In-Between

Her 15-year-old eyes beam with discovery, New York City all new and impossibly promising. She squeals when I point out the celebrity's home and asks me if I've ever spent New Year's Eve at Times Square. After I leave them at the Astor Place subway station, New York looks a little brighter again, a little new. Did I not arrive here once with stars in my eyes, too, and imagine a life beyond anything I had known before?

I go for a run along the river and instantly pull a muscle. There are always ways to be brought back down to earth.

Later, he looks at me and says You do not hate people, you only hate the risk of disappointing them, and all you can think is how long it's been since someone looked at you. You are not sure you are ready to be seen. A new year arrives, but they all look the same somehow, like promises of sunshine under forecasts of rain. A tarot reading would be just as useful. 

I am tired, now.
Wake me when it is over.

Pause

For days, you do not surface. Wade through mires of thousand-piece puzzles and hot chocolate, string lights turning on and off, bits of leftovers making their way from fridge shelves to countertops to crumbs on already muddled sweaters. The sun rises and sets, the temperatures plummet and climb back up again. My car freezes to a puddle that melts before I have to move it. At the back of my neck, little tendrils of thoughts begin to turn themsleves into words. On my river walk, they turn to tears, and I have no need to stop them. Let them work their way out, let them purge themselves from under my skin and create assertion instead. I begin looking at apartment listings. 

Something gets lost in poverty, in the constant ache of fear in your heart. The mind's ability to conjure joy becomes worn, dulled, it is not like it once was. She writes from behind metal bars and says the electricity they send through her synapses should make everything better, but when she comes out, the peaks and valleys are erased alike. You put on another movie, start another puzzle, hope that the joy will be pumped into your veins for you. It feels like the end of days, but perhaps humans always felt this way. Maslow's hierarchy of needs only reaches so far; eventually we will have actualized ourselves into oblivion. 

I write a to-do list for the new year. Everything seems possible when it lies ahead.

Jolly Rancher

Winter Solstice arrives like a dream: crisp, sunny Wednesday morning with white puffs billowing out of the smokestacks. I take deep breaths and warm my cheeks against my crepe paper hands, the tide is high but not for long, for every take there is a give. Familiar faces run past on their morning runs, their dog walks, their river fishing, you revel in a community that asks nothing from you in the early hours, as you drink your coffee until it turns cold. Every day after this one will be longer, now.

In the little writing space on 14th street, you wriggle into a new corner, try this perspective on for size. The pattern on the tin ceiling distracts you, the angles of the roof, the constriction of a restricted vision. Forty years of living has taught you to accept the traits that sit deep within yo, so you do. Tomorrow you will return to the place that is yours. 

Perhaps that's something to be said
for a lot of things.

Midwinter

(It’s cold, yes 

but you look at the tiny flame 

in your chest 

and it warms the blank pages 

of your calendar 

Makes the days ahead 

Thawed with hope.)

Woke Up New

Sunday mornings in the East Village are crisp, like brand new sheets of paper, like wind coming down a mountain. My car is parked near a fire hydrant, I walk past it anxiously, trying to weigh number of feet against the benevolence of the NYPD. There's no way to calculate it accurately. 

The L train is still, after Union Square there is only a handful of us left. I make my way up the stairs, up, up, up, this City is built into the sky, we dig our ways out of the ground to the top of walkup stairs. The writing nook is quiet, the coffee I make is too weak but there's a sense of peace in making it, a sort of routine that carries me into my cubicle. On a day when I could have my pick, I still sit down at my usual, and it says more about me than I can be bothered with. Here are a precious few hours of writing time: do not waste them on yourself. 

As the year comes to an end, you cannot help but look back over your shoulder and see what's become of the path behind you. Every year seems muddled and thorny at your fingertips, but at a distance, don't they begin to paint themselves in color, don't they look like favorite clothes in your closet eventually?

There is nothing wise to say about it yet. Everything is still grinding its way through your innards. Just wait patiently, remember to breathe in and then breathe out. 

You cannot find wisdom
if you are dead.

Tunnels

The silence speaks volumes. You know the sentiment without hearing the words. How the days and nights and hours get eaten up by your disappointing to do list, how there is no room for whims and creative flourishes. You stay up too late at night in revenge, sit in the magic of the dark, of the quiet, strings of Christmas lights wrapping themselves around your periphery. A car across the street blinks hazard lights into the night for hours, growing more dim and still persistent. The remains of a winter storm blanket the seaboard. You neighbor calls and asks if you have a very tall ladder. 

I recite a laundry list of occurences, no mention of the words I long to have fall from my lips. The silence speaks for you. 

You feel it stir in your belly, wait patiently.
In silence you hear what was not spoken before.

For the Rest of Us

Drive the 87 late at night, shake the last of the New Jersey drivers on the outskirts of Paramus and sail through the last ninety miles in peace. The little hamlet lies quiet, dark, stars shining and the Hudson River shivering at the end of the street. You wake hours later and do not remember where you are, the silence buries you. 

By late afternoon, we are shivering in the quaint holiday activities of town. Hot chocolate is free. The Christmas tree is lit, you want nothing but for time to drift into oblivion. The forecast calls for snow. 

She pours brandy into the egg nog, we stand on wide-grated heating vents in the Victorian house, everything is ridiculous and delightful and the flannel pajamas wait all year in the attic for this moment. 

That is all,
and that is plenty.

as the Sea

Return to the quiet space on 14th street, determined to try other pockets of placement for your writings but ending up again at the little back nook, nestled into the maze. The hive is full of writers today, escaping the foggy December afternoon, escaping whatever lies outside the walls that impedes the writing. Mary Oliver has wrestled with the angel, she is stained with light, but I am wrangling my demons, I am torn with dark. He writes to say you can join me, we begin before dawn, and you weigh your late nights against the thrill of adventure. 

Earlier, on the bridge back from Brooklyn, a book in my lap and a wet umbrella between my feet, I remembered for a brief, brief moment what it was like to live in New York, what a life in New York looked like before the walls came tumbling down. It wasn't grandiose, wasn't a persistent Times Square inside your eyelids. New York was crossing those bridges, on the way from somewhere, on the way to something. New York was the glitter of the Chrysler Building heading home from a good date, was saying yes to an unexpected moment, New York was going through motions of the mundane, but in a place that always buzzed with extraordinary. It was centuries of arriving with a dream in your pocket and a song for a bed. 

It was fifteen years of arriving on a grid and running out of questions. 

I got caught up later, in doing dishes and stringing Christmas lights, but the feeling didn't leave, not entirely. It's been three years lost without you New York. 

But I think you're coming home, at last.

in Disguise

You carrry mental illness in your bones like a family heirloom no one else wanted to take on and you were the last one holding it when the music stopped. The bartender remembers you now, asks if you want him to turn the lights up for your reading. You nestle into your regular seat in the corner and shake your head, prefer to let the darkness envelope you. This is the gift of the writing bar, a soft vacuum, an absence of time, you never want to do anything else. At the base of your spine, you begin to remember something about who it is you used to be, like a quiet but steady dial tone just outside your range of hearing, persistently vibrating against the inside of your skin. 

Everything returns. We went to the ends of the earth, to the edges of humanity, but we are still here, in one way or another. 

Take a deep breath. Get a firm grip on the hot potatoes you were given . 

And keep walking.

Do Not Hold

Time becomes irrelevant when you are doing the work. You are reminded again of the strange currents of your creative endeavors. You hold no resentment in the madness. An entire life, your father disappeared into his office for weeks on end, he wouldn't eat, the cups of coffee piled up around his desk, you tried to reach his attention but never could. Eventually he would resurface, gaunt, musty, but done. I have finished the manuscript, is all he would say, and you never knew if he was happy or not about it. 

The point of addictions is rarely to be happy, but to feel sated. 

You feel the whims of your mental illnesses melt away, the questions of purpose you never can seem to shake. A day passes, you do not remember to leave the apartment, to eat, to make your bed. Long after the city goes to sleep, you have not remembered to go to bed. Feel like you missed out on a day in the real world. 

You are not happy.
But you are sated. 

And so you carry on the legacy you have been given.

Intro

You begin a new story. 

(You cannot help yourself.)

Untold potential unfolds in front of you, little morsels of hope floating toward the sky like ash and you have to catch them in the precise moment between when they are too hot and when are no more. 

Everything that requires catching is too particular about the hows, and you feel your life wither from under you. I go for a long run in the biting wind and watch the sun beam over the East River. 

Everything that desires catching will come back for another round,

but
you still have to reach out to take it.