to Sleep

She had a good last day, she writes from across the river in suburbia. She passed on Thursday and I got on a flight the next day, I couldn't be home. 

Lives pass underneath us. A favorite singer of my youth says here's a classic and you realize it's coming up on 17 years since she wrote it. A classic from first trembling steps on Manhattan grid, a song that will forever make me happy when I am here and sad when I am not. Your voice was in my ears this morning again, but it doesn'ts sound the same, you don't mean the same, I grew and you stayed behind in another time, it's alright. 

I ran into a friend on Second Avenue, chatted briefly in the street like in days before the great explosion. Went for a run along the river and it felt like spring might not be far, like maybe there will be a time when it feels like it did then. When I walk up to the bar, the bartender just looks at me and mouths the usual? across somebody else's Guinness order, and something in my heart warms that has not thawed in years. 

Lives return in little steps, little heartbeats, the snowdrops have broken through the ground in the community garden across the street and I think perhaps this is how it happens. We die in gunshots but recover in rehabilitation wings, painstakingly relearning how to take our first steps all over again, how to make our lips form the words we are so desperate to put into the air. I woke up this morning with the blinds drawn up, I cannot help myself. Sunrise creeping across the 6th street treetops, a flock of birds relaying hte morning news on the roof and a mourning dove warming up in the escaping heat on my windowsill. We stood on a rooftop smoking one night, but it's not the same, I greet the dawn feet first now, greet the dawn by myself, but that's not how it's different. 

I fell to the bottom of the barrel, but
how it's different is
this time I'll be climbing back up again.

Never Been Great

Your father still writes on his laptop like it was a 1970s era typewriter, one index finger at a time, emphatically recoiling inches off the keyboard with each strike. It's perhaps his most endearing feature, hundreds of thousands of words written in this way, at the speed of any modern assistant's record. When he stares at that spot just out of sight and tells you I just fear I'm running out of time and I haven't told all my stories yet, it's the closest you ever get to each other.

At the bookstore, the unclearly gendered barista tells you they turned off their Wi-Fi. It's 2023 now, they say in a way that you couldn't possibly be mad about. The café is quiet, a welcome peace on a Thursday morning after a day of monsoon winter rains. The sun rose like March, birds ignorant to the calendar, they say it's the longest New York has gone without snow in centuries, and you know it means we are all about to die, but it's so hard to despair. A bookstore without Wi-Fi, a Thursday morning without panic, the light sing-songs of creative swirls unfettered by inbox dings. I know you've been having a hard time lately, but I have to believe we will make it through, I have to believe spring will return, because if I did not, what on earth would be the point of any of it.

My keyboard taps are just as loud as my father's, despite my correct finger placement, despite my coming into computer literacy in the 1990s, they echo through the bookstore like I have not a moment to lose, like I have to punch all these words into the ether before it is too late. 

I haven't told all my stories yet.

But I have to believe one day
I will.

Neither Fire Nor

Mondays back at the bar, I flinch to see the wrong bartender's back turned to me, the one who doesn't know how to sink into East Village congeniality, who doesn't know how to remember a drink order. You instruct the pour, at least he plays White Stripes, at least your seat in the corner is free, you hear yourself tell a doctor that things are pretty good, the devastation of 48 hours back like a stumble you might expect, like an expression of your clumsy charm. But isn't that what it is? Aren't we all made of bits of crooked corners, bits of flowering fields? The bartender plays Hotel California and you have to try to forgive him. You always made it miles on a tank of sunshine, when bitter lemons would stutter and stop after the first corner. 

The clock behind the bar is forever set to 9:41. You try to remember a time when you felt magic, when you felt like a stopped clock hinted at whimsy, you believe it can still be there just underneath your skin and if you could only set a spark to your nerve endings, you could set this whole town on fire. 

You came here smoldering,
don't forget,
you came here ready to
become.

Tumble

Can you come pick me up?
I fainted and they won't let me leave on my own.

You race up to midtown, 42nd street like a strange safari on a Sunday afternoon but you revel in the brief burst of light against your temples. She walks out defeated, how our demons sometimes resurface when we least expect it, how cruel the blow to an ego caught unawares. I return to a parking spot down the block, the Universe rewards devotion. 

Upstairs, my apartment remains a disaster, Christmas tinsel still draped around the fireplace and three days of coffee cups strewn about the living room. You think the mess is trying to tell you something but it is too late, you are too tired. Tomorrow is another day. 

You are ready to greet it, now,
glad to see its sunrise on the horizon.

Swirl

Did you know that it is possible to live an entire life and be no wiser than you were to begin with. You look at words from decades past and they are all the same melody, twisting their words to form the same feeling in your chest, you are forever who you were. 

January gets me at last, comes thrashing in like an unwanted relative, dirties your home then criticizes your lack of cleanliness. You cancel your plans and try to appease the relative instead, a useless game it is impossible to win. The demons line up to take communion at your feet, to eat your flesh, to drink your blood, and all you can do in return is say bless you. It's cruel that way. 

It occurs to me that maybe the cruelty is not the relative's,
but mine.

Freia

The air in the morning after a storm is always clearer than any other, the water more peaceful though the tide is high. A tentative sun climbs up behind the Williamsburg skyscrapers as you try to retrieve your senses. Last night, a flash that surprised you, like January erases summer weather from your memory, the violent smack that followed in a heartbeat setting you straight again. Later, a raging downpour while you race toward a deadline late into the night, you were never happier than reaching for that line, than when it presses the yoke of its adrenaline on your shoulders. It helps you ignore all the other voices that yell from within you. 

Earlier, at the reading, you stand staring into the bar, trying to hear the magic between the words. You’ve been so far from any magic and you wonder if that isn’t why you pad yourself in all this self-harm. You are a cliche. 

Friday arrives, the beauty of a sunrise after January thunder. You absorb it like you still believe in remission. 

Malibu

Return to the shoebox in Alphabet City to find the heater in the basement broken. You close the open windows and try to find the wool socks in the back of the closet. The pointsettias in the corner by the fireplace seem strangely out of place this side of a holiday season that feels months behind us. In California, you sister surveys a broken beach in the wake of a storm. You choke on the allegory, and your shoulders ache with tension. An unknown voice confirms your appointment. 

It's so hard to tell which lifelines lead to sunshine and which ones only seem like blue skies from afar. You determine to keep walking, but it's scarier to do it, now.

Consult

The weather app shivers in its announcements, the polar wind racing down the mountains toward the Hudson river, as I determine my way out for that neverending morning walk. The cemetery lies still, stones frozen in wait, never as quiet as in January. Down by the dock, one lone dog walker braves the temperatures. The dog is excited for hellos, the humans more keen to return somewhere warmer. The coffee grows cold in my hand in minutes. 

Promises line themselves up on the horizon, some so close I can nearly reach them with my fingertips. The depths of January that normally convolute your vision seem restful, at ease this year, forgetting to make themselves known. The instructor leads you in a deep breath and you think that's alright then. 

Every day that is not bad
is good.

Ready for

The SAD lamp flickers to light, dusty around the corners. A dreary January rain covers the windows, my limbs compacted into oblivion, the season bowls us over as it likes. I sit in the bright light, a garish caricature of my old self, and let the promise of life wash over me. My parents make good time and pass into the edge of Death Valley by late afternoon. The coast has been evacuated and they drive right into it. 

When your house is on fire, you still run in after your kids. 

I make a note to rethink what I thought love was
Make a note that the things we tell each other are only stories
until we do them.

of that World

The mornings are later by the day, I stay in bed and let the hangover drag itself across my forehead, unable to muster up the stress to get up. Januaries can be kind in their inability to care. The words lie scattered in corners, like dust bunnies abandoned to the decades, but the piano by the window whispers of release and you are powerless to resist. How it is only ever in late nights that the magic appears, how it is only after the streets quiet and the city sleeps that your mind wakes and is ready to create. She sends you a book manuscript, she sends you her bleeding hands and what did any of us think we were doing with the time we had. Over beers, he talks of moving to Mexico, and you try to remember what it was like to make something happen. 

In the movie, the empress turns 40 and declares her life over. The doctor prescribes heroin. 

You wonder if it is time lean into the wisdom of generations past, after all.

Run

Late morning, I’ve overslept, the river is beginning to empty of it’s ambitious early runners. A few familiar faces remain as I wear down my usual path, comforted by the predictability. At the edge of what remains, they are cutting down more trees, it aches in you. So many things ache in you. In my dream, we spoke of summer, we spoke of maybe come here to relax first, like we had suddenly solved a crux decades in the making. 

I woke up late, yes, but with new answers on my lips. 

Each day now is lighter than the one before. Start here. 

Don’t stop until you find yourself alive again. 

what gives

[someday
this pain will be
useful to you]

Habit

You are back at the writing bar, a constant in a sea of chaos. The bar is empty, January Mondays when people retreat into white weeks and winter silences. You fight through the apathy, beat your way to the quiet, warm space in the corner. There is too much at stake, always too much at stake, all of life is a stake and it pushes itself through your chest. There is poetry in the pain, you repeat to yourself like a mantra, like a conviction that needs to carry you through when nothing else could. You have to find reasons to everything or you'll never get out of bed, you think. Mending generations of heartache will pull the life right out of you; you wonder who has to drown for someone else to survive until the rescue boats arrive. 

You miss a time when you could run for miles and miles until all of the sad dripped out of you.

At least the bar is comforting, at least the delayed twilight of 5 pm is a pleasant surprise, at least when you walk in the door, the bartender pulls a glass and knows already what you'll ask of him. New York returns to you in minute minutes, in hair-triggers, just one more moment and you've built a whole life. I bet my heart on you years ago, New York, and even when we trip, even when we stumble, we find our way back to center. I have never regretted the miles and miles I poured into your streets.

Have never regretted the life we built
around the stake in our hearts.

2023

You count the years on your fingers, come up short, how could it possibly be this many? You flip through years of new year's letters, see how they've amassed under your thumb. Read the cynical hopefulness of your youth, watch it wax and wane through the years. How many of them speak of New York, of the word, how clear it is that the person who is you today was you already decades ago. 

The new year arrives with thaw, you wake to birdsong before dawn, everything feels like late March when life returns. Maybe it's an omen. You wonder if you can muster the optimism again, if you can lift yourself into a new year as though the darkness in your flesh was but a light whisper to be brushed off. On the first day of the year, does it not always seem possible? You take deep breaths and muster the willcourage. 

We have dreamed so many things into existence already. 

It doesn't seem impossible that we could
make another miracle before we are
done.