into your subconscious wishes, we stood there a long time just holding onto each other and that was the whole dream. When I wake, sunlight streams in through the window and for a moment, everything feels possible. My lungs heave, they crackle and spit little embers into my outbreath, I know - I know - this is not good, we all read the news, but oh how the pain in my muscles overrides the fear. How an hour of steady paces underneath spring blooms erase dark clouds from my brow, and I am yet again invincible.

But the new world creeps in under your sealed doorway, under the protections you've set up for yourself, it reminds you that perhaps you'd like a chance at something new, that perhaps when the smoke has cleared, you do not want to be who you were before this whole thing swept in.

So here's your chance: the whole goddamn world is on pause, the whole goddamn world is holding its breath and giving you just the space and silence you've always been asking for through the rush of things. Here it is, here you are, this is as good as it's going to get.

Who do you intend to be,
when the system comes back online?

My Mind

The show is set in a glamorous 1960s that you never would have had access to anyway. It still makes you want to drink bourbon all day and resume your smoking habit. The rain outside turns to spring sun under your feet, but the hail washed so many petals off their branches. This is always the cruelty of April storms.

Still, you've almost made it through the deepest week, have almost stretched your strengths as far as they'll go, your pantry is empty but your steps along the river are steady, your breaths are full. We fall off the rails sometimes, but it's never too late to step back on.

No matter how you stumble, those cherry trees will always bloom, the days will continue to stretch into the evening, take over the long dark night, no matter how you fail, there will always be a chance for you to win again.

Had It Coming

I wake at four from how cold the wind sweeping across me. Pull the poetry book out of the window, the rain and years have worn it down, it won't last the generation but how reliable it has been all these years. I bought it in that bookstore, on the 3rd floor, sat on the carpet in the back thumbing through pages like presents before finally buying it and I've carried it with me everywhere since.

Anyway the point is I fell back asleep, dreamed strange dreams of quarantine life, woke with a dry throat but a glad heart, the point is we are still alive to see another day and sometimes that's all we can ask.

Anyway,
the point is,
I miss you.

Rise

But the crick in your lung returns. Is now the time to scour your apartment for those sedatives you took from your grandmother's closet after her body no longer lived there? Or would a nap suffice? Your muscles scream for more time along the river, to stretch and exert and tired themselves out isntead of your mind, but the little fire in your throat says maybe best not. You wonder what it feels like to die alone.

The ginkgos double in size. So do you, but that's less welcome. Every creative listserv with your name on it yells about what you could be writing now, the stories you could tell. The typewriter on the windowsill is dusty. Everything is dusty. You try to remember what it's like to fall in love, to be wrapped up in a typhoon that holds you upside down and shakes you and still you do not want to be let down: you cannot now even imagine. Everyone outside the window is wrapped in a mask now, or their obvious lack of access to one. We've used the word strange so many times to describe the situation that it's lost its meaning. Strange is the new normal. Maybe the room is just running out of air.

Better the room than your lungs.

You put on your combat gear. Decide to fight another day.

Spirit in the Sky

Your dad's birthday passes uneventfully. He tests negative despite the persistent cough: we have all become experts at symptoms, yet the disease is steps ahead of us, morphing with each leap and confounding us with its secret menu. He celebrates with a glass of wine and falling asleep before the movie has even started. When this is all over, we whisper into the virtual void, we'll get in a car and just drive. The ginkgos on Second Avenue are beside themselves in sunlight and peace, they titter and gossip among themselves and burst like little green popcorn on spindly branches; the crab apples around the projects dare you to believe they weren't painted from a dream.

Coming out of illness, out of fear, is like being given your life all over again. When I remembered what it was like to breathe in simple gratitude at the world, I cried and laughed all at once, and it seemed apt. We are in the thick of it, now, but I'm back on the shore, I feel the earth steady underneath my feet. When all this is over, I said into the sunlight, I'll be right here, and that is fine just on its own.

2:34 a.m.

I think I'm already awake when the phone whirs, but in retrospect it must have been what woke me. Stumbling in the middle of the night can feel so much like falling into the depths of the abyss, when if only it was a little bit lighter, you'd find your footing again. Distance is cruel when we need its opposite, freedom burns when we need to be held. When my mother was my age, she had already lost a parent, she was carrying a sprawled family on her back and paying the bills with pennies she stretched into dollar bills, I model my self-reliance on her impossible fortitude, but we are not creatures made to live without touch, it breaks us when we forget it could. The street was so empty outside, a cold rain washing over the avenue, I tried to remember how to still a racing heart but it's harder with rivers in the way, it's harder with global pandemics sweeping over our brows, the best way I know how to do it is by way of fingertips and fingertips have been taken out of commission lately.

After he hangs up and falls asleep, I lie staring into the early morning for a while, trying to set the clocks right in my mind. Monday again, another week begins. They say this one may be the worst of it. You tell everyone else to be patient with and kind to themselves, but you think you are better than to stumble now. How we are reduced to our cores, we see ourselves without the gloss and sometimes it is a hard pill to swallow. As you drift off again, you turn off your alarm, allow yourself a reprieve. The weather forecast says Monday will be warm, and sunny, says the spring will sweep through your ghost town whether anyone is there for it or not, and what a relief it is, that some good things will come, whether or not you make them. That some good things will sweep through you, and all you have to do is be there when they do.

Your Tone

Everything is hard, now, confusing and out of our control.

But we walked along the river today, and the cherry trees are in full bloom, and we each found a four-leaf clover in the grass, and the magnolia trees stretched along the houses, and the breeze off the East River was mild, the water glittering in blissful oblivion, and do you know for a moment, my lungs were full of air, my cheeks were full of smiles, for a short moment we sat there in the sunshine and it was like all of it was easy.

And like control was never something we wanted to begin with.

Tenebrae

I remember it now as a rush to finish the whole thing, to read all the signs before time ran out. When the dust had settled, all that remained was the knowledge that time would run out no matter what I did, that time had actually already run out and we were only pretending otherwise. If I had known then what I knew after, would I have cut my losses early, before the cherries even bloomed? Would I have spent the spring crying into their petals and healing into their sunshine, instead of willing them to promise a future that had already been extinguished? It is April, now, cruel in its beauty, in its invitations, how many springs will be broken underneath me, will be torn from my longing ache, you know April always made me look at apartment listings and tickets to the ends of the earth but none of that is possible now and I think it's just as well.

I am happy here, now, it's not as innocent, not a blissful joy like it was when I thought I had found the answers and that they lay in the way you mumbled my name into the night, but it is reliable. I can read books without looking for clues, without superstitiously fearing that I'll break the future by stepping on cracks, I know the water's gone under the bridge a thousand times and I haven't drowned. I've learned I can swim.

It's just, I used to think I could fly.

so Go If You're Able

The rest does wonders, the chicken soup like a cliche with purpose. You wake in the late afternoon with a spring waiting in your steps, although the park finds you wishing for more breath in your lungs. Late afternoon revelers space out along the benches; I stand in a friend's front yard looking in through their windows: we make ourselves heard via phone. The internet is full of ingenuinty and creative entertainment. What on earth did they do go get through the Spanish flu? she says, but the truth is your experience is based on what you expect. You cannot miss a meme if they do not exist.

Still, you cannot help but admonish your inactivity. Should you not be creating all the wonders that have been waiting for your time? Should you not, now, have absolute access to the Universe and make something of it? Are you not, at last, out of excuses?

You begin to think that the churning of your chest is not so much a death rattle, as a capitulation to your own shortcomings. That may be worse.

Fools

The sun returns like a gift, your heavy chest drinks it in like long awaited medicine. Little embers continue to prick you when you breathe but then so does anxiety, it's too hard to know which diseases are of your own making. We stare at each other across screens but can offer little comfort, what a brave new world we are navigating, closing the doors to the storm outside but trying our best to experience as much of it as possible from behind the plexiglass. You do not tell your parents how your body feels. The cherries are in bloom along the river.

Surely there must be something at the other end of this that can offer us some meaning, some purpose? Surely we must come out of this a people changed, a newfound appreciation for another's warm skin, for streets alive? One bright morning two airplanes flew into very tall buildings and the city had never been more determined to live than in the devastation that came after. Surely we must want something more than just  a return to whatever came before?

I don't know now what I'm hoping. I'm so tired, just today, just let me lie down for a bit, let me quell this storm in my chest, I'll come back to you shortly, it's just today, this day, it's making fools of us all.