Hallows

The illness returns, drapes your lungs in iron weights, drags your body across the room. You write your excuses into the ether and saunter slowly towards cauldrons if soup. Children in costume yell at you outside the window, it’s all laughs beyond the disease. 

I took a long slow walk along the river this morning in my daze, warm October sun drifting over Brooklyn, and a feeling so long gone I nearly didn’t recognize it sat itself at the bottom of my spine. Happiness keeps showing up, lately, keeps trying to make me believe it will stick around, I’m almost starting to listen. In the midst of all this darkness, in all this ache and falling leaf, I’m starting to think 

You are happy. 

Viral

The illness burns and burns through you, bursting into awareness in aching mornings, boring you into the boredom of confinement. At last, after years deepening isolation, you want out, you want the world again. We walk through Prospect Park closely peeled against each other like lovers, but your eyes are in the autumn leaves, your senses tickling across the perfect October days. In your fevered haze, you are not bothered with separating them, with making any hasty decision, but later, on your solitary morning walk along the East River, you are able to sift through the pieces, sort out your insights. 

The other day, in the quiet sunshine, I felt joy. In retrospect, for a minute, you feared it was a mirage, just a trick of the lights, but the feeling reminded itself to you again, again, quietly but certain, unwavering.

In a quiet October morning,  you decide to believe it. Decide to be unwavering in return  

Something Meaty

The illness leaves and returns with a vengeance. I walk breathless along an east river in its prime, New York beams in October, makes up for all its ills, kisses your bruised knees and tries to make you forget what has passed. Everything aches but I don't want to listen to it, I walk breathless along the east river and feel something new, something familiar but far away, like a distant memory. It takes you a moment to realize it is joy. Like you dragged your wasted heart, your weary soul through a thousand deserts and were landed suddenly on the banks of an oasis. Like you'd been a jumble of jigsaw for years and suddenly all the pieces sat neatly together, sat soft in your chest. 

I came back to the little shoebox on 6th street and everything looked different, clearer, crisp in its contrasts. It's been a long, cold, lonely winter. 

Maybe this is how it ends.

Raises

 The streets don’t look different, the air doesn’t vibrate with potential. You think perhaps you shouldn’t make mountains out of mole hills but you also long for mountains, so it’s hard not to look for them. When you leave him on the L train you are softer than before, but it may just be a trick of the lights, just the fog rolling in across the east river. You are different now, harder, carved in marble by apprentice hands. The east river remains as ever. 

You wonder what it is it’s trying to say. 

and the Fury

Labored breathing, heavy limbs, I make my way across the avenues to test my abilities for errands. When I get there I’ve forgotten to bring my wallet. The east village is all Saturday morning sunshine, stretching and yawning along St Marks as the restaurants sweep sidewalks and set up chairs for the day. 

Crossing through Tompkins, I find myself reluctant to leave it, the steady murmur of people in joy, an open park bench. I sit down and find an abandoned copy of the Sound and the Fury. Within its pages, someone has circled, “She smelled like trees.” A man sits down next to me and I realize too late it is a storyteller long admired. We sit in silence in the sunshine. I never get the chance to tell him. Dogs in costume swell into the park for the Halloween Parade, New York is sunshine and smiles, a perfect October Saturday in a city that adores its own narratives, it would have been perfect with my hand in yours. Instead I took a slow run along the river and thought about a time before everything broke in us.

The city gives its gifts when you well and truly need them. A book on a park bench. A storyteller silent by your side. A long slow stride in sunshine the kind you used to take before everything broke. Your lungs burn in illness but no matter. 

When the gifts are given to you, you take them. 

Now it's on you to make something of the treasures you've unwrapped.

All of the Time

Your pockets of time turn to large swaths of empty as the illness moves in and takes over your body. It will not name itself, will not disclose its intentions, just sits on your chest for days on end and tears you from your slow and steady build toward stability. He offers to bring you food, to make you laugh, to watch you sleep, and you don't know how to explain that your brief flirt with what it is to be human ended in collapsing bridges and boarded airports. It was too much work to get there once, how could I possibly do it again?

I sit in the open window, eating ramen and tapping out poetry, trawl my own words to find the key, to find the secret that unlocks a happiness I know I once carried. The words show up empty handed, show up without their usefulness in tow, I close the books and grasp at straws. The illness sits in your lungs like fire smoldering in the underbrush: quiet, insidious persistent. It's just that fear can be a little over-eager and misguided, says a Post-It on the wall, a gentle reminder from a kinder time. You finish another book, think I can do better.

Wonder if you really ever got back up and dusted yourself off,
or if everything before this was child's play. 

So Good

The Taconic on a Tuesday is easy, sunlight rolling over orange hills, out of state cars making their way toward the City in no hurry. Arrive at an east village unchanged by your absence, though you are perpetually changed by its presence. He asks for pockets of your time in unassumed corners, you forget to look at your calendar. It is late and you are anything but 

tired. 

Demand

By morning, the trees are slick with rain, cold October Monday cringing at commuters along Main street, on their way to Albany for another day of pushing paper. She writes of heartbreak, four decades of ache returning to their familiar swansongs, they arrange their fatal patterns and ready themselves to strike. You wish you could protect her body from the blows, but she opens her arms to welcome them, and it is not your maze to navigate. You vow to move differently on your own. 

Eventually the coffee sinks in, the quiet Victorian house stretches itself into action. You eye the to do-list, wonder what matters. Turn the heat up in the old iron vents, and think perhaps it will tell you on its own.

Sleep

The way up the mountain winds in familiar fashions, sunlight gleaming through hillsides on fire, maple leaves trilling in the breeze. The car ahead of you slows to a crawl; you know they are simply mesmerized. When we pass, an old man sits smiling in the driver's seat. We cannot possibly be angry. 

Hike past throngs of people, reach a quiet outcrop in the shade, the Catskill mountains billowing out around us and a great waterfall roaring at our side. We make jokes about the fresh air in our lungs, about how our familiarity with tenement walkups help us get up the steep steps to the mountaintop. Everything is a freedom. Later, we sit reading on quiet couches, red wine in our glasses and apple pie in our bellies, there is no panic the upstate cannot soothe, no noise it cannot silence. He writes convoluted soliloquies of longing, you try them out on your body to see how they may fit, but it's too soon to tell. You take warm baths and fall asleep in a town silent as death. 

Silent as a heart cleansed of darkness.

Chime

Familiar ripples along your skin remind you that something of you remains inside the stone monument you've become. You wonder if this is what it feels like to crawl out of the cave. Too many false starts to bring out the morsels of hope left in your pocket, but curiosity peeks around the corner. I was a person once. 

That's all this is about. 

We venture into the world to become human, stand face to face with others to see ourselves reflected in their eyes, try on someone else's voice in our ears and gauge if it sounds like home. 

You shake the dust off your aching shoulders, try to stretch your limbs toward the light. Let the taste of possibility sit on your tongue, try to see if you remember it. 

Try to remember what it's like to want something again.

Murray Street

A picture appeared on the screen, a reminder of days past, an unexpected punch in the gut. Didn't the sunlight look brighter, didn't your eyes seem clearer? Reminders of your strength, of how you built and dragged yourself across coals, across oceans. A whole life has come and gone between. When he looks at you with bright lights in his eyes you don't know how to tell him the bulbs seem to have gone out in yours. 

In the middle of the night, I wake to the sound of unexpected proximity. A man climbs the fire escape outside your open window, unfazed by your revolt. You lie awake for an hour, staring at the full moon and wondering at signs. The man climbs back down, jumps onto the street, walks away. I fall back asleep. 

You wonder where people find the switch
to turn the light back on.

Didn't Even KnowIt

Allen Ginsberg stares at you from the page, those cocker spaniel eyes but always an emphasis on the cock, it's a life of contradictions. Inside your apartment, the October sun beams warmth onto your skin but along the river the wind was bitingly cold. You read a children's book and compare notes, compare turns of phrase, compare daydreams, and somehow do not come up short, it's all surprising. In the early morning, the little dog jumps up on the bed and nestles in to a warm nook along my side, it's another day of silence, of forgetting about time, of sinking into whatever words concoct themselves at the nape of my neck. You tell her it's too soon to hope, but the gears warm up without your input, and you do not stop them. We all have to train so that one day when we need the muscle, it will do what it's supposed to. 

October stretches inside you. Says here is a moment that is not too hot, not too cold, here is a moment that is just right. You sit down at the typewriter and smile at its blank space. Feel invincible at the top of its page.

East Village Grieve

You spend a day in silence, in literature and thought and sunshine. Walk the little dog around the neighborhood and marvel at the East Village in October sunshine. The community parks are all abuzz with music and poetry, you add an extra block to your route and the dog delights. Soft jazz wafts in from your open windows, you know there has been a fall when you were happy, but it seems so long ago now, there's a time after this when you won't remember what a smile feels like, I've been in the dark for years.

One day I walked out of an office and I never walked back in. I know the road has been long, and tiring, and impossible to navigate, but you have not left it, I promise. You're stumbling, legs scratched from the bramble, but you are still moving along, you are still taking step after step. A little dog lies sleeping at your side. Your father goes on a book tour at 70. Every page that lies ahead is still unwritten. 

So write it.

Rear View

A small dog moves into the shoebox on 6th street. She is just the right size for what little floor space you have to spare. Just the right size for the hawks in Tompkins Square Park, a bearded old man reminds you as you pass him on a stoop. A pony arrives at the park and everyone is smiles, but later you learn that someone was stabbed on the corner not 15 minutes later. New York is strange that way. 

A friend arrives on a train from the South, months of separation disappear in the returns. The city is loud, and warm, and bubbling, something has returned, or is ready to, or is itching to and all it needs is for you to open the gate.

You stand with your hand fiddling with the lock, considering your options. Wonder if you're ready for what's to come.

Makes Right

In the early morning, remnants of a hangover remind themselves on your brow. A late walk home across the villages, the Empire State Building nestled in a swath of rainclouds, the October dread relentless. It only begins to lift when you have just given up hope, when you have dug your nails in at the shoreline and only just decided not to drown. Curiosity resuscitates your cat, it's a joke of words, I refill my cup and watch you unfurl little tendrils around my edges. My great-grandfather's gold watch ticks comfortably at my side, reminding me only of my own insignificance: the days will tick by even after I am gone. There is only what you will make of your time here, everything else will be lost on you. 

He says in real life it's more, and you think that's exactly what you've been trying to say, but haven't been able to. 

Tread carefully around the fires.
Remember how they keep you warm.

Poor Little Rich Boy

Avenue B remains, your flowers unmoved by your absence. Tompkins Square Park rests in the rain, remnants of a hurricane washing the streets. Everything is dirty, but you are happy. That is what New York is. He writes regrets across the time zones, but it is too late now, you are already somewhere else. That is what New York is. 

There's a moment in return, when your edges are still soft from the country, when you find your brows furrow, your jaw tighten, when you retrieve the rush of subway stairs, a transition that occurs before you've even reached your front door. They have Sunday dinner waiting when you arrive, and you forget you were ever away. 

Open the windows, let in fall. You have made all the space in the world
to take in whatever is ready to come.

And

The sun rises quietly, Saturday morning but it doesn't count the hours, only does what it is meant to do. A hot air balloon rises above the hillsides, quietly defying gravity like a deep breath to greet it. The tops of the mountains turn golden with autumn, a million quaking aspens leading the way into a new season. Do not be afraid, they whisper in the wind, here is light still. I get out of bed reluctantly, put the sheets in the washing machine, look at all I own and wonder how to fit it into such a small container. It is good practice for how to furnish one's heart. 

There is always room. 

The hot air balloon sinks, lowering itself gently back into the valley. There's a way to return home that feels
just
like love.