Fall Back

Halloween night, full moon turn the clocks, we've already lost all meaning of time in this haunted year, what more can you want from us? The children are delighted at the treats and wonder less about the tricks, the old Victorian town does so well around the holidays, we remark, and I wonder if I'm losing them forever to this dream. The whole attic floor is yours, they say. We thought your writing desk could go here by the window.

Later at night, as I bury myself under layers of November bedding, the demons return to fill the spaces in the silence. The street is empty, the little town dark. I went a long way, but they can smell my shivering heartstrings a hundred miles out of sight. Every escape is temporary, they say. You haven't answered anything, and you know it.

November approaches in the icy darkness. My room is so quiet, so absolutely still, if I only try hard enough, maybe I'll believe this vacuum is all we have left. Maybe it will look something like peace. 

and Good Things Ahead

I am going to make it through this year

if it kills me. 

We tell tales of times past and realize too late it was only February, it was only last Christmas, doesn't everything that came before feel like a whole other life and we've aged impossibly since then. In the early morning, I hurry across the bridge to find the car, forgetting every stress in the drive back to Manhattan, sunny and still across the river. By the time we race down the parkway, Catskill mountains on fire in the distance, I feel the Darkness lightly lift off my ribs at last.

We get brief moments of respite. It was not what we had hoped, but oh how rolling with the punches means appreciating what we can. 

If there is one thing this year can teach us, it's that before anything else, the most important thing we can do every day
is survive.

And

The rain gives way to glacial winds. I am failing at every turn. There are no avenues left I haven't walked in the downward spiral, no stones I haven't turned to look for evidence of hopelessness. These aren't the words I wanted to offer you, these aren't the fruits I wanted to harvest from my labor. It is winter now, and I am too tired to fill my stores. There was a time when I wished on the Universe for delights unexpected, but I have learned now the Universe doesn't work according to wishes. 

Just give me a minute. I'll figure out how to work without it.

Any More Time

 "Remember when you thought I had hit bottom?

That wasn't bottom."

Respire

 The rain continues. I have brief moments of levity followed by eons of a cast iron weight on my chest. I know we're meant to tell our younger selves it gets better, and we're not wrong, only, the house is on fire also seems an appropriate hint and maybe my older self could be kind enough to warn me. I came to New York to be a starving writer but now I only starve, it's so hard to remember how to tell stories when your fingers are frozen stiff. Poverty eats at your dreams, if you were just a little bit better you wouldn't need security in order to fulfill them.

"What I could do, apparently, was daydream the years away: go on yearning for 'things' to be different so that I would be different," Vivian Gornick writes. "Now there was only the immensity of the vacated present... It was there on the street, I realized, that I was filling my skin, occupying the present."

Perhaps I daydream too much, try to solve my hollowness with hope instead of accepting reality and conforming to its laws. No one ever pointed out to me that my heroes all died in middle aged destitution, and I was too young to ever think middle age would come anyway, what would it have mattered. Here we are now, groveling in the dirt while our friends buy houses, move on, fertilize their bank accounts. 

This train of thought comes with no answers. 

One foot in front of the other until it does.

Ache

The forecast calls for rain unending, hour after our of thick cloud covers on the radar and you are probably better off huddled in a corner for the remainder of the day. A man rides by on a bicycle across the street, one cigarette in his mouth and another in his hand. You think of paper pulp and how ridiculous New York can be in its beauty. You've never stopped loving it, and perhaps there is something to be said for loyalty. The rain picks up. 

Last night, at the regular bar shrouded in orange lights, she says she's trying to move them all back home. Hoping the motherland will offer solace, solutions, solvency. But if we go, we won't be able to come back, she says, and you wonder if it's worth giving up this madness for anything. The day offers a brief pause in your despair, and you're a hundred pounds lighter without it. There's something in life you have yet to figure out, and in the parting clouds you remember a desire to do it. To turn stones. To find one gift you did not expect. To marvel. 

The rain picks up. But so do you. One day at a time. Eventually we get where we are going.

Andante

There's a brief moment every morning, when I do not remember the weight of my chest. Like a heart in mourning, rising from sleep in blissful oblivion and forgetting its loss just long enough to know peace. It makes the comedown crueler, somehow, and yet how you live for that short pocket of air between your lips. I try to barrel into a day, thinking if I keep running, I can remain ignorant, thinking if I do not acknowledge my bleeding limbs they will work as intended. Sometimes I can buy myself an hour. But when the bar has been lowered into murky waters on fire, an hour can look like Elysium. 

I know this specter too well, remember its heavy shroud and cloying desperation, its detrimental whispers. Know how the hours pass, how I wake up in the middle of the night with an itch that will not leave me alone and in morning cannot rise from under the covers. I know the temptation of eternal sleep, its one offering. But I'm not looking for your prizes. 

This is all the attention you'll get today. You get this one acknowledgment of your existence, before I was you out of my hair, run you out of my house, before I meet someone better who knows what it is to love, I have, despite the odds, decided to move on and be something else moving forward. 

I don't have any answers. But neither do you. So I'm done
hearing
you
out.

Lucky II

Everything hurts. I try to breathe but it gets stuck in the fog, in my desperate attempts to remember how to do it. I try to bury myself in work, but bury work in the desk drawer to avoid reminders of my own shortcomings instead. A book manuscript stares at me in horror, but the demons are louder than any of its complaints so I am left to piece together its pleas from my own haunted innards. I go back to bed. Desperately try to remind myself how to know better. They say death by hypothermia can make people feel unexpectedly warm, a brief spell of relief or confusion as the body fires off its last attempts at survival. I know this bed is a virtual roll in the snow. I know the relief of sleep is only waste of a life, but oh, what a blessing is a short moment of respite. If I make myself perfectly still, perhaps this life won't notice me, won't ask things of me I am no longer able to offer it. 

I am too soft, and life is too far out of my reach. Everything feels warm now. 

I'm starting to forget what I was fighting for.

You Said

The problem with the Darkness, of course, is that it swallows you whole. You're only dying slowly, but you do so entirely, aware of every minute as it passes, numb inside the cotton vacuum behind its jagged teeth. I do not open my eyes properly, move my muscles or fill my lungs, everything is stunted. When they knock on my window and ask me questions, I reply in half sentences without punctuation, leaving trails of clues behind me but only if you already hold the riddle in your hand. I force myself to runs along the river, my feet pounding in automatic routines, while my brain ruminates like a cow recycling the same three straws of grass for an hour. Nothing new happens, nothing changes, it does not have the energy to build any story, and I don't force it. 

The scariest part of the Darkness is always the apathy. The way my marionette limbs can collapse on a couch in unhuman forms and stay there reluctantly. The way my heart wants to sleep at 7:30, concocting rationales of detrimental sleep deficits and productive tomorrows but in the back of my mind a foggy memory of the Darkest Year when all there was was sleep. I carry this illness like a leper's, closing all the gates to protect the uninfected world. How could I ever put anyone through this? I'm sorry I'm defective, I whisper to the piles of clothes on my floor, the unwashed coffee cups and messages awaiting reply on my phone. I'm sorry I whisper to the unfinished manuscripts, the emptied bank accounts, the strangers who I am supposed to impress into adoration, the city that agreed to hold me as long as I kept deserving it. 

I write a long to do list for morning. Try desperately to wipe the slate clean, do all the right things: fake it till you make it. The Darkness moves across your body like tar. I'm only closing my eyes for a bit.

Cake

Summer is over, the voice rambles, as if we didn't already know by the fire of the leaves. You spend your days pushing new parts of your psyche into the darkness, as if challenging it to move, to surprise you, a game of chicken that no one wins. New voices speak to you across the ether and you see yourself building layers between the rivers, protecting what feels frail, and you don't know why. 

In all these years, after all, you've never broken. But the foam protection couldn't keep you from bruising, so why do you insist on wrapping it around you? 

The trees on Second Avenue turn yellow, bright, beaming, blissfully ignorant of their impending death. The country reels from the last few turns of a mad man's merry-go-round, how long can you be sick to your stomach before you forget you ever felt well? This year asks that question a hundred times. We eat cake and celebrate another unusual birthday, it's a good thing we cannot see into the future, we would never get out of bed. You are determined to keep getting out of bed. 

Summer is over, you repeat to yourself, as if willing your spirit to stand up against it. The pharmacist jabs the needle into your arm, says record numbers this year. You think the great gift of humanity is proving itself wrong in the face of such devastating mistakes. 

You always get another chance to do choose to do it better.

If It Kills Me

Take a deep breath, comes the calming voice across the screen, get started. I opened my eyes, a strange arrangement along my spine, an unusual clarity. Do the work, first, think later. After days in the muck, days of brain fog and despair, of not remembering how to make a lip smile, I wake with a hesitant lightness. I have been fooled before, yes, but the lightness remains, so that I feel my breaths almost reach the edges of my lungs. I tip-toe around the day, trying to fit in as much productive work as I can before the break inevitably ends, trying to get a step ahead before I fall three below. You see I know this parasite, have learned its ways and recognize its game. It offers a moment's reprieve, gives you just enough to dare to hope, before it sinks its teeth in you again, and don't your wounds bleed worse after they started to heal? It's a ruse. 

But I drove into the forest yesterday, sunny whispering forest and a blessed solitude. I could not breathe, then, could not smile at the gift, but I still gave it, and I still opened it, and today I remember. The rain today continues unabated, but I do not hear it, do not see it, do not let it chill me as it will. There was a short moment of lightness, and that is what I will remember. 

This year drags us through burning treacle, holds us under the surface until we choke and a little more, every day seems more cruel than the one before. Is it any wonder if we despair at times? 

Is it any wonder if we forget our way?

Dig

(But then, when all the layers are peeled away, when we are reduced to our most primary colors, when we have nothing but our fear, and longing, and love, and loss, there appears on the page art so true that we cannot defend ourselves against it, creations so void of polish that they fit in our chests like they were tailored. I know, I know, I know you are suffering now but there is a grain of sand in this desert worth finding, there is a truth in this darkness to show you the way, if you hold on just a little longer I think you can catch it, if you carry on I think you can do Something Good.

It isn't over
until you say it is.)

Weight / Wait

October comes for us all in different ways, sly, insidious, coddling. A straggler staggers in the Monday morning gusts, unable to stand upright in the wind, in the intoxication, their legs won't hold. The cafe owner downstairs says the neighborhood is not what it was, he's taking his restaurant to Brooklyn. Park Slope, he says dreamily, it's nice there, you should come. I try to explain to him my stupid loyalty to all things broken, how I never leave anymore, but he is not listening. 

No one is listening lately, and I wonder if I'm only screaming on the inside. 

The rain continues. Yesterday we drove top down in unforecasted sunshine out on Long Island and I thought I never have to come here again, all unending strip malls and income disparity,  but the ocean is a gift every time and I took it. I tried whispering my gratitudes into the rolling waves but I get distracted so easily these days, my mind is a fog, once upon a time I called myself a writer but look at this jumbled mess, this is not what you came for. Me neither, frankly. 

Everything is treacle. I drag my heavy limbs through its days. But why?

Manifest

Eleven years I've been writing this blog. Twenty-one crafting myself birthday letters, twenty-five jotting my thoughts into countless journals: a lifetime of trying to make sense of a life which will not let itself be figured out. You pretend you imagined eventually the answers would come, but you always knew yours was meant to be a life of mists and confusions, of endless questions and the perpetual search for meaning. You never deluded yourself to believe everything would align itself before it was too late, that if you were just patient everything would make sense. But perhaps if someone could have warned you that the person you were is the person you would be, it would have saved you the heartache of dreaming differently. 

You think there must be a purpose to pain, a way to channel the heartbeat in your scars. 

It's hard to see it though,
when you're bleeding out.

En Rose

The mornings are dark now, if you rise early enough, whispering of cold and death and the end of all things. As though we haven't faced that spectre for months, bring us a new horror, this one cannot faze us. I bike across the Williamsburg Bridge at sunrise, the bric-a-brac of the Manhattan skyline glowing in the morning light. I make plans to always rise at dawn but reader, we know I never will. The car moves with ease, squeezing into a spot beyond its means but who are we in life if we cannot be brazen at times. We drive past the old loft in Greenpoint, and nothing looks the same in the old neighborhood. How New York winds and spins, and yet I remain. I was always slow to change, loyal to a fault, but sometimes it does not hurt me. New York, it never hurt me to love you. 

In the depths of this cold death, we must hold dear the joys that still move our hearts.

Dive

She arrives at the outdoor bar with that gait she has, always a little sideways, always like her body is trying to pull her in different directions and she cannot commit to just the one ahead. It feels like coming home. A month worth of unspoken secrets, we stumble over ourselves to fit as many of them into the limited space we have. I tell her, a little too loudly for the quiet street to absorb, how I realized the hollowness of my endeavors, how I've spent a whole life shielding myself from pain by attempting to prove nothing at all. How sometimes the Universe shines on me and I take what it offers, but I never climb into the sky on my own to get what could be mine. 

The days are endless spirals now, are hard-won steps to breach the surface and then easy tumbles to the depths again, how do we spend so much time just trying to survive. You wonder what the year is meant to prove to you. But perhaps those are the wrong questions again. 

It's entirely possible to survive
without living, after
all

With Purpose

But what is it you want?

The voice rings in my ears, echoes of the same question badgered at my every creation, my every turn. What is it I want, what is it I have to lose that I cannot bear to, where is the tension that makes this narrative a worthwhile way to spend a life, why should anyone care? A character in ink climbs across a hundred of my messy pages trying only to avoid life, trying only to react when it happens, and you wonder if she isn't more a symptom than a gift, wonder if she isn't a message you are desperately trying to deliver to yourself. 

I know the chasm is so deep, I know the bottomless pain that resides there is enough to keep you from ever stepping off the middle of the road and risk falling in. 

But what if instead of using mediocrity to douse the flames
you used the fire to fuel this one life into an explosion?

We Are Standing on the Edge

 Pull me out of the aircrash

Pull me out of the lake

I feel my luck could change.

Orchards

Early morning is crisp as I race across the Williamsburg bridge: October. Lazy sunshine, a familiar face down Broadway, a familiar car along Kent and the early risers stumble toward their hipster coffee. We make our way back across the Brooklyn Bridge, weave across a whole island topple out into a valley on fire. Leaves do not care for your apocalyptic years, they still fulfill their timetables and dazzle on schedule. We hike through whistling woods and sit staring at the enormity of the world. For a short moment, we are rendered irrelevant, and it is a most comforting tonic. 

Hours later, in the golden afternoon, the great spikes of Manhattan appear at the end of the river as the car careens down the hill. Did we get what we came for? It's hard to know. I sneak the car into a newly appearing spot along the gleaming skyscrapers, make my way back across the bridge just as the last rays of apricot sunshine make their way over the top of the skyline. Saturday evening bounces in the East Village, we try to squeeze just a few drops of joy out of the year that nearly killed us. 

It's a worthwhile endeavor,
if we do nothing else.

October 1

I wake in the middle of the night, a steady beeping somewhere in the apartment poking at my subconscious just enough to annoy me out of rest. Fire alarms are always elusive when you need them not to be. After surgical removal of waning batteries, I lay back down and remembered all the things I had forgotten to let worry me through the day. Soft songs of things you used to say swept past me and I tried not to hear them. It's been too long, I said in the newfound silence. You can't come here anymore. It did not help me sleep. I'd like to think my own voice would be enough, but here's the thing: in the vaccum this year has afforded us, the absences have come into stark relief. My voice carries further against the tongue of another. Carrying myself is only useful when I catch another's stumble. It is not enough for me to smile in safe spaces, do you not see I want the Universe in the palm of your hand, do you not see I will not settle for sleepless nights without you?

A rat lay suffering on the sidewalk near Avenue D last night. It did not move as I approached, and I had no relief to offer. An hour later, after the September sun had set and the glass towers of Brooklyn had sparkled in that particular way they do in autum, I returned to find it dead beside a tree. No more, no less. We do the best we can for a short while here on earth, and when we die that is all there is. I wake in the middle of the night and stare at full moons, stare at October rising to a year on fire, we do the best we can. 

Only, I think we'd do it better together.