Never More

And this is where we write, she says, pointing at the closed wooden door. The hallway smells like coffee and radiator steam, beads of sweat creep down your back after mounting the long staircase. An editor at the kitchen table asks what I'm writing, and when I try to answer only joy spills out. I fill out the paperwork, she gives me a key. Opening the door feels like walking through a portal, like unwrapping the most intriguing present, my skin tingles. 

There's a silence in the space that holds you. 14th street lies somewhere not too far away but the distance feels immeasurable. You do not take out your ruler. For a short moment, time is your own again, like it used to be, not like you wielded it into submission but like you made friends with it. The street grows dark outside the window, you are oblivious to the changes of the world, and why shouldn't you be. 

There are too many worlds
still needing exploring.

Re:Cover

You're new, I say, before considering whether that's appropriate. The bar is empty, but for a quiet writer nursing a tea in the corner and a young pair on their first date by the window. Their animated body languages compete with each other for ultimate consent,  Can you tell that I like you? The bartender's name is Connor. Another regular comes in, and everything feels like home, like it used to, like there was a time before everything fell apart and we can still nestle into that feeling. We can still be who we meant to be. (Do you remember when they made toaster oven pizzas in the corner and you had to sneak in to use the bathroom when no one was watching? Sometimes we love in sickness and in health without even realizing until it's over.)

The corner bodega brings in the Christmas trees for the season, they steal an inch that becomes a football field and stretch their wires well past the green door on 6th street. When I walk out I stumble straight into the season, and there's no being mad about foliage in your eyes. My apartment is half a mile of string lights now, my nails are miles deep of dirt from digging out of the abyss, it never ends, it never ends, that is the lesson I forget in the deepest of darkness, that all is not over at the bottom, it's just you'll see it again. Reliable like transition. Lean in.

A large group of college students tumbles in, lingers in the back alcove, consdering their next steps, overjoyed at unexpected reunions. You wonder if it's okay to shush people in a bar. I've been coming here since you were in diapers. The snark seems a good sign that you are in recovery.  You gather whatever rosebuds make themselves available to you at the peak of the rollercoaster, cushion the fall in the descent. You cling to words like life rafts. 

You won't realize they are until it's over.

and I Say

The furniture giant feels like home only until it doesn't, only until its safe reprieve becomes a tangle of puzzle pieces not fitting according to instruction, with parts missing, with arguments built into the tapestry of its design, I stood in a corner of the closet organizing section trying to dispense with tears in a way that would give rise to no questions. In New York they let you cry on the subway without so much as a second glance, in the subway you are buffered by a quiet comfort, but underneath the glaring lights and white walls of inexpensive home goods I was unsure of the rules, unsure if I would be be left alone in the aisles of pillows as I contemplated self-worth against the price point at which I would permit purchases of duck down. Am I worth $24.99? $87? 

I walked out with neither, so you do the math. 

They say no couple comes into IKEA without a fight in their future, say the confined corridors create conflict, but I never recognized my own skin in those descriptions, knew only joy. It turns out sometimes when they say things, it comes out garbled, a riddle. It turns out when you fight in IKEA it is only with yourself. 

And she is a significant other
you have yet to figure out how to
leave behind.

Default

An island washed in sunshine, I turn my head and squint as I walk down the promenade. The calm of a holiday eve, of the deep breath before a tinseled madness, you let the joy build in your heart in the silence. Spend fifteen hours a day working to close up shop in time, how far you’ve come, how deeply entrenched in the rat race. 

You still believe you can get out. 

There’s a current along your spine, built from decades of contrarian influence, from generations of firestarters, that says stepping off is easy as scratching an itch, that says when everything burns you can build from scratch. 

The years pass, they mold you and knead you into unfamiliar shapes, 

but you don’t have to listen to them 

if you don’t want. 

Mildly

Suddenly the weather is mild, you peel layers off your skin along the river and stare straight into the sunlight. Remember again how much the sunlight carries you. What is lost in the dark. I find a penny heads up on the pavement and remember how I used to feel like the universe was winking at me  

A holiday races toward you, you scramble to prepare. Remember all the things good around you. 

Start there.  

Instant

Make your way across Tompkins Square Park, tears streaming in the bitter wind. Remember how it always was to run freezing down into a subway station and be caught up by beads of sweat trickling down your back, your sweater itching at the collar. Remember a lot of things about a life before the one of the odd Intermission. The city begins to look the same underneath the soles of your feet now, the same when you tuck yourself in at night and lie staring at it from out your window. 

In the little writing nook on 14th street, you snag a coveted window seat and remember why you're better off writing in a cave: The goings on of the street below capture all of your attention. A pigeon has snuggled in on your windowsill, feathers ruffled against the cold, conserving energy for sunnier days and stray bread crumbs. They make their living here, somehow, too.

Safely nestled into your cubicle, you dive down innumerable rabbit holes, discovering and rediscovering creative joys you have spent three years inadvertently beating out of yourself. That which is hidden in snow remains, you remind yourself, but not without losing some of its luster, not without partly turning to mulch. 

The first day I lived in New York City, our new landlord drove us to pick up a bunk bed we had found on craigslist. East 4th Street, between B and C. Some of the crew stayed behind to go to the grocery store on the Southeast corner. It is still there today. As I paid the nice young couple the cash for the bed, I could only ask how did you get this place? New York was new and impossible, so close I could touch it but entirely out of reach. The idea of an apartment in the East Village seemed absolutely preposterous. The idea of making a life, a real life not just a desperate clawing fleeing moment, seemed like something other people did, something I could never build myself up to deserve. 

Some days I think I have achieved no thing in life except making a life in New York City. 

Some days I think that is more than enough.

Booster

This may hurt a bit, she says, as she pricks me with the needle. I walk home on a Friday night in the city, the 20-somethings heading to their parties, and think about how tickling it felt to believe in the magic of an unknown evening. 

By morning, my skin aches and I spend 24 hours writhing in side effects, unable to leave bed or remember how to think at all. The reprieve was scheduled in my calendar. Nowadays everything is planned, even recovery. I see the years fall away from me but also return, old, unwanted garments I thought I had discarded which turned out only to gather dust in my closet waiting for the right time. I try them on for size, they cling to my skin and weigh me down, I fear they’ll suffocate me this is not what I wanted. 

Take a deep breath. Remember I know how to remove what I know longer want. Remember I know what it feels like when your skin fits the home you’ve created for yourself. 

Go to sleep in a fever dream. Determine your start over in the morning. 

Such a Taste for Flesh

The demons are back. How long they stayed away in years of sunshine, how strange to get a taste from a whole other life then have it all taken away again. You get nothing for free. 

The same cuts bleed across your skin, like old friends you hoped you’d never see again, and now you have to speak with them like your languages are the same. Your tongue is unwilling to form the words, but the demons drag them out of you regardless, they come out twisted and fumbled. You hate everything they say. 

A storm is brewing. You prepare your armor. Determine not to wait until it pulls the roof from off your house. Step straight into the maelstrom 

and pull out your sword. 

Do Less

Fourteen hours tethered to the little corner desk, I forget to check the time and float into the weighted blanket of a good deadline and creative works. The bank account says maybe that's fine, and the days fall out from under you. He tries to explain how the hollowness fills his entire inside and he's not sure quite how to smile if nothing reminds him to. Your soft heart hasn't fully hardened, you realize, and perhaps that is all for the better. 

I don't yet know what the point of all of this is. I'm still choosing to believe there is one.

Stannar Du

Too far from the path you’d finally found, spend your days weeding through thickets. The sky is gray above the Manhattan Bridge as you make your way out into the world. So familiar with this aversion to the light, with the layers folding in on themselves. You don’t know how to turn it around on your own, can’t get the wheels spinning in the right direction. You know there was joy here somewhere, a bearable lightness, you know now how it feels underneath your skin and it’s too hard to navigate a world without it. 

It’s been too many days with

to now suddenly be without. 

Hamlet

Too many days pass in silence: quiet sunrises, falling leaves along the river, Lincoln Center after dark when everything gleams of New York. The mourning doves line up along your windowsill, basking in the sunlight and escaped radiator heat. On a sunny Saturday, you pack the last of her potted plants and jewelry into the station wagon and drive a person who once was your home across the river to the settled life in suburbia. You absorb her smiles, then hold your breath until you are safely upended on the other side of the Holland tunnel. 

The temperature drops in the middle of your run along the river, you cannot be mad when November beams at you. You dream of London in the spring, 

Everything ties itself together somewhere. You are just not sure, yet, where.

Paragraphs

Step into a rickety walkup, countless staircases ahead and the promise of other dimensions hiding behind the door at their end. She shows me the kitchen, the unending supply of freshly brewed coffee, the creaking wood floors, while I glimpse at the closed door and wonder what lies inside. 

When at last she guides you to your cubicle, a cocoon punctured only by one skylight hinting at fire escapes and sunshine beyond, you feel a gratitude settle along your spine, a quiet humming like electrical lines spreading across your skin, an itch in your fingertips that has been sorely missing. 

We have been away for so long, have been absent from our own lives and suffering without remembering since the heavy blanket was draped across our town all those years ago. I have been half a life, half alive, I have been a weighted shadow, I have seen a face in the mirror but it has not been my own. Tears appear in my eyes that only make me smile. 

I have made it out of the valley of death again,
somehow, impossibly,
and it feels as if
the taste of life has never been
sweeter than
this.

Wasn’t True

Chelsea lies quiet on a Monday night in daylight saving times, the night darker somehow, the sidewalks empty in anticipation. A Freedom towers at the end of sixth avenue but I turn east on 10th street, ogling the foyers of west village townhouses with their high ceilings and refined silences. Somewhere near university place it occurs to me: I am smiling. Somewhere near university place it occurs to me there is a song in my step, a joy in my heart. I cross the east village in a hum, the avenues full of yellow cabs again, the asphalt buzzing, one could almost forget the years of death, of morgues in Central Park and careful whispers across window panes. 

I cut through Tompkins square park, a cop car trailing me in silence past the darkest corners, and I finally understand again the feeling in my chest. 

When I found myself breathing, after months of drowning, that was only the discovery of a survival. I was still heaving on the shoreline, still confusing tears for salt water. 

Now, suddenly, on a Monday night in lower Manhattan, I wasn’t only alive anymore. Now, suddenly, I am living. 

Different

Something chafes, and you end the sprouting tendrils before they attach properly. Once the words are spoken, you don’t look back for a second. New York swelters like an august afternoon, but we turn the clocks back, the streets dark in the afternoon and littered with leaves while you walk bare legged home down sixth street. 

You could feel weighed down by what might be seen as a failure, you could suffer under the pressure of your own ruminations. But they are no longer there. 

The dark is here, but all you feel is free. 

A Ware

The bar is around the corner, the walk short. The evening bursts around you like an open window, ajar to fireworks but quickly closed. You return home well before its time. 

There's an open loop in a quiet corner of your chest. You itch to close it. He says maybe Los Angeles. 

You think maybe you close your own loops. 

The forecast says sunshine and summer heat. Your station wagon is parked on the corner. 

Everything is better than it's ever been.

Remember, Remember

The bar is quiet when you first walk in, a few young boys and a scruffy regular lean against the dark wood. You haven't seen the bartender in ages, she pours your regular with a heavy hand and updates you on the latest. I've been sick so long, she says, I probably shouldn't even be here. But I can't stand to think about it anymore. You can commiserate. 

Your corner table is free, it waits for you, as it has waited for you for years now, ready when you are. The weather outside yells of summer despite the fallen leaves, and you get a hundred mosquito bites despite the early sunset. The clock behind the bar lies, it's been twenty to ten for as long as you can remember, it's an inside joke with people who probably aren't even here anymore. 

But you are here. Again, again, still, after all this time, you are still here. The city tried to wring you out like a sponge for years and you remained, then the the world tried to wring your city out and you clenched your fist at the Universe for allowing this heartache, but you remained. Now the illness has washed the last of your weariness away, you have only love now, you have only remain, you have only the bare bones of whatever madness drove you to this city, to the world, to this life.

You're ready to see that
it is more than enough.

Overwhelm

A writing day appears on your doorstep, quiet at first, unsure of its footing. A few stray jabs from a to-do list catch you off guard. You attempt to catch the opportunities afforded you, as the sky outside your window breaks into impossible shades of blue underneath a November sun. How you used to fear these days, thinking the dark would reach you so early. But escaping to the little island gave you the most precious gift of time, and you have months yet before the weight breeds in your chest. 

As the illness recedes off of you, and words begins to sift into the empty spaces it leaves behind, you feel that age-old itch in your spine again, feel that elusive longing for all the things in the world outside your window, feel the pieces within you fit again into a puzzle on Manhattan's grids. She asks why you moved here to begin with and all you have to tell her is It was meant to be. That time seems so long ago now, the moment when first you knew, when he lit a fire in you that you could not ignore. You said so often that he changed your life and for a while the words seemed to lose their meaning, but their content never truly did. 

One day in a late August of your youth, you landed on these New York City streets, and nothing would ever, ever be the same. If the moments you remember what that meant are few now, it never makes them any
less
precious.