Super Vivere

A month passes, I do not write. Do not put ink onto the blank pages of the now past, do not commit to memory the days which will soon fall from me. My father comes to town; we navigate the delicate balance of two adults who can never be grown at once. It is sweet, in all its exasperated impatience.

He says there are no right angles in your apartment, and to me it seems a perfect description of why I love New York. When I moved to my first apartment, twenty years ago and counting, he came to knock on the walls, as if testing the structural stability of my new home, as if making sure it would hold me like his home no longer would. I remember him hmmming in the hallway. Now he asks me why I'm not marrying rich, why I'm not making babies, why I'm not leaving this metropolis, Don't you want someone to look after you when you're older? But the joke's on him, because I'm already older. And you can't always get what you want.

I get back to work, distracted by the open window at my desk. It smells like spring: like fresh air, faint cigarette smoke, waking mulch, sunshine, a halal cart five blocks away. I fidget in my seat, legs longing to run into the season, heart aching to beat into the early dawn. After I dropped my father at JFK - bittersweetly on a windy Sunday afternoon - I drove back across the Williamsburg Bridge in the late afternoon, brick skyline of Manhattan spreading our before more and twinkling in the sunlight. I know it's too soon to say it. But by god I think we're alive yet.

with a Fork

The cold returns. It creeps into your Friday night like a ghost, slipping under the cracks in your window, eats away at the thin veneer of defenses you have lined up around you. He mispronounces your name and you wonder if that is what will break the seal, but it is not. It is five hours of darkness later, of a muscle memory from decades past, of thin, sharp blades perfectly puncturing the dotted line along your arteries and saying see, this is who you are on the inside, does it look like you thought?

The truth is nothing looks like I thought. 

But maybe exactly like I knew it must? 

Wherever you go
There you are.

the Sky is just the Sky but I say

It arrives unannounced, every time, I tell him, whispering to not scare it away. I never know until it is here. He nods, but only from knowing my whims so many years. 

I woke at 6:30 this morning, blinds all the way up and a slow dawn stretching over Brooklyn, and I knew it was here. I could feel it in the tingle of my toes, in the way my breath reaches the bottom of my lungs for the first time in eons. I knew it in the way my brain whispered possibility in the face of obstacle, I hear it in the way my work lays at the wayside in favor of my own creative whims and I am not sorry. 

It's been two very, very long years, my dear, it's been unimaginable strains on our humanity and a weight in our collective chest I never knew we could carry. But we did carry it, and now we're allowed to let it go. 

This is me telling you I'm letting it go. 

This is me telling you I will leave this weight here,
and from now on I will
fly.

 

Get My Head Around It

Outside my window, spring thaw is dripping from the windowsills upstairs. I've seen that apartment, how she keeps it light, airy, painted white. A woman with her life under control, a woman whose clothes are clean, a woman who doesn't wake in the middle of the night with the Madness of the city coursing through her veins. 

I walked back downstairs to my shoebox after we spoke, saw the cacophony of colors, the piles of books and papers and dreams gathering dust on the shelves, sparkling despite the temporary neglect. I saw my own wild hair in the mirror, how I have crammed so many hopes and dreams into these split ends and never been sorry about it. I moved into this shoebox on an answered prayer, I bought this pink couch like a pat on my own back, 15 years ago I came to this city and I have never been sorry, New York, do you hear me? 

I have never once regretted loving you in this all-consuming, wondrous, wild way I do.

(but)

 (but i miss you.
i miss you like there's a space inside my body
where the feel of your warm skin in the morning
used to reside
like
there was a whole person I used to be
and haven't seen since you left
like
our time together was a brief moment
of everything making sense
and hasn't since. 

it was like i found my way out of the maze
only to now be lost
in the woods.)

Crocus

I go out to move my car in the late morning, and the sun has already thawed the last piles of snow on the sidewalk. By the time the street sweeper has passed, I have taken my coat off, stand chatting with a neighbor on the corner of 6 and B in nothing more than a sweatshirt, beaming into the midday sun. I forget the cloud that's been sitting on my chest and run spontaneous errands from the sheer ease of it. The numbers are plummeting.

On the way home, a man catches up to me on Fourth street, says hello, says I've been seeing you walk by my shop for at least 5 years and, he pauses, looks sheepish, like he ran first and thought after, I just thought I should say hi. You recognize New York winking at you from a mile away, know we're both just lying in the ground, feeling the warmth at the end of our tendrils. 

Just a little longer now, you hear it whisper, careful, but certain. Just a little longer and we can sprout again. 

Can begin to recover
all that we lost in the war.

71

The path out of the darkness is frail, at first, you think you see light but you question why you still stumble. The head is full of cotton, every step tremulous. You try not to scare it. Suddenly you turn a corner. The air smells brighter, your blooded courses through your creaky limbs like they've been nothing but dust for millenia, you wake with air in your lungs. I scramble to finish the piles of work left abandoned in the darkness, catch up on days of unanswered letters, the shame all left behind by some magic you cannot understand. At night I do not sleep, a manic stream racing through my consciousness, I could write a book in this one small moment. 

Today I walked out to the river
sun shining painfully hopeful across the East River
air fresh with potential
New York a peaceful giant stirring from its slumber. 

All things are coming. You'll remember how to enjoy them in time.

Welcomed Them In

I can't read anymore about the world
without living in it.
I can't think anymore about a life unlived
and still hope to make it another

40. 

February doesn't roar in, it sneaks, bright early mornings but a heavy cloud in the margins, it's too tempting to succumb to the darkness, too familiar to lean into the tidal waves, deep breaths of salt water in your lungs, too easy to sink a hundred feet to the bottom. 

I go back to bed, bury myself under the covers, pull down the blinds. Remind myself: 

In 40 winters
not a one has killed me.

Out of Control

Thursday afternoons are for writing.

There is no rule for this, no law, no generally accepted absence from the day, but you take it anyway, force the fences up around your hours. Sit in silence, pour another cup of coffee, wait for the magic to seep in. 

The thing about love is it sits there waiting, patiently. It is not fearful, it builds and evolves on itself and when you are ready, it is, too. When you show up with your full force and beating heart, it will match you step for step, the thing about winter is if you make it through, 

there will be a spring. 

I never didn't love you.
Let me prove to you
what I mean.

Prescription

Heavy fog over Manhattan,
the ground thaws

conversation at
the old bar is
easy
and there's no telling what to make of that
You hold on to that which feels like
home

When I return to the tenement,
a delivery worker is trying to reach the triplex next door,
dormant this whole time and now suddenly a sign of
life

Too many signs
to piece them together yet.

In My Hands

Coast onto the Taconic State Parkway in the early afternoon, sunlight beaming across the snowy fields, watch the odometer cross one hundred thousand miles at the top of a hill, watch the darkest month of the year recede behind us, I gave the little station wagon a pat and a smile. All the things we have seen together, and the truth is I was a child when we first met. Near the outskirts of the city, a nondescript sedan rolls past, its vanity license plate saying FEBRUARY straight to my face and I burst out laughing like all the sunbeams of the Universe had coalesced in this one spot. The station wagon and I careened into Manhattan, deep gulping breaths at the sight of the Empire State building, gray and misty in the late afternoon, the FDR a fat, slow snake, but steady, alive. I slide into a nonexistant parking spot in a pile of snow on the block, you take whatever gifts the city offers and so often they are more than you could ever hope. The apartment is steaming, the plants thriving. 

We made it to February, not only alive, but more.
Hopeful. 

Everything that comes now,
is brighter.