Turnpike

By the time we make our way out the Holland Tunnel, it has begun to drizzle: New Jersey's finest. You approach the destination in a sort of breathless anticipation, unsure of if there's anything to worry about. Usually all that needs worrying about is you. 

By the end of the night - hurrying home to walk the dog - you are more questions than answers, although with more answers than you had before leaving the island. Some people move in on you like snow melt: slowly, thoroughly, delightfully, even before you were aware you were thawing. You decide maybe you can carry the questions with you for a while, yet. Later, in the witching hour, you lie awake and listen to the steady breaths of Chelsea walkups, to the unsteady breaths of your own wary insides. Maybe I can carry the questions with me for a while, yet, you repeat to yourself. 

The sleep that follows is the best you've had in weeks.

Act

When you wake, the illness has passed from your brow, the morning reminds itself as a weekday. Your dreams were too kind to wake from, you ask for them back, but no one answers. The dog jumps around you until you feed her, then promptly settles in in the warm spot on the bed that you left behind. You cannot blame her. These in-between days are a strange limbo, a mountain of possibilities, a chance to erase what's been and start over. 

You wonder if you'd like to start over.

Site

A fever appears across your shoulder. You vow to sweat it out. 

You bring out leftovers from a feast, the dog an inch from your hand at any moment. She was taken off the Puerto Rican streets, she was taken from a life of hunger and dog fights and now she walks out of her way to avoid purebreds in the streets, now she sits an inch away from my hand, her whole body quivering, hoping for morsels even though she just was fed.

Suddenly it's clear as day, how scarcity sits in one's bones, like the body can grow but the vast emptiness inside does not shrink in proportion, it eats up the insides and reminds itself at every turn. You were raised hungry, you remain hungry. 

I speak to her in soft tones as I feed her bits of meatball, pears, egg, I say When will you learn that you aren't living on the streets, when will you learn that you are safe now, that you will get all the food you need? and the words are scarcely out of my mouth before realize I am saying it to myself. 

When will you learn that you have made it out of the woods,
that you have rowed your boat to shore?

When will you believe that you are safe?

Day

For an entire Christmas Eve, you sleep. The dog is delighted, she buries her body in the blankets along your side, nuzzles her little nose into the crook of your arm. Your breaths rattle, but your chest is full of warmth. When you wake up on Christmas morning, isn't your head a little lighter?

With rest, you start to remember the stories from which you've hidden, the plans which so so loved to feel in your blood stream. The end of the year draws nigh, a new one readies its lungs for deeps breaths and big steps. 

Where will you go when it arrives?

Who will you be when the questions are asked of you?

Rest

He says, this is just what I wanted for Christmas, like you appeared on the back of a sleigh, wrapped in ribbons. You make a note to ask the Universe what it means by this ease, I turned over a tails up penny in the street the other day and it’s still there waiting every day when I walk by now, why is no one taking the luck when it’s given so readily. 

Christmas waits in the wings, rest waits in the wings, you have worked so hard to get not where you’re going but to all the places you’ll go. Now, for a minute, you may rest on your laurels.

Now, says the Universe, you may get what’s been yours to come. 

Den of Thieves

Winter floods in through the open window, you forgot to close it after he walked out the door, forgot to warm yourself when your skin was left bare, you walk the dog along the river and she sleeps for the rest of the morning, it is winter. 

Somewhere, bits of poetry lie floating in your inseam, somewhere the magic of a holiday season streams past your subconscious, somewhere there is music if only you had the time to grab it, if only you had the wits to unearth yourself above the surface of an oil slick on the ocean. Time is running out, the white rabbit says, what will you make of what little you have? The dog looks at you like she hasn't been fed in months, like she hasn't seen the light of day and you think, same, and take you both out for another walk. 

You don't have to have the answers yet. 

You only have to keep walking towards them.

That's All I Wanted

Return to the apartment on 46th street, see it now like a hotel room with your things in it. Nothing looks like anything, and the space feels like a cubicle without life. On 22nd street, the buildings are low, the bricks have a comforting song to them, you take the long way round with the dog, she is thrilled. There's a Christmas tree in the apartment, an open bottle of red in the kitchen, your limbs are tired but your mind is full of joy, how can you possibly be sad about this. 

Only a few days left to soak up the season. You are always a step behind, every year a step behind. You vow to spend the week a step ahead. 

Vow to be better than you were the day before.

La Lucha

You tumble out of Grand Central Station, the afternoon sun streaming at the far end of Lexington Avenue, New York forever welcoming you home like nothing has changed, like you haven't changed, even though every time you return to the little island everything is different. 

I take the most important parts from the midtown apartment, turn off the lights, and head downtown. Chelsea lies like a promise to the south, with its low skyline and old buildings, with the little dog waiting by the door. Your muscles ache in that way that reminds you only of questions answered, of new ones placed in your lap. Futures look different when someone else paints them, you try them on for size and find that you like the lilt on your tongue. 

The road hasn't been conquered yet, but neither have you. You tear the pages from your calendar and watch them float away. New York will welcome you home whenever you show up, in whatever way you arrive on its shores.

Hudson Line

Scramble with the last of the things, check for errant chargers and turn the oven off (did you turn the oven off?), you live next door to Grand Central now, so the transit time isn't long. You turn off the last light switch, call for the elevator, and make your way down Lexington Avenue, seventeen years you've been making your way along Lexington Avenue, it never ceases to remind itself to you.

The express train waits at the far end of the concourse, you cross the large train station with its histories, with its stories, you rush though you are not in a hurry, upend yourself in a seat on the Hudson side of the car, tell him you made it, tell him you're making it, tell him though the days are short, the life is long and to wait for you in Poughkeepsie. 

Everything that has yet to come
will come. 

Don't say your goodbyes,
say your I love yous.

and a Clock Still Strikes

Some days aren't yours at all. 

I race downtown in the freezing afternoon, sunlight like a long-lost relative I didn't remember I missed. My skin freezes but my chest radiates, New York was always a city on the move, the still midtown days erase this knowledge from my blood. Perpetually late, I hop on a bike in Chelsea and speed east, to the comforts of familiar corners. There is much left to do, of course, always so much left to do, how do I never catch up to the Red Queen, only see her coattails disappear around the bends. 

Anyway, all I wanted to say was I haven't forgotten the promises I made you. I haven't lost the shooting stars you gave me or the trail of pennies you left to light my path. I know some days it seems like I've been devoured by the grid again, that all my days are naught but to-lists, but you forget.

The Universe can fit in a single silent moment,
a lifetime of a cosmos in a single breath.

Time

You lose track again, you falter and fall, feel a hundred miles behind, but when at last you get to sit down and write, it's like the weight of the world falls off your hips, you are light as a feather, you are fine.

She writes to say his best friend died, and the way your little east village family rallies could warm the coldest of hearts. You tell him you will plant yourself at the usual bar, will be there from open to close, and whatever he might need from that space will be there waiting for him. Yeah maybe one drink would be good, he says.

I whispered words into the rain last night that I hadn't heard myself say in so long. Let my heart beat to a rhythm so long missing that it felt rusty at the return, and I stumbled as it skipped a few beats. I don't know yet if these castles in the sky are built of brick or just the lightest of clouds, but perhaps I don't have to know yet. 

Perhaps grace is the space we allow ourselves for not knowing. Perhaps grace is sitting at the regular bar from open to close and whenever we are ready for a drink, there is someone there to drink it with.

Race

The days are supposed to be quiet, but they are not. They are supposed to give you space to breathe, and weave, and twirl into the ether, but they do not, and you do not know how to make them. You're certain there's a trick somewhere, certain you read an instruction manual with the right steps to take but you cannot remember where you saw it now, and the places you've been are so far behind there's no way to reach back and grab it. 

You book a bus ticket, pack a day bag, pack a word of wisdom, wonder what comes next. Adrenaline runs through your veins like bolts of lightning. You know there's a way to lasso it for your own bidding, but now you are just being dragged along. 

All in due time.
All in due time.

Scratcher

You walk into the bar early, Monday afternoon and only a few scattered patrons chatting quietly at the tables. Your regular bartender is back after summer, you're back after summer, New York remains as ever, reliable. He gave the cats away, he did a two week stint at a Frank Sinatra show in Ocean City, you tell him of the Road, he looks tired, did the city break him so soon, did Broadway not shine so bright in the rearview mirror, you want to tell him that everything is his for the taking, want to tell him that if you can live in a Midtown darkness without an address to your name then he can carry on without the cats, that New York has so much more to offer and when the seasoned bartender shows up and breaks into a beaming smile upon seeing you, you want to tell New York that it is everything that was ever good in your life, that anything you dared to do came from living on these streets and when the night at last is over and you pack up and go home, you miss your stumbling walk down sixth street but at least you are here, at least you are here, and it mended every broken bone in your soul,
you are not sorry. 

Some days your cup is filled
with more than it could ever hold;
and those days are worth
all the rest.

Some kind of Way

A week ends, a month end, you wash up on shore like a wet rag all wrung out, but also like you haven’t seen sunlight in months and now it’s beaming down on you: your tired soon dissipates. Take the bus out to a rainy Brooklyn, dig into a storage unit full of pieces revealing who you’ve been before. You wonder how much of this you could burn. 

Wonder what a home is, if you were to truly define it. 

He says he’ll pick you and your unearthed treasures up, take you all out to lunch, take you safely back to your midtown home, says it like it’s nothing, like it just makes sense and you think maybe it does. 

On the car in front of the bus, a Christmas tree lies tied to the roof. You think, that’s alright then. 

Wrapped

The last day of the month feels like a strange precipice, like an edge you've been looking at in the approach but which now you hesitate to leap from. What is behind door number one? You know only the mayhem through which you wade, the sense of control is the payoff you're reluctant to give up.

I send a 300-page manuscript to the editor, and the fear doesn't grip me until it's too late to take it back. What if they pull back the curtain and see me with my wizard strings, see me with no clothes, see that it's all smoke and mirrors, what was I thinking? 

At the edge of the cursor is another manuscript entirely, a young girl stands waiting, patient. She has many obstacles yet to face, many journeys yet to wander, but she waits there, knowing that soon you will return to her and only her. Soon you will find your place again, and it will make all the wait worth it. 

You take a deep breath, count down the wild list of things remaining to do. At the end of the tunnel waits a young girl on a blinking cursor, and soon you may reach her, soon you can take her and and walk her to the ends of the earth.

November

A month comes to an end,
the days tumble from your open palms. 

There is a light beyond this tunnel. 

No good work was done in vain.

Bury

Fourteen hours per day you sit digging through the deadlines, trying to prioritize in a pile that will not allow itself to be sorted. The hours are only so many, the life is only so long, you have been given this brief moment back in your City and you are squandering it to the yoke. 

Winter is here, the holidays are here, your brief respite on morning walks turns your cheeks rosy and you regret not yet unearthing your winter clothes from their storage. Life arrives much quicker than you expect, always, always. But when he asks if you are free for coffee, you shuffle the piles, you clear a little space in the middle of the room, you think, Life arrives much quicker than you expect, whether you are there for it or not.

So you might as well be there for it, after all. 

Time

It sways and swerves in waves all its own, reminders of times past, friendships entwine into the present and build on memories future, you laugh into the space created among yourselves. She asks how it feels to be back in New York and when you say it feels like home, she smiles, satisfied with an answer she was afraid to request. You are never fully sure if answers you give are merely the ones you read in other people's pleading eyes. 

Navigating unknown street corners, you make your way to the river. Here is the park where we met halfway during the pandemic, floats past your consciousness, memories of strange accomodations to unreliable gameday rules. You see the river in the distance, November gray, an entrance only half-familiar from days before they closed the promenade. Your steps are heavier than they've been, slower, but you take them, and after only a few minutes do you not feel different? Do you not feel exactly the same? Joy returns to you in strange pushes and pulls, it, too, twisted into time so that the two are indistinguishable and though you don't know which end to untangle, you are not bothered of the work. 

To have joy, and the time to find it, is a better gift than you could have known to ask for.

Gratitude

At last a moment comes when nothing presses on you, when nothing is asked of you. You spend the day writing, spend the day thinking of stories and myths, of how people become who they are, spend the day rewriting your own history in someone else's journey because you know no other way to repair what has been broken, but today you are not unhappy about it. Midtown carries on outside my window and I ignore it. I feel a step behind again, like I haven't quite gotten my bearings yet, but I'm working on it. 

I'm working on it. 

One of these days you'll catch up to the Red Queen, have a nice cup of tea in her presence, talk about the things you've seen on your travels, but not yet, not today. Today you're just catching your breath, before you can try to reach her
again.

Lineage

The story swifts and swerves around you, appears at the most unconvenient moments, burns the back of your eyes until rivers come out, I stood crying in the middle of a workout class and couldn't get it to stop, is this what they mean when they say face your fears? I write kindness into children's stories when what they really need is to see death and know someone will get them out alive. On holidays you're allowed to drink bourbon at lunch. 

So you do.

Organize

The last few hours are like pushing through boulders. You steel yourself and ignore how your muscles ache. Completing the last items on your to do list and closing up shop gives you no satisfaction, this is the great cruelty of life. You read a story that sounds like it was written at you, it knocks the air out of your lungs.

Leave the cavern for the first time in days, deposited into the middle of a transit day unlike any other, Midtown Manhattan like the eye of the anthill. I find bourbon, find fresh air, I wasn't meant for skyscraper living and it shows. The doorman remembers me, says he's put packages aside for me, I pick up the bread crumbs where they're strewn and remark at the insight.

A day to give thanks arrives, to celebrate a bountiful harvest, to take stock of the year that's been. You don't know where to start. But whatever it's been, it's putting some of that air back inside your lungs.

Tumble

Another day comes and goes at the desk, I do not leave the room, do not see the world. My body contracts into itself, is made shorter by the oppression of a sweatshop, is made compact by compression. My neck creaks. I take a personality test that tells me I was broken early and am a jagged patchwork of a person, but it says it in an empathetic tone. I do not fault it for my own makeshift casts and splints. No wonder it hurts so to move through this world. 

For a brief moment, I stumble, get distracted by the one thousand bees stinging my insides, by the jellyfish tentacles wrapped around my throat. Midtown grows dark outside my window, a rainstorm drenches the city, the Thanksgiving travelers. I know I will be able to breathe, soon, will be able to step blinking into the light again, know I have made myself free. 

I am the adult in the room now.
I'm in charge of keeping the time.

Trigger

You spend twelve hours at a desk, plowing through the mounds of work that need finishing before you can turn your shingle to holiday mode. By the time you are set free, you feel like a wrung out rag, like sea foam, and like you've nothing left to write into the ether. 

But you made a promise, so you turn on the soundtrack, set the lighting. You made a promise so you open the word processor, pull out your proverbial piece of paper. And as you sink into the rituals you have created, the weariness wears off, the ache in your arm seems less volatile, the pressing and oppressing monoliths of midtown outside your window don't feel quite so close around your lungs.

There is one thing I am meant to do, and it is this. There is one thing that grants me peace at the end of a day, and it is this. No day was spent in vain that was spent writing. We are already nearing November, we are already racing toward the end of a year and all the things you thought you had meant to do with it. 

But you are writing now, and so you are not as worried. You are chipping away, bit by bit, at the creative mountain you fought so long to make your own. Forty-sixth street is a lonely endeavor, but you are not alone. Stories unfold at your fingertips, you adore them. 

You adore them. 

No day spent writing
was spent
in vain.

Tremble

(returns to words after unwanted absence is an exercise in trust, a timid stepping up to the plate, to your lover's front door, asking will you still have me, will we still have each other, is treading softly on floors that once were yours to see if if the same boards still creak, is a soft embrace in a freshly made bed and resting your head against their shoulder, saying it's good to be home.)

Grow

A long-awaited wedding comes and goes, a late night with a view of lower Manhattan sparkling across the waters. For the first time in a long time, you feel no emptiness, no twinge of unanswerable questions. You return to the island at peace, make your way through throngs of tourists and let yourself catch up in a strange midtown apartment. It feels bare, until you walk past a window and see the Chrysler Building reflected in a building across the street. This beacon you've loved since you first set foot on these shores, this reminder of all you've done to be here. 

You spend the weekend recovering, a whirlwind of a week behind you and impossible to grasp how much can fit into just a few hours. A holiday season awaits, now, a time of joy and closeness with people you chose.

When you look back on this year one day, I hope you will remember its joy. How you chose a hundred adventures and each one felt only like choosing something and not like losing something else. One day you will have to close doors in order to walk through another, but not now, not yet. For now, you are picking cherries and running away with the star trail. 

For now you are a dream
come true.

Grand Central Station

You arrive in New York City before dawn, the first oranges and pinks of sunrise just starting to climb over the horizon. You feel different, your steps lighter, your back straighter, but everything else is the same: the quick steps down the subway stairs to make a closing door, the quick reparte with the barista who tries to get you to move to Texas with him, the breathless way Grand Central Station feels in the early afternoon, like the ceiling is as high as the sky. She shows you around the apartment and you think, anywhere can be home if you bring your own sunshine, and you have your bags full.

New York envelopes you not like a new lover but like an old friend, you sink into its arms like you had been holding your breath the whole time you were away. It's a gift every time to find that you belong as much now as the first night you set foot on Manhattan shores. You do not take it for granted. 

All day you get no work done, no writing done. You try to hold yourself accountable to the degrees that feel inspiring, but less to the ones that feel too much a part of the real world. These are the dream days now, this is the dream life, what use have I for tangible deadlines. I sat in a second floor window on Union Square and looked at the foliage remain, at the Empire State building exactly where I left it, exactly where I found it. 

These are the dream days,
now.
I won't forget that.

Depart

Monday evening at the brand new airport, the great hall is quiet, save for regular boarding announcements and lost umbrellas at security. You are three hours early, a flight to Albuquerque sits at the end of your gate, but you are not concerned. For years you've been coming to this red eye, been tired and impatient but ready to greet New York at sunrise, it feels like home, still. 

Adrenaline coursing through my veins, a room emptied, a season changed. Goodbyes always were your weakest spot, they tear and ache in you and make you think that you never want to set yourself up for goodbyes again. But you know you don't mean it, you know you will keep digging and digging at the things that hurt because don't they also give you the chance to bloom? 

One day, I think, one day I will build a life without goodbyes, will be all have and no have-not, but I know I don't mean that either, because at the end of that dark night sky is a bevy of stars, and to leap to one means to leap from another. At the other end of this flight lies a city that feels like stars and that makes you feel weightless, at the other end of this flight lies a hello that is worth more goodbyes than you can count, and you know it is true,

because of all
the goodbyes you've said
to reach it.

Bogus

Saturday morning in the mountains, a final weekend on this part of the journey and its end worries you, this lightness requires muscle to hold on to. But you have closed books on journeys before and been able to open them again, there's no reason this should be any different, because though you are different now you are only closer to always having a ticket in your back pocket. The minutes tumble from your outstretched arms, but at the end of them, don't you see the glittering lights of Manhattan? Don't you see that tingle in your chest that says you are home? 

It is only another step on your journey.

Is only another day closer
to all the places you have yet
to go.

Vendredi

What is it you would like to have said? When the curtain comes down, what are you leaving to reverberate in the great hall? Another day races from under your fingertips, when you look in the rear view mirror will you see the exits you missed, will you know the debris that still needs cleaning up?

You have the tingling sensation that you're on the right track, and you nearly don't know what to do with that kind of joy. It's been so long since you thought you could take it for granted. 

Perhaps the best we can hope for in life
is to assume we can take joy
for granted.

Alibi

Hours run out quicker when a deadline looms. You schedule things for next week and have to remember next week is a different timer zone, that next week is a different life entirely. You're not sorry. Do you hear me? I regret none of this. 

What is it you were trying to say? What story were you trying to tell? He writes you from across the ocean and says this is all your fault, but he doesn't realize you are older now than when first you were tangled in each others' sheets. I'm not here to be your manic pixie dream girl, not here to be an escape from the humdrum picket fence you built around yourself, that is not my story but yours. 

Suitcases lie open, clothes and coffee presses strewn around your bedroom. What life would you choose to bring, if you only had 50 pounds and a carryon to fit it in? The thing is I'm not worried, the thing is I am weightless these days, the thing is I was born in transit and transit was borne of me, the hydrangea on the windowsill has survived at least three lovers but now I think it is ready to give in, now I think it is time to leave space on the windowsill for something new to come. It's not that I don't love you,

It's that poetry gets so tricky in twilight, it
pulls the rug from under me it,
tells me carpets were made

to fly. 

Sprint

He tells me he needs to fire the gardener. Says maybe it's time I learn how to prune the roses myself. You google climate zones of Kenya and consider Karen Blixen's lilies and lovers. You itch to book a ticket. 

But then, that is all you do nowadays. Itch, book tickets, revel. The new book is coming along wonderfully, November always was a dreamy month to write a novel after all. My muscles ache from long runs, my head spins with new ideas, my heart simmers with peace. For one brief, wondrous moment on earth, we are in balance. 

You hold on tight, dig in deep. Book a ticket, as long as it will let you.

Sleet

Winter arrives in a huff, draping the mountains in low cloud cover and shaking off slushy snowflakes onto the ground. I raise the thermostat, add another level, keep freezing. It's not a day for business as usual, it's not a day for keeping your shoulder to your wheel or your nose to the grindstone, it's a day for curling up with a dear old book, a day for keeping a drink in hand, for long baths, the season of rest is here. 

You feel like the answers are persistently at the tip of your tongue, feel like they are a dream that you almost have but cannot quite catch, but they linger like a delicious memory, a conviction. And maybe that's a hint in itself, the timelessness of dreams, the sweet mindfulness of watching smoke curl from a cup of tea or the cloud cover tumling down from a mountain. The answers may lie in time being irrelevant, in creating a bubble wherein your spirit may rest. I feel it settle somewhere in my bones, and attempt to make itself at home.

We do not need much. A comfortable place to rest, sunshine when it is offered, companionship when it is apt to make life better than without. Beyond this, but a lung full of creativity, but a fingertip on fire. The stories weave themselves, when the seamstress is lost in song.

Season

When at last a quiet night comes, you do not know how to receive it. Pace anxiously around the kitchen, looking for countertops that need wiping down. Take one more look at your finished to do-list. Stress sits like a nervous rodent in one's chest, only calm when furiously at work, forever trembling in the calm. It takes you over an hour to settle. Make a drink, the kind with bourbon that you like so much. Turn down the lights, turn on the fire. Absorb the minutes, they are not infinite. A week from now, you'll be on your way again, and you don't know when you'll be back here. What a strange life, what a wondrous life. 

The thing is, you said you wanted freedom, and then you got it. You said you wanted the road, and then you followed it. You said you wanted country, and fresh air, and one foot in each realm, and the city as home, and the mountains at sunrise, you said you wanted all these things and now here they are, there are not words for the feeling in your chest when you remember it. 

The path may be lonely, yes, it may be dotted with sorrowful flowers of opportunities lost or lovers squandered, may be reminders of the boxes you did not tick inside the white picket fence, but oh, when you sit by that fire, writing stories into existence, speaking wonder into the Universe, are you not far richer than any bank account you neglected? 

You forget sometimes, that is your flaw as human, but there is always the chance to be reminded again. You are not, without the word, and now you are not without the word. 

And so your existence is, at this moment, complete.

Chill

The day starts mild, a quiet sunrise on the daylight unsaved earth, but soon turns to darkness under heavy November skies. You know the winter is coming, you know the darkness is only gathering strength. You wonder how long you will keep your head above water this time, but for the first time in many years, you think it may actually be a while. 

There was a time, before this virus took our entire lives away, that I raced into winters with reckless abandon. There was a time when I let the warm skin of strangers envelop me into the dark, when I let my dreams of the future carry me on pink clouds across the dirtied snow banks. You have to understand, that was a very long time ago, and none of us are who we were then. That is the only truth. 

Nothing ever stays the same.

Zephyr

You spend a day reading Greek Mythology, so sure there is something there in a story already told which will open your own like a present or a flower's petals. In the end, it's in speaking the words out loud to a friend that solves it. The story of Eurydice winks at you in a margin, and you see how the years build in layers, your life builds in layers, you are not ungrateful. 

The weekend races past you, the life races past you, how do you not have a minute's rest even as you determine so much to find it. You wonder what other people do with their days, you wonder how quickly a life can pass from beneath your fingers. In a week, I return to New York, and yet somehow it feels like there is adventure neverending at the other end of each one-way ticket. One way to many.

And yet I spend a day writing, and none of the rest of it matters. Spend the day writing, and even the fastest falling grains of sand in the hour glass feel heavy as gold, feel worthy of gift wrap. 

So that if I spent an entire lifetime endeavoring only to do this, I will go to my death bed, one day,
in peace.

Wedding dresses

The last night before daylight saving time ends, you steel yourself with big gulps of air at sunset, remembering how the pinks and oranges feel when they arrive late, when they feel like evening. Tomorrow, the darkness will feel like an unwelcome friend, rushing in long before you are ready, catching you unawares. You fear it less these days, resting as you are in the brightly lit mountains, the elevation bringing you nearer the sun, an appropriate worship. 

Remembering still that there were years when this season scared me like nightmares and monsters under the bed. 

I look at train tickets across America, consider contents in suitcases. Wonder when I will begin to miss what I have left behind. I assumed I would have by now, but the idea of my own house keys still sits like a shrug on my shoulder blades. How the road beckons me yet, a new view, another thousand miles of speaking with the Universe and asking it for answers. Where would I be if I could ask all the questions I wanted, read all the stories I could find and write all the answers in song form, in fantasy? Is this not what I am trying to do, but subversively, but failingly? It's like I am one baby step there, but the next step is diving, and I fear I don't yet know how to swim.

I will ask all the questions, I will
read all the stories, and then
write all the answers in a 

song. 

Just give me a moment to find my bearings.
Just give me a moment to hear my voice.

Dawn

The room is still dark when I wake, no telling why my body at last decides to return to its stirring before dawn. I decide to  take advantage, carry my laptop up to the kichen without turning on the lights, make coffee in silence. As the shapes of camouflaged deer come into relief on the field outside the window, I scrounge around cupboards and cabinets to find candlesticks and candles, light them while the coffee brews.

I am taking deep swims into nostalgia lately, getting cozy in warm moments and flickers of delight. On the page, a new character absorbs the insights, builds herself a personality where the outside world may have its dangers, but her spine was given everything it needed to withstand. We try to give our children everything we did not get. We try to be the parents we needed. 

The sun rises at last, bathes the field in a quiet November yellow, dots the mountain tops in pink swaths and puffy clouds. Cars cross the field on their way to work, the distant valley hums with traffic, with people starting their day. I finish my coffee, reluctantly look at my own to-do list. How many layers do you think one would need for a quick morning walk before reality really needs to make its entrance? 

There are dustings of snow on the mountains. The sunlight at last breaches the ridges. You wonder what the morning looks like on your old pistachio farm, in your cabin in the mountains. This life contains multitudes. You've space yet to add more.

Ode

Day two, I bake bread. Wake the sleeping sourdough from its chilly slumber, a starter that has crossed oceans and continents, expanded and contracted in breaths through the decades, give it life anew with nothing more than a soft, sandy flour and the warmth of water. Borrow my father's mixer, cherry pick milled grains from his collection, carefully balance ingredients, and time. Return to the dough through out the day, pulling and twisting at it, folding it into versions of itself that rise and fall over the course of an afternoon. Heat cast iron pots until they glow, fill the oven with steam, cut a most delicate arc into the boule and sprinkle it with monochrome seeds. A careful wait, an impatient gaze, the bread comes out of the oven smelling like what you've been told safety smells like, what comfort smells like, what home smells like. Wait yet again, counting minutes till the loaf is cool enough to touch, to set serrated teeth to its golden crust and slice through the airy innards. 

I paint the slice with a thick slab of yellow butter, sprinkle salt flakes from an ancient ocean, lay a thin layer of cheese on the top. Eating bread is something sacred, is something to reconnect you with a child you once were, reconnect you with ancestors who paved this way for you. I remember being five years old and getting freshly baked bread even though it was past bed time because these were the rules of freshly baked bread and your family didn't make them but your parents sure did abide by them. A softness on the tongue, a lowering of shoulders, a slowing of heart rate. 

With age we become so immune to wonder. 

But it is still there. You just have to open your eyes more, to see it.

Account

A new month begins, mild in the morning, gentle in ignorance. You feel poetry sitting just at the flutter of your eyelids, reminders of times past you are ready to usher in anew. Freedom tastes sweeter when you remember what it truly entails. The new leaf on your calendar whispers to you it might be possible, and you cling desperately to the words. 

It's November now. What will you do with all the gifts you've been given?

Tip Toe

Hesitant steps into the morning, limbs stretching toward literacy, reluctant glances at inboxes and to-do lists, when all you want is to sink into a good book and wait for snow. The sun rises over frosted fields, the deer tucked away somewhere warmer, the coffee maker rattles itself into consciousness. Everything is silent. 

I had to set an alarm this morning, it tore me from sleep and intricate dreams of yet more travel, more unknown places and a break-up I had not seen coming. Even your dreams have it in for you. I think perhaps I do not need to begin to work before the sun's rays have even reached my window, but I forget there was ever another way. So many things are different now. 

I forget the life I used to live. 

Wonder if I should be making my way back to it. Or not.

Plot

Your word count plummets, your internal morale plummets, you think there may be a connection between your well-being and how much the words are flowing through you. A lifetime in writing, you cannot be surprised when you are a shallow husk without it.

Returns to the valley are surprising, quiet drifts of snow toppling over the mountains and silencing the beyond. Time moves in its own strange machinations, the deer make their way down from the hills, each day has a moment when you think nothing else matters but staring into the sunlight and marveling at the world.

You think maybe you should be making more of those moments in a day. 

November approaches in a speed all its own, your life approaches in a speed unknown, ten years ago you could have never guessed this is how your life would turn out but if you had to do it all again, what would you really change? 

The words come out jumbled, crooked, rusty. But out they come, and it feels like a win all its own.

Gärna Lite Till

I take a short cut over the mountain peak, in windy 30 mph roads through barren aspen forests that just shook off their shroud. Careen down into the valley at sunset like a kerouacian madman, music beating its way out of the little station wagon, not a care left in my lungs. I'm sure there was someone I was before this adventure began, but I can't remember her now, am not bothered by her demons. The nights are cold now but the days are sunshine, the world is a war now, but the mountains are full of awe and I think the answers are lying there just waiting, wondering why we haven't come to unearth them yet. 

Something is brewing in that small space behind my ribs. 

Just wait.
It's bubbling.
Soon, it'll spill
from my lips.

Durango

The remaining days race from my outstretched hands, not so much like rushing waters as a whirlwind that comes and goes, gives you another round of delight. I breathe it in deep, let it fill my chest with sunshine and gratitude, till I have room for nothing else. In the late afternoon, I hike out to watch the sun set over the bone white sand dunes and before I know it, I am all tears. 

I drive out of the desert with nothing but joy in my bones. The month behind me could just as well be an eternity for all the change it wrought. How does one put that into words? It comes out trite, comes out ordinary. 

You vow to try again. The road lies before you. All you have to do is drive.

use poetry

He sends me poetry, asks what magic I have to give in return. My skin is nothing but mosquito bites, my mind is nothing but billables, what could I possibly have to answer. The remaining days in the desert tumble from my open hands, I always squander infinity when I have it, tell me, doctor, what do you have to prescribe me for my sins. 

The hamster wheel spins and spins, rolling around you in shrinking circles. The crick in your neck is back, the violent winds after sunset. 

Who did I come to the desert to be? Who did I become?

The Fates laugh in my face and move
on.

som verkligen är bra

The dog scratches at the door late into the night, the Milky Way already brightly lit across the firmament. You try to walk her home, but she refuses. You think about love, about promises and commitment, how you stayed away from them all, how you assumed you could explain it to adults but never dogs, never children. 

You think maybe the same was actually true for adults, too, we only pretend it's not so, only pretend we can hear what someone says when they're breaking our hearts, when all we really hear is the blood rushing to our feet. 

Time runs out of my stay in the desert, I mourn it already, see the last sunsets slip out of my hands. Where did the time go, where did the life go, how can I not hold on to these few strands of gold that I've so carefully pulled out of the sand dunes, is this what it is to be human. 

I had bigger plans.

of Gold

Time plays tricks on you that all the decades have not taught you to understand. It moves quickly and slowly all at once, you are blessed in all directions. She says I wish you would stay, and you picture your two rowboats bobbing on the desert sea, taking on rattle snakes and solitude from opposite ends of the ranch. The dogs swim back and forth across the waves, making sure everyone is accounted for.

In the late and drunken night, she reads your Tarot cards and they speak only of adventure and discovery, only of clearing mist and you think maybe everyone is on the same journey. Surely not all these signs could align just for your strange walk through the worlds. 

Later, I sit at the shrine and count my blessings, speak them at the nameless god I do not know, think how strange it all is and how nothing really is under our control, after all. Wonder if it would be better to simply give in and coast along the current, see where it may take me. 

Nowhere I've rowed the boat thus far
har gotten me where I wanted to go.

Right

The dogs arrive before sunrise now, impatiently whining at the door. They come in, fur cold, tails impatient. Fall arrived, as though overnight. By afternoon, the sun has washed the chill from your floors, and you walk around the property in gratitude, the dogs following closely behind. 

We have to sweep a scorpion off the front door entrance 

I sit in the temple, meditating, see opportunities play out behind my closed eyelids. He writes to ask if I won't consider staying longer, and I wonder why I haven't thought of that myself. Sit in piles of poetry, letting my imagination run away with me, because such is my to-do list and who am I to question it. My skin grows dry in the desert, my hair my fears, but I cannot be angry. 

Everything paints itself in futures, when you've decided to believe there will be one to be painted on.

Air Quality

Here, take the flashlight, she admonishes, the 50-foot walk back to the trailer plunged in darkness, unknown sounds in the grasses. But I turn the flashlight down and look up, and a shooting star streaks across the length of the sky. Unasked, out of nowhere, but clear as day. You laugh into the dark night, your last steps to the front porch a little lighter, even as you don't know what you're meant to be asking for. 

The unplanned day ahead, with endless hours meant only for writing, tell you you already have it in the palm of your hand.

You asked always for unlimited miracles of time spread out around you. It's proving hard to come by. But it doesn't mean there are paths through the thicket, doesn't mean there is still air left for you to breathe.

Stay

The dogs scratch at the door at all hours, now, have expanded their home turf and found unused prayer cushions on the floor for rest. I haven't the heart to explain to them how all things will be over, how my love is only ever fleeting. It's too on the nose, even for me. I go to bed with a knot in my gutcannot get myself to relax. 

The piles of fur amass in every corner.

You're already running out of time, running out of daylight hours in which to breathe the desert, running out of this one long breath held in the in-between, you are no ready yet to let it all be gone.

Lately

She said "yes", he writes in that melodic way of his, and the years tumble out from under your ragged soles, turn to grains of dust underneath your finger nails he has
built a whole life while you were
idling,
found a footing while you were
desperately clawing at the insides of
a ravine, you
look around the desert for signs of
life
but the dry wind
catches
in your throat and
the drops of dew were
not
yours to put on your
tongue, they

turn to wildfire in his
absence,
send smoke signals across the
county lines, saying

I thought we grappled with the crumbling
columns
together

The desert returns with
nothing but
dustbowls

for answers.

Defeat

A sleep full of nightmares, I wake at unrest and unrested. Walk around the double wide trailer in a heavy daze, contemplate meaning where none is to be found. At the end of the gravel road, I stand in the stillness and marvel at complete silence. The tears wetting my eyes act on their own accord, like drawn out into a vacuum, precious spots of liquid in the desert.

Later, I sit in the strange temple and try to speak to the spirits. They arrive quietly, bringing with them more tears until the front of my shirt is stained and the space inside my head is empty. They told me all I needed, so I do not hold this weariness against them. My neighbor tells me a pickup truck has been driving too slowly past the ranch, asks if I want to borrow a gun. We are not in Kansas anymore. 

I no longer know where I am. Perhaps was the point all along.

Lone Star

The dog scratching your front door is what tells you you've overslept. The sun rises later these days, she comes in with cold fur and points to the open road impatiently. On our way back, the desert sand is already warmer, a coyote runs across our path, also caught aware by the times of day. We are all faltering under the illusion of time. 

I come home, cancel the things I thought I had to do. Clean my own slate, turn off the clocks. The desert is vast, and warm, and impossible to gauge. 

Start there. See where it takes you.

Beam

The sun sets earlier now, I get caught out on the running trail and make my way back in dusk, the first stars clicking on in the east. The run catches my unease, as it always does, washes it away with the sweat along my forehead. I sat in a rich neighborhood of Alamogordo and projected my questions on the yuccas of their gravelly front lawns.

The answers came, as they always do, in familiar simplicity. In continued curiosity and the only way that ever made sense to my crooked lifelines: through words. 

You will write them down,
and then,
perhaps,
you will see how they are to be read.

Way

The night is quiet, so quiet you could hear a moth fly. I walk to the end of the gravel road to the gate, looking for country deliveries dropped off in the night. The dog walks ten feet ahead, always protecting me against the nothings of the world. The land is dark, darker than you remembered it could be, and the sky is a tapestry of starlight. Someone must light them all, you wonder who. Wait for one to fall, but they remain steadfast in the firmament. 

There is a truth to be found in that. 

You do not yet know what it is.

Chariot

Spend an hour crying at puppies and military homecomings, spend an hour wandering grocery store aisles wondering if anything really matters in the long run. There's a great sadness in the depth of your well, and you spend too much time trying to outrun it, instead of bathing in it to find what it is made of. 

You're starting to think maybe the bathing is why you are here. 

Work beckons you for another day, another week, another lifetime. It feels like the last time, just before you stepped off the treadmill, just before you said it's not worth forgetting how to tell stories, to please you. Maybe this means something. 

Maybe the bottom of the well knows what.

October

The dog summons me from the other side of the back porch screen, says she checked her watch and we are late for morning walks. The days are cooler now, the wind brings a chill from the north mountains, your friends dig their heels into hot apple cider but you are not ready, not yet, you are still scared of the darkness that follows so closely in its footsteps. 

Work reminds itself to me, arrives like an unfortunate cousin, while my imagination is far away at sea. I thought I was telling stories, and here you are, asking me for spreadsheets. 

They do not know how to see the starry skies in the desert,
do not know how to find a diamond in a jewelry store.

Dig

And you call me to come
and I do. 

The wind comes in from Kansas, vows to lift you away to yellow brick roads, whispers of poetic winters upstate. It's like you tasted freedom for the first time and now cannot get enough. As though you didn't have a lifetime of freedom under your belt. 

Resurfacing from out of the rubble of an illness is like rebirth, then, like you had in fact not lived a lifetime of freedom, like you had not, in fact, lived a life at all, but appeared on the map a blank slate, a white sheet of paper. 

You take the chance you were given. 

Decide to rewrite the story in colors all your own. 

But Soft

When I take my coffee outside, the sun is just cresting the mountain ridge. The dogs are waiting on the front porch, and your delight takes you by surprise. The morning is silent -- a week has passed and you have not yet taken the time to truly listen to it. It is a kindness. 

You eat breakfast in the shade, watch the hummingbirds and the pigeons and the crows, while the dogs sleep at your feet. A gentle breeze ripples through the flags, a steady backdrop of sound to the valley full of silence. Your head aches with the noise of months in motion, you hadn't realized. Here is a soft landing, here is reprieve. 

Now is the time for you to dig slowly,
see what gold lingers in the dirt.

to the Ends of the Earth

For a week you do not breathe, only race head first into a thousand deadlines awaiting your attention, a thousand deadlines who do not care that you are a thousand miles into the desert. The dogs walk you in the mornings, but then you are locked away in the sweltering trailer, spending data minutes like it didn't cost more than a long distance call in the nineties.

But then the week ends, impossibly disappearing behind you like it was only ever a trick of the lights. A full moon rises over the mountains in the east as a fire sets behind the mountains in the west. The desert is quiet but for a few late night birds making their way home and a flag waving in the last of the sunset wind. You begin to breathe, begin to think about why you came here. 

It was not to outrun deadlines, after all. 

It was to greet the desert like a confidant, to whisper secrets into the startrail, to rediscover the madness that brought you all the way across the American land after all. When Jack was your age he only had a few more years to live, so you may as well live yours now, not try to save anything for winter. When you were your age, you put what you owned into the back of an old station wagon and drove it clear across the land and you think maybe, maybe this is all there is to life and it's not a bad way to go. The road feels like home, and haven't you been looking for it for so long?

Just because you found the pearl,
doesn't mean you get out the water.

One Hundred Acres

The late night silence is punctured by rumbles. Not a cloud in the sky at sunset, it must be military base practices, bombs detonated into a desert where no one will file a complaint. As you go out for a sunset run - your only attempts at going past the gates all week - your sole neighbor stops to tell you her colleague ran over a man and killed him, then kept driving. By the time you start running, the sun has set: your minutes of visibility now numbered. The land is unforgiving. The dog greets you on your return, walks you the whole way to your door. You haven't seen a rattle snake since you came.

The days disappear in mountains of work. You know there is an end on the horizon. Know you came for other reasons, pray there is still magic waiting somewhere beneath the red sand around you. 

If you were looking to run yourself into the ground,
you could as well have stayed home.

This Land

I wake in a vacuum, dark curtains across the windows and a box fan to drown out any sound - if there was any. Get up to find another sunny day, another light breeze rolling down from the mountains, the mornings are cooler now, and I drink it in. The government pretzels itself into a shut down and you wonder if they can really close the doors to parks or if you could sneak onto the white sand dunes under the full moon. Work beckons, and you do not care to hear it. 

Do they not know there are other things to be doing? Do they not know there are roads, and adventures, and full moons to be seen? Can they not feel the ocean waves beat in their heart? I run through the desert and see only stars, see only endless miles ahead. 

This is the time to gather your courage. This is the time to dare the leap. 

If not, how can you follow where I go?

Run

It cools off just before the sun sets. You have a 22 minute window of cool air before it is dark. The dog greets you upon your return, walks you to your door before loping off into the grass. 

You miss running like you used to, but you lap up the 22 minutes, try to enjoy your burning muscles though they show too soon. She sends a video where a tall, black man says we need at least 8 hugs a day to survive. You look around the farm, think it will be months before you are touched again, it doesn't seem fair. 

You wish you could run another ten miles. 

There are cockroaches in the kitchen sink every morning. It's not the same. But the sun sets over the desert in a way that fills your chest to the brim, you ran a little longer today than you did yesterday, the nights are getting cooler in a way that feels like a comfort. 

There are moments to be had yet. 

Even when no one holds you while they happen.

Kyrie

You begin the day in lather, scrubbing long-ignored corners of the dusty double-wide trailer in the New Mexican expanse. Listen to music composed to carry people across the ocean, to let them look for answers though none are to be found. The duhkha permeates your struggle to clean the desert, as though the grains of sand are not uncountable. You do not relent, you are not yet ready. She sends you an article about a writer excising her demons by writing them out in children's stories and you tell her you are not yet ready to unleash your demons on a character so young. 

You are too busy giving these characters the safety you did not have. 

There are parasites latched to the back of your heart. If you pull them out now, if you pull them out before the walls of your heart are think enough, you will only bleed out. 

This is how scar tissue protects,
in more ways than one.

For What It's Worth

The Southwestern night speaks to you again, in whispers still, because you are new to the ground and skittish around its words. Let's take it one star at a time, you think, but you do not mean it, you already feel several constellations behind. You look for armchairs on Craigslist, because the ascetics of a folding chair do nothing for your literary ambitions. 

When he says, it's always been you, but doesn't appear on your doorstep to mean it, you think only how you grew up with the lesson not to count your money until it is in your bank account. Too many old wounds of disappointing men trickle through the ether, you have run out of bandaids, you will not risk the gash tearing open again. 

Take a cold shower in the trailers dirty bathroom. Write mental lists of the grime you will clean out of your auras tomorrow. The cockroaches gather in the sinks. All you have to do is let them out.

Desert Sunrise

I wake in the middle of the night, stifled, a desert headache full of red wine beating its drum behind my temples. The bed is better than any I've slept in for years, the house so silent you could hear a spider crawl. By morning, there is a cockroach in the kitchen sink and a hundred degrees on the back porch steps. 

I saunter around the trailer like I'm wading through a dream, feeling nothing and everything alll at once. Work beckons but all I want to do is write. All I want to do is wait for the sun to set over the desert mountains and listen to silence until it speaks. 

Two birds land on the front porch, looking around themselves like they're waiting for a routine. You think you should introduce yourself. 

I am here now, you'll say. I'll be here, now. And they'll know
exactly what you mean.

Buy Dirt

Red rock turns to volcano stone, tumbleweed turns to yucca, the mountains flatten into one long desert into infinity. There's a marker where the Trinity testing took place, quietly recording horrific history into the centuries. You pull off the highway to a road with no markers, asphalt leading to gravel leading to dust before you make a final turn.

A turqouise double wide trailer rests in the expanse. All is silent. He calls to tell you the fridge is broken but there's a spare in the back barn, that there are no keys because there's nothing to lock up, that you can make yourself at home because no one else should be around. The wind blows the door open in minutes. a giant spider makes itself at home near eye level outside the bedroom. You feel at peace.

For a short moment, everything is still and waiting, everything is breath held and calm. There's a moment just before you begin to eat the honey that is better than when you do,

but you don't know what it's called.

Kayenta

I race down the canyon, anxious to reach the hotel before sundown, anxious to reach the work that lies waiting. At the traffic circle, the steady female voice says to take the second exit and carry on to civilization. The late evening sunlight washes the red rock monoliths in fire, it feels unfinished. 

I take the third exit. 

At the top of the slope, the road ends at a vista. Enormous bluffs tower over the endless desert, they glow as dusk settles along the bottom of the dry ocean. Rainbow twilight sifts along the horizon, I run to the edge to catch the last rays, run to catch the peace that evades me. At the edge, a most precious gift is placed right in my hands: awe. 

By the time I reach the hotel, long after sundown, I am happy. The uneasy shaking that followed me all day disintegrates. I work, catch up to myself, catch my breath. Another day careening through the desert lies ahead. 

I will follow the GPS only until my heart says 
otherwise.

Advent

The mornings are cooler, now, the nights spent best around a fire to watch the moon rise. I sit on the back porch at midnight, watching the stars and wondering if they might lead the way. The bags are nearly packed, now, the tingle under the soles of your feet eagerly shaking itself into high gear. The desert awaits, the road awaits, you sit looking for shooting stars only to see them tumble in the periphery, this was the secret all along. 

If it was too easy, you would fight for nothing.
Shooting stars do not avail themselves to you. 

You must go into the darkness
to find them.

Giving

There are scorpions, but they aren't poisonous, she says in a lilting accent. The mice seem to stay mostly in the closet. 

You dig your heels into the starting blocks, linger for too long, sink too deep into intertia, the days and weeks packing from out under you. But the horizon lingers, it waits for you when you are ready, it isn't going anywhere. 

It isn't going anywhere. 

So you are.

Flight

The desert is quiet in fall. I forget to wake up, forget to lift myself out of complicated dreams. Drink coffee slowly over morning reads, unbothered by the schedule of a civilized world, you do not take it for granted. The apple trees are reeling at the weight of their fruit, you think it's a metaphor of having all the things you asked for. Begin to see now that none of your life was lived in a box and it only hurt when you tried to make it. You are forever standing on the outside looking in, looking at the warmth on the other side of the window but oh, how stifling that air when you've tried to breathe it. 

Turn around, return to the road.
Find your warmth in the miles under your feet.

Begin Again

Wake slowly in the quiet valley between mountains, watch the late summer sunrise spread across golden fields, resist rising as your bones beg for more time to rest. Your head is full of poetry, again, your heart full of song. Distant voices call to you but they are not here now, they live elsewhere and you cannot follow where they beckon. You are back on the road, now, back in your one track mind, back in magic. September was made for writing, winter was made for waiting to see what comes out of a silence and grabbing it, here is the gift I give myself, the time has come to make good on your promises. 

Everything that is about to happen lies ahead of you. 

All you have to do is move
forward.

Terminal 4

Familiar steps lead through you through midtown subway stations, Long Island Railroad tracks, and a terminal you know now like you lived there. A brief visit comes to an end, a top up of love so strong it risks beating your heart out of it chest, such is life when you've worked a lifetime to get there.You do not mourn this departure, because you know it is but the beginning of a journey, not the end. 

I go west, again, again, searching for treasures underneath the red sand, for answers in the open road, I have no fear because I know they lie waiting there, and I have no choice but to find them. 

Pack up your car, my dear, put your books and your dreams in the back of the old station wagon and turn the radio on. The way lies untouched ahead, and you've nothing left now to do
but reach it.

Bryant Park

You leave him at the top of 30 Rock, the relic of a love affair from which you are ready to pick the raisins, all you see now are skyscrapers and sunshine, are little magics of old studios and the promise of Manhattan below. You're happy to take them and go. 

In Bryant Park, the folding chairs are filled again, you will never forget how it was to hear birdsong in the apocalypse, and you are happy now to share the space, even with the midwestern tourists bumbling in your way. Your to-do list yells at you, but listlessly, without too much oomph, it understands that what you're supposed to be doing isn't necessarily what you should be doing. Fill your lungs with the city, gather ye rosebuds, absorb every last morsel and bring it to the desert, remind yourself the fire that got you where you are. 

The desert whispers promises and starshine, but remember.
You would not be there soon,
if you had not been here first. 

The treasures can only be yours,
after someone gave you the map
to begin with.

Brief

The thing is,
you haven't the words. 

The thing is, you should have so much to say and instead you are left with silent awe, with the feeling that you cannot actually put words to the jumble of peace and joy inside you. I walked down 14th street last night after the rains, and it was like I could breathe for the first time in months. How does one put words to that?

New York simmers in me like a perfect symphony, when everywhere else is the mess of instruments being tuned. It is at once the familiarity of home and the possibility of something new, it is the reminder of seventeen years of building a life that cannot be taken from me, it is a giggle.

I make my preparations for other adventures, look to the desert for undiscovered roads, look to the world for undiscovered melodies, yes. But one day I will yearn for the philharmonic again. 

And then I will know where to go.

Anthem

“It occurs to me that there are other towns. It occurs to me so violently that I say, at intervals, "Very well, if New York is going to be like this, I'm going to live somewhere else." 

And I do — that's the funny part of it. But then one day there comes to me the sharp picture of New York at its best, on a shiny blue-and-white Autumn day with its buildings cut diagonally in halves of light and shadow, with its straight neat avenues colored with quick throngs, like confetti in a breeze. Some one, and I wish it had been I, has said that "Autumn is the Springtime of big cities." I see New York at holiday time, always in the late afternoon, under a Maxfield Parish sky, with the crowds even more quick and nervous but even more good-natured, the dark groups splashed with the white of Christmas packages, the lighted holly-strung shops urging them in to buy more and more. I see it on a Spring morning, with the clothes of the women as soft and as hopeful as the pretty new leaves on a few, brave trees. I see it at night, with the low skies red with the black-flung lights of Broadway, those lights of which Chesterton — or they told me it was Chesterton — said, "What a marvelous sight for those who cannot read!" I see it in the rain, I smell the enchanting odor of wet asphalt, with the empty streets black and shining as ripe olives. I see it — by this time, I become maudlin with nostalgia — even with its gray mounds of crusted snow, its little Appalachians of ice along the pavements. 

So I go back. And it is always better than I thought it would be.

I suppose that is the thing about New York. It is always a little more than you had hoped for. Each day, there, is so definitely a new day. "Now we'll start over," it seems to say every morning, "and come on, let's hurry like anything."

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it. 

There is excitement ever running its streets. Each day, as you go out, you feel the little nervous quiver that is yours when you sit in the theater just before the curtain rises. Other places may give you a sweet and soothing sense of level; but in New York there is always the feeling of "Something's going to happen." It isn't peace. But, you know, you do get used to peace, and so quickly. And you never get used to New York.”

-Dorothy Parker 

Home

I cried
on the F train again today
while New York looked in another direction and
let me,

I didn’t realize I would, didn’t
know how tight my heartstrings
in its absence
in anticipation in
waiting to see if I still had a home, I
spent so much time without one
after all 

And here
it waited for me,
let me
run around the world in adventure
let me
try my wings
and find
that the one place I’d always
want to fly

was here.

Gate A2

They always put the New York redeyes at the far end of the terminal, a cul-de-sac of late night wanderers. You nestle in among them like nothing is out of the ordinary, like you're heading home for the hundredth time only, only this time home is elusive, is 22 boxes in a storage unit near the water, this time you arrive unsure of the arms that will greet you. 

They say a heatwave is licking the city, burying its citizen under the wet blanket of their own ambition, they say You picked quite a time to come. What they don't know is you've come to this city in its darkest hours, its shakiest knees, you have kissed and caressed its wounds and loved it for all its crooked faults. You will endure this heat, too. 

When he writes to say, I don't know who I am, you think he'd do best to find out. You think this work is his and his alone. At some point you whispered to the city who you thought you might be, and found the whisper reverberate against its walls until it became a song in your ears you could no longer doubt. 

You wait impatiently now for the minutes to pass until boarding. 

For the hours to pass until you may be home again.

Desert(ed)

You spend the time you should be working, looking instead at images of white sand dunes. You calculate average temperatures, altitudes, potential journalism assignments, forget that the work pays the bills because you do not want to remember anything that isn't bathed in wonder. 

The sun rises slowly over your valley in the west. An airplane ticket simmers in your backpocket, reminds you of civilization and a different speed of life. You know you can love that too. 

Know that love is not a limited resources, but a well which overflows with use. 

So you intend to use it until the floods create super blooms
in the desert.

For the both of us now

He says, let's talk. Says, the farm might be free. Says, here is more sunshine to put in your pocket, your dreams are good enough to come true. You google maps of the desert, google how long it would take to add a trip to Pie Town to the itinerary, google how quickly you can pack all your things into the station wagon and return to the road. 

Your father wrings his hands, worried at your homelessness, worried at your solitude. Worried most, perhaps, at your joy. You understand now why it was so hard to come by when you were a child. 

If you could tell that child now all the things that were to come, if you could give that child all the permission to breathe, and live, and carry joy, would she believe it?

Perhaps some things are best when they arrive
in their due time.

Should we say

The desert rains. He writes from across the state to see that you're still there, you write from across the table to make sure the dreams you built together still gleam. All you wanted were starlit nights. 

Fall arrives, the nights are cold but the days are sunny enough for you to believe in a day after this one. You begin to recognize the blood coursing in your veins again: the impatience, the itch to go, the little sparks of creativity zipping just past your line of vision. 

Fall arrives. 

You vow to let it mean something new at last can begin.

Practice

They call it a practice, but really it's a life.
They call it a life, but really it's practice that never ends,
that never reaches perfection, that
never sees you satisfied and resting on your
laurels. 

He speaks ills into the ether,
ignorant of his own hand
in the maelstrom, you think
out of this soil I grew, 

No wonder the laurels are
too gnarled
to rest on.

Cloud

Early morning, reverse commute, long lines of cars make their way up the mountain as you careen down it in peace. The coffee shop is quiet still when you get there, but quickly fills up with people who look like they might want to stay there all day.

You know you do. 

They sit in the bubble of a writing space, concocting stories out of nothing, creating magic out of the firing synapses of their own making. You adore them. 

A weekend stretches out ahead of you, strings of hours serving only to remind you what this time is for. You did not leave New York to sleep early and watch the days pass. You left New York to make more space for the whims of your interior. If you do not do that, you may as well go home. 

Take the road while it is available to you,
See what you find at the end of the headlights
and what you might make of it for the world.

Let Me Go

Super moon, blue moon, rising above the mountain ridge, we stood staring at the perfect orb made golden by wildfire smoke. Later, I sat under its spotlight, watching it wash out the stars, the sky like a lavender blanket, the air full of cicadas and silence. The days are passing too fast without doing anything at all, running and standing still at the same time, the restlessness spinning like a whirlwind that doesn't go anywhere. 

I look at my to-do list, see the asks of outsiders begin to dissipate. Thin, now is the time for it.

Think,
now is the time to live.

(memo)

get to work

your life is calling.

Impatients

The days pass from under you, crawl uneasy underneath your skin, you begin to pace in just letting them pass. There was more you wanted to do, there is more you want to do, it claws at you in the early morning silences then retreats in the loud days. This isn't what you'd meant to do with your time. You long for the wild, for the space beyond time, long for a place where all you have is words. 

It is time to pack up and go, again, is time to set back off on the journey you began when you crossed the Hudson River, you have grown too soft and comfortable again, and nothing wild ever came
from doing the least
of what was asked of you.

Sink

The morning begins quieter than you've been used to, the last of August still stretching its tendrils along your shoulder blades. The deer come down from the mountain, so early in the season, you are both reading the temperatures wrong, both preparing for the chill even as the flowers wilt in the sun. You look at off-grid cabins in New Mexico and try to remember the momentum that propeled you all the way here, try to remember the fire that drove you from your sleep. 

The space is growing around you, the ground preparing for your moves. Nothing is lost that cannot be found, nothing is past that cannot be made present. He says I'll get the bus ready for you, and you think the road beneath you has all the answers you'll ever need. 

Think there is magic up ahead
you haven't even known to wish for.

Waxing

The silence begins to eat at you, it follows you around when you haven't room for it and asks questions you cannot answer. 

This is exactly how it should be. 

It is only when the silence begins to make you uncomfortable
that you move forward. 

It is only when the questions begin to
itch
that you can begin
to uncover new layers
under your skin.

41

I hope you remember to choose Freedom, and Creativity, and Joy. I hope you do not settle for anything. I hope you look back on the year that was and feel a lightness. 

You are 41 now, you lucky bastard. Everything that is to come, lies ahead of you. I hope you feel that. 

And I don't care to wish you anything but that. 

Pitch

The car is in the driveway, a hundred degrees and a burning steering wheel. It smells like your youth, like back-to-school and promises yet to be fulfilled, it feels like home on your skin. He writes to ask for pictures, for stories, he tries to dig his nerves into your awareness, while you hesitate to glance at his; too many obstacles in your line of vision. The canyon is unseasonably green, inviting, the desert gives way to the whims of the universe, you coast along as best you can. 

Their faces brighten your afternoon, their imaginations feed your own, 13 years you've been coming into the folds of each others creativity and the gift is not lost on you. One day you will thank them. One day a little girl will fasten herself onto printed pages for good and it will be because of them. The gift is not lost on you. 

He says your life is intriguing, it seems so free, and it doesn't take much effort to see what he means. You built for yourself this playground of color, this land of adjusted rules, and for every day you've doubted your rickety sand castle, all it takes is one day of recognizing your face in the mirror to feel at peace with the crooked road you've paved. 

Another birthday waits in the wings. 

You greet it with open arms, at last.

Port

Summer nights in the Rocky Mountain West, the heat returns to hold your skin, the sunsets are long and poetic, telling stories across the hillsides as they go. Six years ago you sat here, too, your body made new, your heart stirred, the possibility of the Word turning you into your own homing beacon, you were a lighthouse.

We've gone a long way into the circles of hell, lately, waded around the bottom where all things go to die, but oy, it was not always such darkness, you were not always two eyes matted by hopelessness. You were a lighthouse. 

You think maybe it's time you were,
again.

Lag

I went to bed early. Not because I had to, only because I needed the space. Woke in dark night. At 4 a.m. no one will intrude. I sat in the deep breaths of silence, sat in the stillness of contrast, and counted my blessings. 

One, how suddenly I have all the freedom my little heart can desire
Two, now matter how I use my freedoms, I am still firmly ensconced in the hearts of those I love
Three, I dreamed of the world and suddenly it is here

A new story painted itself inside my eyelids, as they always do when you let them. Perhaps that is the biggest blessing of all. By the time dawn rose in cold pink breaths across the mountaintops, I had already lived a whole day in the cities of my interior. 

It is easier to share a life, when you have some of it to yourself. 

Tändstickor

You see yourself gather kindling around your feet, watch your hands full of dried leaves, surely I had matches here in one of these pockets, strike anywhere they say and I ready myself to do as I'm told. 

It's wildfire season. 

You pack your bags
and head into the woods.

Feels

The transatlantic flight is more hours of alone time than you’ve had in three weeks, the silence rings in your ears, and you try to remember how to breathe on your own, without the structure of a schedule or the lives of others dictating how your lungs move through the day.

All that appears is words.

Stories, ideas, plans, poetry swim around the spaces within you made soft by time and rest and love, tumble out of your fingertips so you cannot keep up, you don’t know why you ever doubted that this was the spirit that sits in you. You vow to ignore the loud voices around you who try to say how a successful life is to be lived. They do not want what you want, so you do not have to aim for what they’re trying to reach.

All I wanted 
was to go to New York City, 
live madly, 
and write.

All I have to do now, 
is listen.

Windmills

Airplanes full of crying children, airports full of anticipation, I am a wet rag emptied of air, emptied of all the energy I brought on the outbound journey, filled with a magic of being seen entirely. The gift of chosen family beats in your chest like you don’t know how you got so lucky, like you don’t know why you ever feel a void, because you filled all your emptiness with them and they will not go away.

He says, you know as well as I do, speaks truths of futures you are not yet ready to see, even as you bend your worlds to meet. You book a ticket to New York, and it feels like ease, it feels like New York City is your home.

It is.

You return to America all the same as when you left, but twisted somehow, molded soft by loving pressure, fall is waiting in the wings but you feel like you are only just beginning to take off, feel like you are only just lifting, in that way it feels when spring is new and all the land lies ahead of you. An old station wagon waits in a garage, a mint green typewriter sits in quiet anticipation, you are full of love now, full of whatever comes next, there is nothing ahead but the open road, and you are ready to set back out on it, because the things to come were too fantastic not to tell.

The gifts are not lost on you.
You will not turn them down.

Forevers

The beginning of forever looks different, when you already have 23 years together under your belt: a rear view mirror summary from 75 people who knew you when you were all still children, a lifetime built by a village of love. Inredulous reunions after decades apart, faces older but minds and hearts the same, you recognize your self in their eyes, remember who you are based on who you were and how far you've come. By the time dawn arrives, the last few stragglers sit by the water with half drunk bottles of wine, with half spoken sounds of truth. He looks at you and says, I will wait however long it takes, and you don't know how to explain that time is different when you are free. 

Realize that your freedom is worth more than any other promises,
even love. 

It took you a long time to get here. 

You will not leave unless you can bring it with you
where you go.

On.

Suddenly, you are given long moments of time to yourself, slow silences in large houses, the easy life of a small town family. You revel in the space, metaphorical and otherwise, but float on top of the existence, like it is not yours. 

It is not yours. 

You love these people like family you chose, their stories sit in your very bones, and you want all these treasures for them. But you do not want them for you. The insight is surprising, somehow, you examine them from the outside with the curiosity of a toddler, who hasn't yet discovered bittersweetness. You can want this for them and not for you. 

You can be happy with what you have. 

Recovery swims in your lungs, rolls like waves across your muscles and softens your spine, you sleep in peace and wake happy, it is such a novel concept that you want to ask people if this is how it feels. You asked for the road and when it was not quite given to you, you went out to find it. You're on the on-ramp now, you're on the right track now. 

All you have to do
is go on.

Trained

Ride the bus early, with only the long-way commuters bumbling aboard, resigned to a life of long journeys and early mornings. They're all wearing autumn clothes and a determined frown. You realize the time may not be right for you to move back. For the first time in years, this insight does not cut deep inside your chest like it always did before. Get a brief moment alone on a train, think how you should be working but your entire being says you need to sit still in silence and see only the landscape pass by outside your window. 

An old couple in front of you discuss the towns you pass. She says, You know this town. You used to change trains here every day. He looks out and says, I did? but it does not appear to pain him. He forgets where they are going. Something about how life is short and long all at once passes by your internal field of vision, you realize you have more stories to tell now, you long for the neverending silences that the West may bring and the words that might appear with them. 

You long for things you do not know the names of, yet. 

Look at New York City apartment listings, look at houses in New Mexico, look at weather reports for any manner of worlds, 
feel nothing
but free.

Rönnäng

Find a familiar face on the familiar square, everything frozen in time except the worlds of wisdom that lie between you. Take the commuter bus out of town, past the throngs of people, see the city give way to rolling hills and late-summer greens, valiant flags braving the autumn chill even as the humans wrap themselves in more layers. 

A new house, a new promise, crooked floors and dated wallpaper, endless potential hidden within the folds in the old fishing village. Late in the evening, we bike down to the cliffs and dive into the water, no one there but the birds and one misguided jellyfish. The sun sets in that melancholy way it does in the North, just before the season ends. You pretend not to see it, revel only in the salt water on your lips. Bike home with a chill on your skin, adore a freedom you know only in memories, sleep like you never knew fear, 

there is something here, an answer telling itself to you in parts, you begin to piece it together,
believing at last
that you might.

August

Days pass in a blur, you forget where you begin and end and think perhaps you exist only in the eyes of those who’ve loved you for decades. There is no greater gift than to be seen and loved in spite of it. 

The summer comes to an end, but it trudges on with its last powers, you do not resent it, somehow. Perhaps you have something to prove, but for a short minute, it is irrelevant. They already know. 

Eventually you will have to return to New York, you think. 

You can not live your life only

in the eyes of others. 

Islands

The boat won’t go in the choppy waters, he yells from across the bow. A storm moves in from the west, floods the little city on the coast. We run to a bus instead, drag bags to a car barge and find another bus to take us to the edge of the island. Here it is, the endless sea, rages against itself, against cliffs and houses that have weathered its incessant tumult, you cannot ruffle the inhabitants here. No man is an island, but these people know what it takes to be one, they remain steadfast. The food is delicious, the hostel quiet on a cold august evening. In town, the festival begins. Do you remember when it began? You heard Regina Spektor revel from the other side of the woods. 

Do you remember who you were then? It seems impossible, now, to imagine. So young, so full of why does everything happen across the other side of the woods. I’ve come a long way since then. 

I have so far still to go. 

When they ask you to have a home you say, take a deep breath, remember how you know me. I am a heart full of woods, I am a life full of one day I will go through it, 

And sometimes that day

is today. 

En train

The train rolls out of the station, early morning but still well past dawn, eager Stockholmers making their way to work after long vacations and resigned endings. It feels like fall. People on the platform wear sensible wind jackets, I shiver in my bare legs and wonder what happened to summer. Think in New Mexico it is endless, still, and the thought warms me even as I feel stretched across the continents, torn at the seams.

Late at night, the evening before departure, I could not sleep. Tossed and turned in all the large questions, while counting down to an alarm clock that didn't have to ring, I was out the door all on my own. Oh, but life is sad, and strange, and beautiful, you feel tendrils of home bury themselves on her borrowed balcony, look out over a water that once belonged to you, look at the children you should be knowing better, you feel home bend itself into bus seats and subway trains and the familiar tint of people's hair and accents. You know traveling twists your lenses beyond distortion, know that if you lived here you would always be slightly askew, know that New York feels like your spine aligning, but 

oh,

In the late nights that refuse sleep, in the quiet, sandlime brick houses along a cross-country railway, in the cool crisp water of an evening swim, and the melancholic wringing of a heart already inflamed, you allow yourself wonder. What if this was home, and I'd never have to wander again, 

It's a thought too to big grasp. I nap no the train, instead, look forward to another reunion and another question of it this what it is to be humnan?

The answer I'm only just beginning to fingure out.

Rodeo

Your bags lie half-packed, clothes strewn about the room, your life in shambles, shards of people you might like to be. An airplane ticket sits in your pocket, it makes you feel calm, safe, right. 

You realize now when they ask you questions, none of your answers will suit them. You are homeless, now, you do not know where you will be a month from whenever they ask you to clarify your plans, they cannot grasp you. They've known you this way before. They've lost you to the whims.

This, too, feels right. 

So you are not sorry.

Echo Lake

Climb the mountain pass, morning warming into hot July day, so few remain, navigate treacherous terrain around unknown corners and deposit at the foot of a lake. I hike through forests that look like those of my childhood, find the flower that gave me my name, listen for bears but hear only my own breaths, I am the only person for miles.

The fears grab me, too often they sit me down, take the muscles from out of my legs, the voice from my throat, keep me locked in the confines of a beloved home. But some days I put them in the backseat with me, say you can come but you cannot say anything, some days I drag myself across the coals of their eager hands and dare to look at what's beyond their horizon. 

I came home tired, happy, trekked out to the creek and sat staring at the moving waters. Count down minutes till farewell. But I am free, and when you are free, 

no goodbyes really hurt
quite so much.

Dusk

The sun sets late here in the north, lingers like in your home country, like a reluctant end, the familiarity feels comforting. I sit on the back porch letting my skin get cold, a swirl of poetry and stories and truths running laps through my insides. You came to the country to see more clearly, and you cannot take it back now. Sometimes the things we find by opening the door to hidden closets is exactly the monsters we feared would be there waiting. 

The point is to turn the light on anyways, drag them out into the middle of the room, make them less fearful by revealing their edges. Every monster ends somewhere. 

Even you.

Hellgate Canyon

A warm breeze moves in from the east, unassuming, gentle. You see the remaining days trickle from your calendar, it feels too soon, too soon, all you ever wanted was more time. You plead with the Universe for more time, look at each blade of grass like you want to commit it to memory. 

Earlier, along the lazy river, drifting through statuesque Montana canyons, you remarked at how easy it is to laugh in the company of others, how light your heart after a day spent with friends. Driving back home to the empty cabin under big sky lightning, you thought, and yet, how easy to live without.

It's harder to fight an illness,
when it was made in your bones.

Earlies

Wake with a shock, late after too many false starts in the middle of the silent nights. Strange dreams of holiday shopping, new apartments, and a climb across peaceful, icy waters bounce around your head like ping pong balls while you wait for the coffee to steep. 

a full writing day

The gift trickles across your eyebrows without knowing quite where to land. The coffee begins to sink in, remind you of the magic feeling when a page is blank, a day is new, an everything is possible. 

You sit down in front of the word processor, greet it like an old friend. Feel like a stranger to it, but at once that you've known each other your whole life. 

It feels like home. And you are ready to come back to it.

Ridge View

At the top of the switchbacks, where the mountain ridge peaks and the valleys spread in three directions, Big Sky making a name for itself without even trying, stood a lone picnic table. I climbed the last incline, through a sea of gold, long grass waving in the wind. Sat on the picnic table and looked out over the valley, searching for answers among the rolling hills, the cast fields, the cars in miniature making their way across the highway. 

It's always in silence that the answers come. I saw the core of what it is to be human, the core of what it is to be me, and how the two don't seem to intersect as much as they should.

The insight didn't seem so hard to swallow, more like getting glasses after the world was blurry for years. Like a psychic only telling you things you already know.

I took my core back down the mountainside. Made my way back to the little cabin in the valley. Sat in silence, holding the core in the palm of my hand, 

and wondering where it goes now.

I'd Forgotten How It Goes

I wake early in the cold morning, with just the slightest hint of magic across my eyelids, like sensing the season's first snow fall before you look out the window. Step out into the quiet cabin, where what remains of my life sits immobile, a still life painting in the mountains. Here is the typewriter, with a half written poem in its jaws. Here is the piano, preparing for a wedding, piles of paper trying to make sense of your literary ambitions. 

He summons you to work, and you cannot quite tell what's getting in your way, until the coffee sinks into your chest and reminds you of feelings long lost. You want to be writing, it whispers to you, the words are ready. 

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.

You arrived at the doorstep
of everything you were hoping you would find

and all you have to do is walk through.

Notes on Home

Shake out of a dream, your pulse high and your mind elsewhere. Returning to Earth takes longer when you were just light years away. The western wilderness remains steadfast outside your window, quiet in an early morning breeze, as the sun climbs the mountainside behind the house. A new day, a blank slate. You see the end of the road approaching, want desperately to find the metaphor that will shift you into a higher gear. Want to feel the deadline energy make you savor each moment.

Images of New York came across the screen last night, simple, sweet and quintessentially home. They asked if I miss the city, and when I said no, it was clear they heard what they wanted in the answer. But not missing it doesn't mean never wanting to go back. 

No, filled me with such joy. 

Because not missing New York now, means it is still a home I take for granted. 

Not missing New York now, means it has not been taken from me. 

I saw those images on the screen, and all I felt was peace.

Sunset Park

On the drive home, the sun set behind me, setting the grassy knolls aflame in bright washes of yellow. Remains of clouds become homing beacons, dotting the sky with bright lights and sharp edges. Turn off the highway to the small country road, feel it in your gut, it's time to pull over. 

Find the western horizon aflame, impossibly stretched across the endless miles of sky, pink feathers around the edges and a sliver of moon on the periwinkle ends. The air smelling of grass, cows, summer. Back in the car, see the first black bear of the trip, pausing as I pass, dusk settled by the time I reach the little cabin. The insight of the evening not to forget all the things you are already doing right, that are already going well. It's so easy to see the things not yet accomplished. 

But you've already seen a sunset the kind that takes your breath away, already seen a black bear, a night sky, already felt the afternoon breeze across your shoulders. You've already discovered a new story in the melee of your mind. 

There is much left to do. But oh, how many stars you hold already in your hands.