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.
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