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.