You Get All the Big Lights

The day disappears in a mess of boxes, labels, plans. At ten p.m., you run out of packing tape, and the grace of a New York RiteAid is not lost on you. The street is busy, warm but no longer overbearing. People of the East Village are living their lives. Bless this opportunity. She asks if you are sad to leave this home, and you cannot find the feeling, though you've looked. You empty the bourbon, the nice one that you had been saving, because what's to save now. Tomorrow the movers come. Soon, soon, the horizon lies at your feet. You put the lid on the typewriter. Hold a hand to the exposed brick fireplace that no longer works except to whisper of lives past. 

You were a good home.
I'm sorry I wasn't good while I was with you.
But I'm better for having been here.

Ends

I wake up to a room of white walls. Clean lines of neatly taped moving boxes sit comfortingly along the periphery. This is a world I know. It’s still early when I get to the river, speak with the skyline and wonder if this is our last meeting. Say silent goodbyes to the regulars, New York is a constant unspoken agreement of loss and connection. I wonder where I’ll land when I come back. A large ship trails by, it’s name in large letters on the bow. Red Hook. 

I take an extra moment with the clovers, let myself stay in it, my request silent, hesitant. At last, holding tightly to the ground, a tiny, half-eaten four-leaf clover appears. I remember the first one I found, years ago, beat up and imperfect, and the lesson I took from it. Calling this full-circle is too on the nose to even mention. Luck comes in all shapes. 

I pluck the clover, tuck it away safely. Return to the home of the moving boxes. A neighbor comes over, prepares to make the home his. So much light, he says, and you wax poetic about how the windows won you over. You do not tell him how you made this apartment appear out of thin air, do not tell him of your Friday child ways, this home is his now, your thin air lies across the horizon, 

waiting for whatever else you are ready to make 

appear. 

Clean Sheets

The apartment begins to empty. You realize you never took any pictures of the home as it was. Now it is something different. Maybe you are, too. 

I select books for the journey, piles of poetry, puzzles. A person begins to form behind my eyelids, not new, she is wholly familiar, I only lost her for a little while, only lost myself for a bit, but I know how to hear her now. Take down the structures piece by piece, pan for gold nuggets until you find the vein, unearth the parts until you can build the whole. 

It's been a long time.
I am ready now.

How Many Sleeps

One week remains in the apartment with all the windows. The people from the triplex have already moved out, the people into whose home you stared late November nights and dreamed that if you ever could choose your street corner, this would be it. And then you did. 

One week remains with your books on their shelves, your clothes in the closet. With keys in your pocket. There's too much adrenaline in your veins, now, to be sad, it's all packing tape and to-do lists, all forward motion. It's only that brief moment, late at night, when I lay my head on the pillow, that I count the remaining sleeps, that I wonder what it will be like not to have the view out of these windows be the last thing I see at night, the first again when dawn returns. 

I'm sorry for all the times I left you, all the times my heart was already elsewhere though you asked me to stay. I'm sorry I made it seem like a part of me wanted to. 

The truth is I'm always already one step away from the door, I'm always one step away from having my bags packed. Nothing makes as much sense as when I'm tearing the pages from out of the notebook until I find a clean sheet. 

My head is full of stories again.
I have to find somewhere
to write them down.

the Scratcher

You walk into the writing bar, sticky summer Monday shortly after opening, the little pandemic outdoor seating a welcome homing beacon. The bartender greets you like a friend, you tell her this is my last writing Monday in a while, and she pours your drink for free. New York beams at you. 

How many years has it been since you took your first hesitant steps into its underground, armed with a backpack full of unwritten paper? The Village Voice was still in print, its writers trickling in after work, discussing the discoveries of the day. How many first dates, second dates, pandemic meetups, last-minute drinks, moments of silence, have you had within its dark-wooded cavern? The first pangs of separation smart on your skin. You think maybe a part of you likes it. You never tell the bartender your order. You do not have to. 

He writes from Hawaii, says he has a cabin in the depths of the Western wilderness if you'd like to live in it, and you think that yes, yes you do. Your mother calls you a Friday child, says everything always comes up roses for you. You feel the Universe align with your spine. A friend creates a road trip playlist for your travels. You feel the Universe settle in, get cozy, get ready. 

All the things that were to come were too fantastic not to tell. 

Turn your hand over. Find a pearl resting in your palm. Think, Alright then,

Let the adventure begin.

Scribbles

Days in and out, you never write, there is too much electricity in the air. The apartment turns into a maelstrom of upended boxes from the recesses of your little shoebox. The moving company asks if you have furniture, and when you describe it they deftly reduce the quote. I drive across the Brooklyn Bridge laughing, because isn't this the most beautiful place to call home? Find old typewriter scribbles among the boxes, saying I was homeless once, but leaving New York now is only travel, is only adventure, because since I became yours, I never sleep a night without knowing where I belong. 

Everything feels easy when the demons step off the gas, when their races through the bottoms of the sludge wash away into distant memories, when the chest is no longer weighed down by a hundred pounds of lead. You make a note to remember this when they return. 

That thing
where life feels unbearable
is not the truth
The illness gets loud sometimes
but now is the time to be

Louder.

The Slows

Summer enters your bloodstream against your better judgment, against your best attempts at maintaining decorum. You feel the currents of every water you have ever stepped into stream across your temples, there's a light breeze you've never seen before in June in New York, somehow the world is smiling on you and you've yet to find out why. 

A storage unit is rented, a moving company contacted. There's a tingle at the back of your neck each night when you go to bed. Fourteen sleeps till it's here. There's a sweet appreciation in walking around the apartment, breathing in the light, remembering a longing for this space long before it was mine to hold. 

Look at road maps across America and feel only freedom, no fear. 

Little sprouts of your words begin to stretch and yawn in the depths of your mind, their tendrils trembling toward foot holds previously weighted by the world on your shoulders. She worries that you are throwing your cares to the wind and will blow away, and you do not know how to explain it. 

Riding the wind doesn't mean I diseappear into the ether.
It means when I come back, it's because I wanted to.

Stinging

By the end of the day, my eyes are watering. The deep yellow apocalypse has given way to skies capped at a higher altitude, but New Yorkers still bring out the masks from their pandemic time capsules, ready at a moment. You think, it begins, but the truth is the end of days have been counting themselves down for ages already. This species deserves no better. The Colorado River dries up. 

The bartender says, New York real estate has weathered every storm, has always bounced back, as you discuss options beyond fifth street. 

She says she moved to Cape Cod.

By the time you return home, eager to rediscover the magical mysteries of your unleashed interior, the winds have turned and new fires need extinguishing. You are reminded that no one minds your dreams but you. 

Nothing begins
if you do not start it.

Tempest

I wake early again, a hazy light outside my window says the wildfires of Canada still rage, the sun merely an orange glow in the sky, a speck of dust behind the Williamsburg skyscrapers. The air smells like late nights at camp. A neighbor gifts me moving boxes, they stack up in a corner of the shoebox, while I try to consider what pieces will make it to the new life. Management doesn't answer my emails, but perhaps it's just as well: I don't know what I want them to say, anyway. 

Late at night, staring at the East Village lights outside the window, I think perhaps it is too soon to go. That this place only ever saw me in illness, that I only ever saw this place under the shroud of darkness, and perhaps there is hope for us yet. But on my lips rest the charms of the two-year itch, of the need to death clean and live with only the suitcases I can carry. I look at houseplants and contemplate what will come. The avocado is thriving. The geranium grew out of cuttings my mother carried on a plane across the continent, I would never go without it. 

The road lies tempting and simmering just outside my line of vision. I know the promises it holds. I pick up disused charging cords, pandemic puzzles, a crock pot I haven't used in four years. 

Think, how light would I be not to carry these things? and answer only,
light enough to fly.

But Its Gone Now

I figured we were the same. 

The nights are full of strange dreams, dawn creeping into convoluted storylines, where I am neither victor nor spoils. I wake in a strange twilight, like someone raked a distorted symphony of emotion across my chest. How are any of us meant to live a mundane existence when the wonders of the world simmer underneath the surface? 

Along the river, a Chinese man catches a fish the size of my leg, lets it wriggle and gasp until the last breath disappears from it. I find a four-leaf clover in the same green patch where I’ve found nothing for days. A heavy fog lies across the East River. Summer begins. 

You count down the days until you may simmer, 

too. 

to be Kind

Spring has never been so long, so lingering in its cool air, I wore a sweatshirt today and reveled in the feeling. I waver at the edge of the precipice, at once so near and far, so steady and yet so frail. He sends a song and you wonder if you might take that into the dessert and call it a day. Management writes to ask if you might consider negotiating still, and your newly beating heart doesn’t know what to wish for now. 

I dreamed of you last night, all safety and comforts in unflinching eyes, in knowing just how the muscles curve around your elbows. I woke in joy, but I woke, too, in the incalculable distance between us. 

I have this old car and a tank full of gas. I’m driving it wherever the road takes me, until it tells me to stop. 

And what I mean is

there’s room in the front seat, if you want it. 

Till You See the Sun Rise

Is this how people feel all the time? you ask, incredulous, so many years since you knew what it was like to be people that you cannot remember on your own. There's a lightness in your mornings, an ease under your to-do list, a spark in your eyes that feels like it was familiar once. I cross the bridge, again, again, each time returning with eyes wide, skyscrapers at twilight, microcosms bubbling, bridges towering, in every window a world is happening and it could only be happening here. She writes, If you don't want to come back, you don't have to come back, and I realize we're having different conversations entirely. 

New York, my darling, I've been away so long. Even as your streets passed under my feet, I couldn't see you for all the darkness across my eyes, wasn't truly here at all. But I am here now, New York, I see you again like the days when we first met, when you nestled your fumbling hands into mine, when I woke with your name on my lips. And the things to come were too fantastic not to tell lingers in my blood stream, 17 years after it first slipped in. We've weathered a storm, New York. 

But we weathered it together.
And now we can revel
in all the fantastic things
to come.