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.
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