Offer

(Careful what you wish for. 

When it lands on your doorstep you have to let it in.)

Skin and Bones

(I condensed my being into a sheet of paper for you, just one sheet of paper to tell you all the stories inside this Universe, what impossible feats we expect of people just for a moment's chance at a spark, just a spark's chance at a lifetime. I know you are not far away, I know New York City is a tiny maze in the grand scheme of infinity, that we saw the same full moon last night and that still somehow the distance is endless. I drove across the country to save my own life but I am here now. I would do the same for you, if you'd let me.)

Xìng fú

Wake early, determined. 

Barrel into a day, a week, a month, lead with grit, ignore your knees when they tremble. The sun breaks out, late summer sunlight and you feel happy and sad all at once. He comes to see how you are doing but does not ask, and so you do not say. The dances get stranger with age, I take a long run along the river (it gets dark so early now, it's hard to see your steps, the strangers you meet) and land back at the footbridge in a worn pile but it's better than hearing yourself think. The apartment across the street is still empty. Fall into bed exhausted. One day down, countless to go. The coffee grows tepid if you do not drink it. 

It's me. I'm the coffee. 

But you knew that.

is Now

It gets harder and harder, standing up again after being beaten down. The protests still make their way around the city, roaming bands of justice. The honeylocusts sprout frosted tips, little flashes of yellow dotting their crowns while the humidity still swelters. Almost October, you whisper to yourself and try not to hear it, buried under blankets and unchecked to-do lists and failure. Your roommate packs up her room, the dog paces nervously and you miss her already. But you miss very few things when they are actually gone. 

(There are some notable exceptions.)

I spent the morning writing, in that delicious way Sundays will let you do sometimes, when you are left to your own devices and can't think of anything you'd rather be doing. I could never write while you were around, I would always rather be with you, perhaps it is better to be without that. I'm grappling at straws trying to find the person I lost, but I think who I'm really looking for is me. It's so dark outside suddenly, blustery, I am happy and defeated all at once, my bank account is drained and I don't know who I thought I could be, but I'm still someone, am I not? I'm still here, still standing back up again every god damned time, am I not? It's getting harder and harder, yes. 

Does that mean I'm getting stronger and stronger for doing it?

Spring(')s Eternal

The old piano moans and creaks under my touch. Or perhaps it's my fingers that creak, stiff from years of absence, if you long for something for too many turns of the sundial eventually you bury your ache deep, deep within and pretend it isn't there. It's a way to survive, yes, but not quite to live. I feel another crushing wave approach, it begins by steam rolling your lungs so there is no breath left and dissolving your bones into peanut brittle, what use is seeing the black clouds on the horizon if you cannot outrun them. I make lists, more lists, my room is a pile of lists while the world burns, what good will mountains of paper do at the end of the world?

I cannot outrun these demons, you know. They are always faster, more persistent, they wait me out until I'm too tired to go on, the sink their claws into my shoulders and drag me down until I stop. At what point do we make amends with the ghouls that haunt us, allow them to pass through, look at ourselves in the mirror and say, here you are, and gather the courage to accept that?

It's almost as though I drove all across the land only to find
I was in the car the whole time.

Say Her Name

The air is thick with the sound of helicopters again. Second avenue is a wave of peaceful protest, followed by a brick wall of unmarked vans and twirled batons. A woman is dead and the powers that be would like to move on now, thanks, we have a country to dismantle. The countdown races ahead and you wonder what will come of all of it. Will there be any reprieve, any relief? We have stopped wishing for joy. 

It is hard to carry so much fear, so much sorrow and anger, and still try to go through the world as though business were the usual. How do we sleep, eat, file papers, when everything burns in the margins? How can we justify taking out the trash when they ask us, after the holocaust, what we did to stave off the tsunami when it came? 

Breonna Taylor is dead. 200,000 people are dead. America, you have taken all, and now we are..

It occurs to me that I am America.

Oh Happy

My back aches when I wake now, I realize it is not my old age after all but only poverty presenting itself in the form of failing mattress springs. The phone overheats with angry rants and desperate pleas, we are collectively losing our minds and yet somehow making our way through the days as though we were capable of it. I drain my savings account to pay for a lifestyle of bare minimums, my roommate moves out and I hoard her clothes, her notebooks, a Great War mentality sits in my spine, inherited through the ages, when the earth moves we do not throw away and this is how I came to cook soup from stone, my people have changed the meaning over the years, we have learned to eat gravel and like it. The dog is confused by all the packed bags. In Kentucky, murderers in uniform are wiped clean of the blood on their hands. Washington burns, burns and hopes the smoke will hide the dead. Twenty-seven years ago I chose this country and I have kept choosing it ever since, why do you make a fool of my love, America? Why do you dishonor the dream upon which your foundation was built?

I return to the drawing board. Rewrite the narrative, adjust to the apocalypse as it moves and undulates beneath us. The mantra under my breath has changed. Now it is simply: survive, because you have to. 

For now, it will have to do.

Parallel

Our last night on the road we spend in Nowhere, Ohio. The residents seem inclined to go along with this moniker, even though I suppose the place has a name. Everything closes early, the roadside motel dark in the back of a gas station parking lot when we pull in. Long after dark, we snake our way out of the highwaya exit stop again to find a field under the stars and tune our radio to the drive in theater's frequency. An old classic revs up as the night grows cold outside our window. I wish for a blanket and a shooting star and get neither. Come morning we gather our things quickly, leave before breakfast, and make it to New Jersey by early afternoon. 

There's a certain thing that happens when you speed out of the Holland Tunnel and onto Manhattan soil at the appendix just off Canal Street. It's always that deep breath, always that slight settling of your bones into alignment. But arriving in New York, after so much time away, in a car that has crossed the entire country and which is now yours to keep on this ridiculous island, turned out to be more than my little heart could handle. I exploded in uncontrollable giggles and sobs behind the steering wheel, looking around in every direction and trying desperately to hold the buildings, to touch the concrete. Rush hour traffic was picking up, the street a tangle of cars and a mess of pedestrians and skateboarders, and still I reveled in the sight. So this is what it feels like to be home, I thought, and I know now after so many years it's stupid to keep harping on it. Of course this is what it feels like. How many times must New York tell you it is the best thing you have before you start to take it for granted?

I dropped him in Brooklyn later, just as the sun was setting across the bridges and everything had that sherbet glow, had that incandescent hum. By the time I reached my own stoop I nearly forgot I had been away, nearly forgot I had crossed the great land and that the back of my spine was bringing a whole new manuscript with it up to my little desk by the window. My muscles weary with the miles under my feet, my soul still buzzed with all that it had seen.

This year bathes us in tragedy. Joy is our best resistance. 

Smooth

Maybe it's that there's only so much corn a girl can handle before it begins to itch at her spine. Maybe it's that despite my reticence to the speed and crowd, once I settled back into the currents of a big city I felt like myself again, remembered the pace of my step, the sharpness of my tongue. We laughed and chatted across the Chicago bridges and sounded like ourselves again, how strange the turn of a dime. The car weaved just as well through a conservative farmland as through the sharp one way turns of a metropolis, I pat it gently in the garage before we close it for the night and ascend onto the streets. What a gift this life, I have time to think, what a marvel this land. If it falls apart, will we say we had a good run? Or will we bring the shovels and start to dig through the rubble?

Build something better with the shards we uncover.

Ice

I wake slowly, new time zones and a strange haze over Nebraska. The forecast says clear skies and sunshine, is this what constitutes a clear sky here? Perhaps the world is coming to an end. 

The newsfeed is all obituary in the form of partisan warfare. The view from the 8th floor window remains blissfully ignorant. A few cars loll by. He returns with coffee to say there is a farmer's market down the street and we have to go. You wonder if a farmer's market is different here, where the farms creep into the city limits. I miss New York. 

A story continues to bulge and undulate behind my temples. It adds the rickety old houses to its memory bank, adds the alienated feeling of not being quite sure this is the same country where you live. I look over my notes, remember the point of the story. 

Remember the point is I am all story, no matter when I try not to, no matter when I forget. 

A wedding begins in the banquet hall downstairs. 150 people as though the world wasn't ending, only beginning. Hashtag Wray of light from the newly minted Mr and Mrs. Well, he gets to remain. She's changing her entire self. 

Add it to the memory bank. Think art is a form of resistance. Gather your weapons. Prepare to draw.

Lincoln

We roll into town at the last rays of sun, golden hazy cornfield sun like a full moon behind us and I don’t know if the smog is wildfires from the west or just business as usual it everything is peach. We wander the streets under neon lights and wonder who lives here. By the looks of things, mostly the young. They embrace Friday night like there isn’t a pandemic, like another crack in the armor of democracy just broke like a heart in mourning. We have a beer and a smoke and take pictures of quiet brick alleyways and string lights in dark corners. 

In the late afternoon, in a small town surrounded by fields, I stared at a pony express station and marveled again at history, at human perseverance and dogged determination that there be a future. She writes from the west coast and says you’ve never sounded more sure, that’s why I believe you now, and you know she’s right. You know what you want now, and it makes everything else irrelevant, like you could take it or lose it. I walked across the land in search of the good word and perhaps the search was the word all along. I sleep a heavy sleep. Vow to keep looking, come morning. 

News

We leave a canyon on fire, waves of orange and red leaves washing the mountainside in color. It is breathtaking. I try to fathom the journey I have just started, but there is no wrapping my head around it. A car rolls under my hand, and it feels like mine already. We practice parallel parking in small spaces at the top of a mountain rest stop, the entire wild west spread out around us. The Rocky Mountains spike and dive around us, we soar into Denver at sunset and I wonder if this is how Jack felt, chasing Neal a mile into the sky, before the feeling trickles away in the beer glass in front of me. America lies ahead of us, already we have covered hundreds of its miles and we have many, many more to go. Take a moment, remember to soak it in. Storms and destruction lie in our future: give yourself a moment under the stars, give yourself a deep breath in the American West, remind yourself what you are doing and why. 

Our short existence is insignificant in the grand scheme of the Universe. Just make it significant for yourself, and you've already won.

Carte

The maps spread out in front of us, comparing and contrasting themselves, calculating hours under our hands and gauging points of interest along the route. The truth is on the road you don't know what you want to see until you see it. The stars were muted tonight, unwilling to leap to their deaths for my flights of fancy, how cruel reality when the fairy tale will not budge. If we drive the southern route it'll take us ages to get across the mountains. I wonder what I'm running back to. They say fall has arrived in New York, they say parking is a nightmare. 

But I have nightmares all the time, and wouldn't I rather go through them with an escape plan? The entire world has been a nightmare lately, so what harm can a little adventure do? The other night while lost in the dark, an entire new novel outlined itself against the back of my eyelid. This is the magic of the road, or of words, or of the stars. I run back to New York because I miss it while I'm away, because I am not whole outside of its borders. The rest works itself out because you make it. 

In the midst of this nightmare, we have to fight to dream.

Black Cab

 We rolled down to the reservoir, frigid mountain run off and the last days of summer frantically grasping at grains of sand, out all day and I didn’t burn. I will never forgive this year for taking summer from me, I have time to think, but didn’t I see the Hudson River at sunset, didn’t I eat birthday cake in the Rockaways and pick berries in patches and drink frozen drinks till my head hurt? I am pale, yes, and tired and wrung out like a wet rag but summer was here and I saw it. This year has taken everything from us and yet we are not poor, we are not empty. A fire rages in our collective bellies, a new determination and a different point of view. I have vowed to come out of this year with one thing so good it makes the horrors pale in comparison. We have three and a half months, 2020. 

We better get to work. 

Nine Eleven

The carnations on my desk begin to shrivel and wither. The vase was my great grandmothers, she always had pink carnations in it, so for 130 years that's what it's held. It has moved the length of a country, to the northern forests and southern shore, crossing at last the vast, wide ocean and landing in the desert West. Could she have imagined such a fate for her crystal? Could she imagine that four generations later it's still filled only with light pink carnations, so sweet in their countenance, so reliable in their tradition? What a marvel this life, after all, how small our tribulations in the grand scheme of things. What is a day's sorrow, compared to the wonder of a whole existence?

I sit outside later, long after the sun has set behind smoky moutains and the sky again has turned to an ocean of jewels, and I think of all the miracles it took just to get me here, too. It's hard to be despondent in gratitude. It's hard to be grateful, and not want to climb out of the ditch. Honor those who came before you, honor those who didn't make it all this way. One sunny morning in New York City, everything changed, and still the city remained for you to see it. This year in New York City, everything changed again, and still you remain. There's a whisper somewhere in you that has the answer. 

Stick around. One day it will rise to a song, and you'll find you know it by heart.

Valley

Are the highs worth it, when the lows do drag on so? you feel yourself ask, as you guide the old station wagon through the mountain pass. The leaves change color and I cannot feel a thing. Later, under a stream of increasingly hot water, you try to remember that this state comes and goes, that the depths of your lows are no more valid than the dazzle of your highs. This is not proof of your utter insignificance. 

But one can only spend so many hours staring into the abyss before it begins to feel familiar, can only wade around in the muck of one's own misdirection before the path seems out of reach forever. Eleven years I have been chewing this same cud, and what have we learned but that time wait for no one and you should've planted that tree eleven years ago, you daft cow. Nearly four decades you have known the only path you wanted to walk and yet all of that time you have spent rolling instead in ditches. It's no wonder you wonder if the ditch wasn't where you belonged, after all. 

You're not paranoid
if they're really out to get you.

Frost

Dawn rises careful, wary of the winds but none remain. The valley is blanketed in the first freezing night of fall, the vegetable patch covered in tarp and for just a second I am overcome with fear that my parents will not have the time to tell me everything they know before it is too late. What if one day I have a vegetable patch and do not know how to tuck it in at night? I look away. My throat is rusty. 

My spirit attempts to run away, to avoid the hard steps to take, how does it always know to do that? I wonder to myself if yours does the same, if we are all nervous pinballs in the world, or if it's just me. The river is wide, how far the other shore. Just take one first step. Take one first step and see if you cannot find another stone in the stream on which to stand. 

Take a deep breath. Find your path by walking it.

Corral

You wake to freezing temperatures and a wintry mix notification. Heavy clouds blanket the mountains, but at least they tempered the fire smog. The flowers seem to have survived. My to do list runs long, but morning is quiet, and you let it take its time, stretching under warm covers, breathing through your ambitions, letting everything settle in the great jigsaw that is your inner machinery. A large deer walks past your window. You are determined to look back on this year and see at least one precious gift it offered, drifts past your line of vision. I remember being broken, but it is far away now, only an abstract thought, a theory. I put myself back together and I am better than before, what a strange feeling. 

Sometimes we expect jagged edges to be sharp forever. 

But even mountains soften into hills, eventually.

In Spire

This moving little word may be traced back to the Latin inspirare (“to breathe or blow into”), which itself is from the word spirare, meaning “to breathe.” Curiosity makes you read the pages upon pages about where a word comes from. Curiosity makes you listen to hours of new voices, breathing power into the world. Curiosity makes you dive head first into tedious busy work because you see a spark on the other side. I know they tell you to do the work, that the zeitgeist (from spirit, time) of the day tells you to put your queer shoulder to the wheel, but I believe there is still something to be said for magic, that you will know it when it comes and then you will not come up for air until you have expended yourself in its grasp. I will follow you to the ends of the earth, make no mistake, but you better be a unicorn when we get there. 

Do you hear me? 

I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light.

Try to keep up. There's an end to that rainbow and if we look for it, don't you know, we
just
might
find it. 

Particulate Matter

Fire sweeps across California, devastating the lands. Smoke reaches our valley by late afternoon, erasing the mountains from the skyline and subduing any sounds, any thoughts. It is unhealthy for sensitive groups to be outside, and you wonder if that is a scientist joke. We destroy our world one disaster at a time, or many disasters at a time, lately, like we can't help ourselves. The desert dries out your lungs, you wake with parched lips and papery skin, I sleep too late in the silence, stumble through the morning disoriented. What was I meant to be doing, again?

A manuscript lies at the side of your desk. A promise of a new story unfurls in the recesses of your mind. Ah yes, you think, that's what I'm meant to be doing. The answer settles along your spine, lets your shoulders relax, tethers your heart to your breaths. The answer connects you to yourself when you are flailing, reminds you:

Everything else is just means to an end. 

But you still have to do them, to reach it. 

Reinstall

The water is low in the last Great Lake, its saline banks stretching like colorful salt marshes around the mountains and you marvel that anything ever survived here. The flight is smooth, HEPA filtered, a ltitle kinder than usual. You think perhaps some good things come out of disaster. It's hard not to hug at airports, they hand you keys to a second car and you drive yourself through the mountain pass behind them, feeling that familiar dry heat on your tongue, sinking into waves of a different kind of life. We eat dinner outside, call out behind like a restaurant kitchen and season from different salt bowls, but it seems a small price to pay for everything else being predictable. I sit outside under the stars later, alone under a silent Milky Way, watching little asteroids go up in flame in the periphery and wonder if they'll grant your wishes even if you were not looking straight at them when they went out. My wishes are clearer now, I am no longer lost and grasping after straws, do you hear me? These straws are a jungle now, are great big baobab trees and there's no ignoring them where they grow. You send all your stars my way, I'll will them to shoot across the entire sky, I will dig where they land. I am ready for these treasures, now, leave it all up to me, I am ready.

In Flight

How a place can be at once so familiar and yet so foreign. The terminals look the same, the smooth currents of transit, the broad sunlight through wide windows. But the floors lie emptied, the hallways muted. Every masked smile is tinged with fear. It’s like returning to riding a bike, except suspecting that the vehicle has been taken apart entirely and reassembled in ways you cannot guess. We walk like testing the ice.

But the September sun was mild on JFK airport this morning, and I stood in its light basking. The American West awaits across the land, and I return to its light, expectant. Winter returns, yes, all the darknesses of a life return eventually but oh, what light there is yet in the world. I am determined to find it all, to stare into its promise and believe it till I burst.

I know I doubted the world, I know I doubted the healing of my scars, but here we are, in the middle of a world on fire, and somehow all I see is sunshine. You do not turn down such a gift, when it gives itself to you.

You say thank you, and you do everything you can to deserve it.

Miracle Workers

 I just want a house, he says, between mouthfuls of birthday cake and gulps of beer, as she sighs in longing. I just want somewhere to breathe. I tried telling them about Penn Station in the morning, of birdsong in Bryant Park and flying down 5th avenue on a creaky bike, tried explaining how these crooked old tenements fit against my joints, but their dreams lie elsewhere just now, there's no telling what mess we're in for yet. I left them early, went home and packed a strange collection of things into a small bag. In my headphones, your voice traveled across my synapses, reminded me there is something left to reach. There's a five-leaf clover and a desert full of shooting stars waiting to help you stretch your limbs.

There's no telling what we're in for yet. 

I'm ready for that to sound like a promise.

and the Hudson

Early morning on the river, a sun rises into the foliage, onto the still water, mirrors a silence invisible elsewhere. I wake early, pack the last of my bag and pour a cup of coffee to watch the creek wake from the back porch. Back to New York, like a promise, like a gift. 

The train ride is quiet, I pick through inbox chatter and watch the herons stretch their long necks at the river's edge. Arrival waits with a hundred demands to be done, tomorrow waits with one big ask, my nerves tingle and try out setting themselves on fire but my head is calm, determined. There is adventure yet to be had this year, there is joy to be felt, the thing about disaster is it gives you the chance to see what it is you really want with what little time you have. We started the year in blissful ignorance, yes, but now in its stead we have determination. Instead of free of care we are full of it. 

If you win hope with skinned knees and bloody knuckles,
you are not so likely to let it go.

Luck

 Today, in a field between rolling hills, where summer was still warm and the sky was still unending, I found a five-leaf clover. Like miracles can just appear, like the universe is ready to wink at you for a minute. 

This life is a blessing when you are ready for it. 

Fonda

It's only another day, you think as you stretch and extend yourself past your boundaries. You like to make people happy. The day is all rain and imminence of autumn, you squandered a whole summer to pandemic panic, what were we to do? You think about the open road, America under your soles and adventure ahead. There must be morsels of joy somewhere. There must be some sort of reason for any of this, why else would we carry on?

The cicadas are loud this side of the river. The night sounds foreign. I don't know the reason, really. 

But maybe I just don't stretch this thin. Maybe I only break.

Empire Service

First day of fall and already they're dressing for winter on the high plains, he writes with a snicker. Along the river, I ran past a woman in a fleece jacket, while I was drenched in sweat wearing nothing. It was early in the morning, the East Village still sleeping and my bike ride to the run like a gentle meditation, just a few quiet minutes of rolling eastward, thinking nothing. The train is familiar now, the quick weave through the West Village and descending into Penn Station right as the track is announced, remembering to pick a river view seat. September first and already the Hudson is dressed in a mysterious mist, the first tinge of yellow seeps through the foliage. After a summer that wasn't, somehow the change is welcome, like my body is ready to build its new life, like everything has disintegrated into dust anyway, why not build something that can last. 

I don't mean to say everything is over. 

I mean when we make the most of what we have, instead of what we don't, we may end up with miracles.