Descent

There's something in the cold November rain that wakes you, something in the gale warning, it blows the gold off the gingkos, soon all will be dead and barren. I try to barrel into a Monday morning, turn up the therapy light, will it to wake the parts of me that still work even as I sense them starting to wither. I consider the refuge under the covers, but am well aware that path is lined with barbed wire and self-inflicted dagger wounds. How you can spend years running from the illnesses within you and still find your flesh has turned to gangrene, how your insides fall apart when you most need something to lean on. 

Disease steals our days in different ways, but the inevitable fact is you're still getting older, still running out of sand in your hour glass, what will you do with the grains that remain? What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? The rain carries on outside unabated. Life asks its questions of you incessantly, ignorant to your attempted bargains for more time to answer. A small girl sits at the end of your cursor, pleads with you to carry on if only for her. You try to explain insufficiency, but she only knows that she can exist or she can not.

Fine, you think to yourself, hit rock bottom. Try it on for size, let me know if that feels better than clambering in the midst of crashing waves to a shore that will not have you. The water at the bottom of the ocean is still, yes. 

But what peace will you find
when your lungs are full of it?
 

east 5th street

We drive down the parkway in late afternoon, a golden light across the city you could not have made up in dreams. I drop them off two blocks away, because such is the beauty of neighbors as family, and park the car around the corner from us both. I pass it a day later, returning from the writing bar, which feels right even when the November wind blows. It's been a mild season so far, you wonder how long the gift may last. It gets dark so early, but it's still bright when it is. New York continues to be a gift, continues to remind you how you have everything you need right in the palm of your hand, even as it stretches out for more. He disappoints you with his humanity, when you are looking for salvation. 

Tomorrow the day starts anew. Dust yourself off and get back up. 

Black Friday

I grow uneasy with the early dusk, watch the light fade from the gray skies over the river, and we are still in pajamas, letting the day meander from under us. The break is so welcome, and yet already I feel the woods close in around me. As though I require the time off to pay me back in answers, in insight and direction. Where do I go from here? I look back at previous years and wonder if the words weren't better, if the gratitude wasn't more eloquently crafted. It's a year that's made it hard to be eloquent. Did I ask for this? Did I think something better would come out of dragging my soul against the gravel, that I had hidden treasures yet to unfold? 

We are who we are. Around my undiscovered corners lies only more darkness, how could I believe otherwise? The truth is that the world didn't break you, so much as you broke yourself in its name. The truth is you could have moved onto another narrative by now but you keep that head so far into the clouds that you cannot see the forks in the road when they offer themselves to you. He asks if he can spend the winter in the comfort of your smile, but your know the frost beneath your touch doesn't thaw for less than a miracle, and then it sets the whole place on fire. 

We have another drink, rearrange ourselves on the couches and floors as the November afternoon turns to night in our repose. I know I have to change this story, that no one else can, that the days will continue to come and go regardless of what I do with them and how much the darkness swallows me on the way. Just because you know this melody

doesn't mean you can't change the key.

Flyktsoda II

We take a walk in the late afternoon, dusk already settling in that way the day ends in the north, you remember winter in your bones and you wish you didn’t. Growing up in the Arctic was a trauma, you do not take pride in surviving it. The country air does you good. You return to closed laptops and silent telephones, to a large country kitchen and the peace of a holiday ahead. I know peace in my lungs only when my hands are busy making, it is no great secret, and you do not avoid it. He calls to tell you his soft, sweet stories and your lungs freeze again, how does that always happen? I want you to be happy, why do my lungs not remember I want you to be happy? I write her drunk messages of open wounds but she sleeps, everyone sleeps but the Christmas tree, what a benevolent silent partner it is. Take a deep breath. 

There’s a nook in the attic that is yours and yours alone. There’s a country air and a brief break from reality, there’s a hundred miles between you and the city, there’s a month left of this terrible, terrible year, what will you make of the tempest at your fingertips? How will you make this year worth a place in your heart? 

You have one day to remember your gratitudes. 

You may have to try a little harder. 

Seesaw

Did you drive in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping? her four-year-old wide eyes smile at me in disbelief. Like magic happened when she was unaware, and the adult world still retains a wonder. The Christmas tree is lit, in 2020 we do not mess around anymore, do not delay the few joys we may have. The truth is I did drive in the night, weaving out of Manhattan in a necklace of string lights and floating along the dark upstate thruway, pulling up to the little Victorian house long after the town turned in. 

I pack light but bring a suitcase full of questions to answer. The sun rises over the mountain ridge, the air is still, expectant. Who do you want to be, when the storm subsides at last? A new year lies on the horizon, a glimmer of hope that things may be different. You consider the possibility that you could be too. 

Consider the possibility that something better
could be yours.

Pack

You break up. Tell the woman with the listening face that this isn't right, tell the man with the seeking hands that your body is not the treasure he is looking for, you clean your slates and sweep your stoop. He asks to spend the winter, asks to find warmth from the cold, and you remind yourself your promises to avoid the as if when it comes. It always comes. You pack your bags, not in the way you used to, with the getaway car rumbling in the street and you with the gas tank spilling behind you as you go. No, this is intentional, this is reprieve, New York don't you know this time I'm making it stick, we have nothing to fear. I smile at new ears on the screen, reach my trembling hands toward new fingertips. I  do not set fires any more, but I believe I can still keep myself warm through this strange, unending winter. One day I will reach for that quiet, vulnerable spot at the nape of your neck, and you will laugh and tell me stories to keep me awake while the miles move from under us. We will be in the getaway car together, just you wait. 

Good things come
to those who do.

Pull Me Out

We careen down second avenue in the early morning, keys to an old apartment left on the kitchen counter and the promising jangle of keys to a new one in her lap. The west village turned to face us with beaming November sunlight and trickling yellow gingko leaves on the little street, like it was made for this moment, like it had been waiting to give it to her. I parked my car underneath her fire escape and remembered just how it felt to move to the neighborhood all those years ago, to turn down a dreamy, tree-lined street and feel like I was home. I never thought I could live here, she says, and we both take a moment to sink in something so good from the Universe. He writes to say Central Park was beautiful today and we decide to let him prove it. The neighbors upstairs have a party. I start to hallucinate things along the sides of my vision. 

It's quite possible for bad things and good to happen at the same time. Quite possible to feel joy even when one is so sad. 

There's no great answer there. Sometimes the world spins on, without them.

Sprain

I drive home in the early morning, the Taconic Parkway dreamy in dawn, soft sunrise playing across frosted fields. For the first 50 miles there is only silence. I hug the shoulderless curves and think about life in the country, wonder at simplicity, if this is happiness. 

But then a few hours later, with the day well under way and the cars amassing in the veins, I crest a hill to see Manhattan spread out before me, and I take a breath so deep I didn't know my lungs had been empty all this time. Returning to New York City after a time away is like seeing in color after settling for black and white. It's turning the brightness up on your dimmer lights, it's a buzz in your skin that you never again want to lose. I drove alongside the island, watching it undulate from the Brooklyn shore, and thought only I love you, I love you, I love you, and when they tell me I should perhaps learn to be satisfied, or settle, or build a life of good enough, I will remind them that if a person, place, or thing does not sit like a deep breath in your chest and a smile in your heart, it would be a dishonor to our lives to stay with them. This city taught me what love is, and now I never have to accept any less.

It's not hard to be thankful,
with such gifts in your hand.

Unmade

Good morning, she whispers into the predawn dusk, and I only just have time to piece together where I am and how I should be reacting before she stands at my bed with childlike eagerness. My weather app says it's beyond cold, says winter is here but I'll soften the blow with some sunshine. I sit in the window basking, eyes closed, heart open. There is much work to be done, so much work to be done, but some mornings it feels quite enough just to have survived, just to be living. 

I take a deep breath into the upstate day. Write all your words, he says. There's nothing like the freedom that comes after the explosion, nothing like the relief after the fire you feared is over.

Track

I lose hours in this attic, I lose days in this town, the streets get dark so early and I forget there are things to do beside sleep. I speak with outside voices and they carry on, but nothing seems quite so important. Like I'm wrapped in a few bales of cotton, and it's numbing, but also soft, and sometimes it's hard to weigh what you lose against what you gain. The days carry on regardless. I do not write my book. 

 I should be writing my book. 

The thing is I am not so sad, anymore. The thing is, cotton will never be fireworks but some days it is enough not to hurt. 

The thing is I'm still alive, despite - *waves vaguely in the general direction of the year that's been* - and perhaps that's the bar we set for now. I ran a slow, cold jog along a country road today and did not marvel, but I ran it. This heart has been dragged across the pavement enough to build scars as thick as the Arctic ice. 

Which is to say it's solid now. 

But it'll thaw eventually. 

And then what a tsunami it'll be. 

Begin

I pour a bourbon as the last of daylight wanes. It feels like the middle of the night out here without streetlights, without traffic, I forget all the fires racing through my blood when the air is quiet. I unfold a card table, spread out my few knicknacks. Don't be precious, a sticker on my computer reads, reminds me to write anywhere, so I do. 

The clock keeps showing 11:11, you know, the Universe keeps nudging me with kindnesses and calls for my attention. I fear I am too numb, I fear it is already too late, I know you know you are losing me and I just haven't pulled the trigger yet, they tell me to stay another day and I think why not because what else is waiting for me downriver but more steps inside a vacuum? We are traumatized by a year that will not let up, do you really think we might live again, you no longer know what living means. 

Write anywhere. Do all the things. Everything ends, and you'll regret what you didn't. There's a light on in the house down the street, there's a light on in the deepest corner of your heart, just hold on for a little longer, and surely you'll have found your way. 

Surely, you'll have found it by making it.

Upstate

The little town is quiet in the late afternoon when at last we turn onto the main street and snake our way up to the little Victorian gingerbread house that is ours at last. The restaurants have all moved indoors, it is too cold, and the people too tired to fight it anymore. They sit inside the warm, cozy spaces and watch the world on fire around them, while the Hudson freezes over. We move furniture in the middle of the night, fill the car with impulses, and set up the Christmas tree way too early but this year all bets are off, (we say giggling and crying all at once). He writes to say the sabbatical he had planned didn't quite follow his trajectory, that a world under siege is a strange place to work out your clichés and discover your meanings. You think what a privilege it is to do that work at all, while your bank account dwindles in the margins. Winter is coming. 

After two days of country air, your lungs begin to move differently, your muscles strech in new ways with space, you sink into slow food and slower dreams, waking only to hear them move furniture again and to watch the sun at last rise over the old cemetery. It's a strange vacuum, and you know it will not last forever. 

But nothing lasts forever. That's the whole point. 

That's why we have to make the most of every damn morsel we can find.

Confines

An entire day rushes past, I wipe leaves off the car and bike back across the bridge to whisper my good mornings to the city. It whispers back, gives me a nudge. I wade through the stories of all the years that built me and marvel at the turns our lives can take. It gets cold outside. He writes sweetnesses into the ether, and you do your best to let them run like water droplets off your shoulders. You pack your bags. 

The numbers are rising around us, the walls building back up. The  powers that be do their best to corrupt the last vestiges of our dignity. I miss you so much it aches in me sometimes, but then everything aches in me so maybe I just can't tell one pain from another. These stories build me, yes, but on shaky foundations and jenga acrobatics. I wake up never quite knowing who I am. 

The rain passes. But the woods are getting dark. You better shine your light real bright if you're going to make it.

Introduce

A day races across your shattered nerves. It asks you to curate the design of your life, asks you to tell me a little bit about yourself, and you want to be the diligent student more than ever. We reminisce about Los Angeles in our youth, try to weave our futures into one another the way they were before, before before there are so many befores now my body has stopped predicting afters. It sounds like you want to be happy, she says, and you laugh at the summary. But technically, she's not wrong. He turns a curious eye your way and you wonder what the tales you tell sound like from the outside. You can schedule another session for next week whenever you're ready. You are so busy your lungs forget to breathe for a full day. The rain arrives, you miss your steady steps along the river and instead here we are racing into another pair of smiling eyes, another set of hopeful futures, don't you know I came to this city making deals with the devil and as long as I am
still here I do not feel
I have lost.

Portfolio

You sort through the piles of your life, looking for treasures and finding little grains of sand where you'd forgotten they might be. Realizing how much you'd like to shake up the choices you've made and knowing that button is not an option on your console. You are where you are. Dig where you stand. We get one more day of sunshine, you run from smiling face to smiling face, for just one brief moment your life feels like New York of old and you try to remember that person in your lungs, in your veins. How long she's been away. So much of your time now is spent surviving, is spent going to sleep one more time and hoping for the best at dawn but waking before alarms with a boulder on your heart, it is not a life, not really. He sends you songs and softness and you distract yourself off topic until it passes. Your regular bar braces for winter, builds a treehouse on 5th street, you have never loved New York more than you do now, and it's a welcome reminder. 

Just because your edges are sharp
doesn't mean you are made of ice.

Edge

A new day rushes ahead, bursts into existence, demands attention. You barrel through the piles of work that collected dust in the week of limbo, while the weight sits sulking in a corner, looking again for its time to shine. Little pockets of chance appear, but you pay it no mind and close the door again. I do not have time for your wailing, you hear yourself say under your breath, while you straighten your back and carry on. Yesterday we weaved through a Central Park in full regalia, fireworks in the trees and smiles on the ground, we were allowed to forget for a short while the cruelties of the world and just enjoy. The work will return, the world, but now, just now, we can meander slowly through our love for this city and speak like old friends, like we lost nothing and gained everything. 

We took the elevator up into the sky and watched the sun set over New York, I know I said I wanted to love someone else but I don't know if it's true anymore. I think maybe I have everything I need underneath my feet, I think maybe everything has been mended with this air in my lungs, the world is on fire but I am unafraid again, do you hear me? Winter is coming. 

I'll be right here. 

And I think that means something.

Not Nothing

I wake with the Weight still deep in my chest, it chains me to the bed and makes friends with the hangover in my head. Drag it behind me out to the river, taking slow steps with raspy lungs and wondering what the point is. Underneath the Manhattan Bridge, I stopped, looked at the downtown skyline, and let everything settle along my spine. The cure for mortality is to leave a legacy, the city whispered to anyone who would listen. Have something to prove, then prove it. 

When I came home, the newstickers flipped themselves into a frenzy, and the city so long under siege erupted into a festival of relief and gratitude in a heartbeat. I biked to Prospect Park and watched waves of cheering undulate across the sunny lawn. Biked to champagne toasts around the borough in a day no one wanted to end. At midnight, we stood by the fountain in Washington Square Park and marveled at the simple joy of relief. You are far away, now, and cannot see this. Do not know the joy in my eyes, the tremble of my heartstrings, life is cruel like that but I'm sure you are happy, too. 

It's been a long, dark year. We are not out of these woods. 

But getting a flashlight is a hell of a thing, when you've been stumbling blind.

And Now I Am

I’ll be gone by tomorrow, he says, and you do not understand how to explain the pit in your heart at the words. You weave yourself around your traumas, nestle within their safety and watch the years pass by while your wrists bleed. It wasn’t mean to be, but you do not know what you are without it. 

You asked the universe for a challenge out of your control this year, and oh, how the universe delivered. You should feel rich that the Universe would grant you such a wish. 

Break now. And when you grow back, grow back strong as as the entire wood. 

This Year

We wake glued to our live feeds. We fall asleep with their regurgitations seeping into our nightmares, each hour is the length of a year, and this year is the length of a lifetime, it seems apt. I listen to voices who say it will be okay. I try not to think about the other option. I will think about the future after the now is called, I tell them when they ask if I return now. But it took me four hours to move my car today and if that isn't a lesson in mindfulness,  I don't know what is. The sun was bright, a friend jumped into shotgun with a grilled cheese sandwich and a can-do attitude, and we chatted up the diehard New Yorkers while waiting for the traffic cop to leave us alone, there's nothing like the Lower East Side on a sunny day, and you returned to your overheated apartment without a shred of the weight that has dragged itself in your shadow for so long. 

There is always a dawn. There is always a day to follow both good and bad. They're counting the votes. You put one foot in front of the other. You do the work. Eventually, the parking spot appears, eventually the sun shines, eventually you make it work and and remember that small ember in the back of your throat. 

Eventually you speak a fire.

Given You All

I sleep a deep sleep, ignorant of the machinations on the outside. When I wake, my phone is a wasp's nest of terror; before my mind has even righted itself, it spins dark tales and confusion. I try to work but spend most of the time staring into a wall. My phone continues to buzz with mostly the same, anger and confusion, inability to put one foot in front of the other. A limbo that pulls and stretches and abandons us all at once. He bikes into the city to give you a hug despite your symptoms; you sink into his shoulder and wonder when the last time was another human touched you. The year has been cruel beyond belief. A few medical professionals poke and prod you and say probably no need to worry, but you feel like that's what the democracy told you too and yet here we are beside ourselves with fear. Across the water, your home country shuts itself down too, like a clam retreating from the treacherous waters beyond. 

The year has been cruel beyond belief. 

But I sat in Washington Square Park today, warm November sunshine on my face, dear friends at my side, New York like a perpetual beacon of hope all around, and for a short moment everything was not on fire, everything was not violently turning to ash at our feet and if there is one thing this year has taught me it is to appreciate that moment more than I ever knew I could. 

We're not out of the woods yet. We are as deep in them as ever. But they are only woods. If we keep walking, eventually we are bound to reach a clearing.

America I Have

Wake early to incessant buzzing. I'm at work at the polling station. 5 am. I am seventh in line to vote. 6:15 am. Daylight Saving jet lag brings me out of strange dreams, the reality of the day snaps me to instant attention. Christmas Day. But bad. My throat is sore, a slow November congestion making its way through my muscles. Read the room, I tell it, but none of the monsters are reading the room this year, why would this one be any different? I wonder what plans I have to cancel, when I can get tested for worse ailments. Everything all at once.

It's a day of italics. A day of squeezing sentiment between the lines. Everything all at once. Here is the day, did you do all you could? Thriving is an act of resistance. A new story builds itself at my fingertips, on the blank page. It speaks of the fallout. It speaks of the Resistance. If it doesn't go your way, will you move back home? he asks from across the sea. 

But this is home. If it doesn't go your way, if your house is on fire, do you leave it behind? Or do you stay, in defiance, and try again to make it better?

Do you stay,
and determine to thrive?

Eve

It's like the night before Christmas, I hear myself say, except bad. The air on the streets is different, or maybe you're projecting. He calls to rant and you feel your body begin to tremble, indiscernible at first but by the time you hang up it trembles deep in your bones. I stock up on bourbon while the liquor store boards up their windows. Just a precaution, they say smiling. Just a precaution for the end of the world, as it were. I pour myself a glass, sit back down at the computer. The words come easier in crisis. It's a cruel payoff. The sunlight along the river whispered of winter today, the cold winds made no mistake and still I smiled as I ran. It's strange to hold a light heart when the world is heavy. 

The important thing is wielding a strong heart when the world goes dark.

Home

We drive three hours in monsoon rain before crossing into the Bronx and a tollfree bridge onto Lexington Avenue in Harlem. Home. We meander down the avenue as the rain slows, jump onto the FDR, and veer into the East Village when the slick streets are black, the Sunday night quiet. I drop them off and snake up and down the streets, content just to be there, marveling at how different an avenue can look from another point of view. The fear washes off, there's a calm in my chest. New York is a gift even when you do not expect it. I find a little nook near my writing bar and nestle in, wondering what the Universe was trying to tell me even though I haven't asked much of it lately.

I walk around the block to my little stoop behind the fish sign and I know it. 

Everything is a numbers game. Keep driving until the spot appears and then take it. Keep showing up until your chance arrives and then you are ready for it. 

When you are ready for it, the fear is rendered mute. The Universe rewards those who keep going.

Apocalypse Noir

A month begins. Cold, dark November with its messages mixed, with its candles lit across graveyards like at attempt to love death to life. We wake early in the twisted clocks, wander up and down rickety staircases in flannel pajamas like a Hallmark card, but when their eyes are turned my insides shrivel. I woke up in the middle of the night, street quiet, sky dark and full of stars, and cut open wounds I didn't even know had any nerve endings left in them. In the morning, he writes to say he has started another story; he gives you the chance to do the same and though you have forgotten what it is for something bright, you reach your trembling hands toward the light and pray, and pray you might catch a lifeline. Your notes for the burgeoning story stand out in the leatherbound journal at your side: No one reads a book where the character just wants to make it to the end.

A month begins. 

You sit down, and start to write.