86 and Lex

Will you come stay with me, she crackles over the line, a weeks worth of hospital chair sleeps finally breaking across her temples. I got a room at a hotel up the street. 

You make your way back to the upper east side, this strange anomaly of a neighborhood you forget is on your map of New York City, stop in at the hospital and walk laps around the corridors with him, gossiping about the nurses and digesting possible futures. By the time you reach the hotel room, she sleeps. You tip toe your way to the bed by the window, shimmy into crisp, white sheets and think, so much of what we encounter in life we could’ve never guessed would happen. 

New York lies comfortingly outside the window, lulls you to sleep, lulls you to peace the kind you’ve only ever felt here. The west calls to you, the world calls to you, but only New York can bring you home with a whisper. 

If You Are the Ghost of New York City

When in doubt,
song will untie the knots
in your chest
will remind your lungs

How to breathe.

An entire day whiles away from under your feet. You do not mind. You have run out of New York hustle, have run out of will to keep your calendar full. You sit in the bath tub until the water goes cold instead, stare at a wall and try to feel the blood return to your body. On the screen, a man moves to New Mexico. You think, I lived there once. Now you cannot see the future anymore, and you don't know where you'll live in it. 

There should be poetry to come out of this darkness, should be stories to billow out of the pain in your fingertips, but all you want is silence. 

All you want is someone else to do
the breathing
for you.

When I Cannot Sing My Heart

You make your way to the East Village at noon, when it slows down to its mid-day lull, when it looks like the home you could always return to. You navigate crosswalks without thinking, because it's rhythm sits in your veins despite the long absence. Their apartment like a second home, the children unaffected by your comings and goings because they've never known a day when you didn't belong to their lives. There is a magic to friends as family, you have long known it but never failed to be bowled over to see it in action. These are the support systems that will carry us all to the other end of this nightmare.

Later in the afternoon, you make your way over to the writing bar, tickled to find yourself in its neighborhood on a Monday, how New York gives you little pats of encouragement when it knows you need it. Sink into its colored lights, its soft music, its reminders of what you ever came into this life to do. When we forget the point of it all, that reminder can set us straight and get us to take a step again. 

In this storm, I have lost my words, lost my way, I disintegrate like dust in the hospital corners but at the end of every hurricane, there is a dawn of stillness, there is a blank page where you can turn your turmoil to tales, where your bleeding heart can turn into a hand full of ink. In the darkest cloud, you still remain certain the sunlight of the Word will return to you again.

After all, in all this life, it has never let you down before.

Recovery Room

The nurse leans against a column near the elevators, looks at her and says, do you know what I read in his records? It just says, 'coming out of anesthesia, still has his sense of humor.' No one does that. We laugh, gratefully accepting any breath of levity in a day that has been anything but. The hours while away at their own pace, shaded hospital windows confusing your perception like Las Vegas casinos, the point is to be here without question. 

At last, when the Upper East Side begins to go to bed, we are able to carry her out of the gates, drag her to food. She says I cannot possibly eat and we say of course but order her meals anyway. She cleans the plate. We make jokes of newfound friendships in sterile corridors, because at the end of the day everything else is too heavy to bear. You turn around and upend your own tears onto those around you, and they step up in ways you could only ask for with your most hopeful of hearts. 

When you come back to Bushwick, late Saturday night and the kids all out, your suitcase still in tow and your eyes empty with exhaustion, it's like you're breathing for the first time all day. The apartment is cool, you thank him silently for fixing the radiators, think, people step up in ways you could only ask for with your most hopeful of hearts, think, support ripples across the water until it reaches peace.

Think,

I would never have known to ask for
half of the gifts I've been given.

Amen

Hospital time takes over your calendar, breathes minutes into hours and miles into millimeters, when you say you’re coming to sit in that hospital room whether she asks it or not she cries on the line and walks five blocks west instead of east, lost in more ways than one and upended at the Carlyle before realizing her mistake. When she says I just love him so much, what she means is I don’t want to live without him. You begin to crumble and see your own safety nets arrange themselves around you, that you may be able to pay it forward and wrap your own whole safety net around that small corner hospital room. When you say you’re coming back early she cries again and says please come straight here and sit with me. Says if we both die will you take our savings and the kids? When you talk on the phone you laugh, because what else is there to do, but when you hang up, you fall into a pile on the floor, overcome by your trembling body, surprised at your unusual frailty. 

But when he wraps you up in the quiet upstate night, for a moment you think, maybe it will be alright. For a moment you think, you have pulled yourself together before. Now is not the time to fall into piles, there will be time for that yet. Now is the time to do the things unasked, to appear in the spaces where otherwise grows worry, now is the time to hold your breath until a balloon appears in your chest and carries you all the way through to where the calendar can be made right again. 

Hospital time

She comes home late, well after the kids are asleep, whispers into the hallway they’ve spent a lifetime building, says I left him to sleep, I’ll go back in the morning. The kids asked you to tell scary stories for bedtime, blissfully unaware the new scares that sit in your breath. 

You cry the whole way home on the L train. 

She speaks new secrets into the Negronis you keep pouring each other, you both pause between the weighted truths, say, This is hospital time, say, This is cancer time, think, everything is different now but between you it’s really more of the same, there’ll be new tests in the morning but between you it’s really just more of the same and when you cry the whole way home on the L train you feel nothing but gratitude for a city that will let you wring your chest open in public at 12:34 am, feel nothing but faith in hospitals with secret exits to fairy lights and taxi cabs that show up in the rain, feel nothing but hope in relationships that brave the cold of winter to endure another year, another decade together  

When you cry the whole way home on the L train you feel  nothing

but light.

Ticket

Your hand lingers on the button for just a moment, you look over the travel details again, confirm connections, calculate pennies in your bank account, calculate joy in your heart. Push the button. 

A whole new trip reveals itself into your life, speaks of as yet unseen wonders, of long awaited thrills, you think it had been a minute since you had a ticket in your back pocket but that isn't true at all, it's been a year of tickets in your back pocket, been a year of making up for lost time, and you are not ignorant to the treasure chest that cracked open inside of you as the Darkness walked out. 

The vastness of the world becomes trite when you try to put it into words, becomes small in containment, cannot possibly paint its entire spectrum onto a blank sheet of paper. But you cannot not try. You cannot go through a life without turning it into words, because you do not know how to know it unless it is shaped into serifs, do not know how to bring the world without you unless you can bind it and carry it under your arm. 

January waxes and wanes in that cloudy space behind your eyes, but for the first time in years, it hasn't taken over the blood in your veins, the breath in your lungs. For the first time in years, you feel as though you can trust you'll make it out alive, feel like spring is just another lightness on the horizon, not a frail lifeline on which your every step hangs. 

Feel like you've found that the answer you were looking for
was in your own hand all along.

Scratcher, take ( )

You try to count the Mondays spent in the far corner of this bar, try to hold the mountains of magic it has amassed in your hand, you come up short every time, your heart cannot hold all the love you feel for this dark space and its warm lighting, this warm space with its inviting energy. I still remember the first time I stepped down these stairs in careful anticipation, still remember the very air of the neighborhood, how suddenly there appeared a little piece of New York that was molded only for my words. It's been years now, but I still feel exactly the same, this is a blessing. A neighbor tumbled in later, we joked with the bartender and told stories in confidence, this, too, a gift. I took the L train home later, strangely making my way out of the neighborhood that for so long was mine. Bushwick was dark, and a little cold, but my keys fit in the door and my things strewn over the kitchen table, this was all I ever asked out of a life. At the end of the street, the Empire State Building gleams in the distance. 

Everything will be alright,
I just know it.

Exit Light

The bathtub fills slowly, but steadily, inches upon inches, crawling up the side. You step in when it's just past your ankles, but the edge of the bathtub reaches past your shoulders, it's the deepest bath you've ever had in New York, the luxury is not lost on. You pull the curtains from their windows, desperate to drag sunlight into the dark Brooklyn nook where your suitcase currently rests. It's been seven months now of your trinkets in storage, of your life on wheels, and you have no desire to step off the moving train just yet. 

You wonder how to explain that to someone who hasn't bought a ticket in decades. 

You wonder how to explain that the West still whispers to you, that your nights are spent dreaming of winding roads and air the kind that expands in your lungs with the altitude, how your nights are spent staring into a starscape that defies belief, how your words yearn themselves to freedom, how they spurn against conformity, the straight and narrow. 

It occurs to me that these words have brought me too far, for me to let them wither now.
Occurs to me that the stars have already spoken,
and whether to follow them or not was never a question that needed answering.

Viral

Another illness roils your lungs, you cannot believe how the after times come for you, but what is January if not a rug pulled out from under you. You light your therapy lamp, sign a lease for a small nook in Bushwick, return to the fifth-floor Nolita walkup where your hat currently hangs, lean into the comfort of having keys to New York City in your back pocket, they do a good job at replacing tickets, sometimes. 

You were dragged around the world for so long, you thought you'd never know how to be still, how to set roots and sleep soundly. 

Instead, it turned out, you can sleep wherever you close your eyes,
can belong wherever you have yourself a key.

Nolita

You take a late train home from Atlantic, nothing running like it should and your breath like a cold cloud escaping from your lips, but when you climb that bridge to Manhattan, does it not expand in your lungs like a tonic? Step out at Grand Street, skip across icy Chinatown crosswalks, see the Empire State building peek through the ends of the avenues like whispered reminders of what you come home to. 

How do you explain the feeling of landing at the edge of the Manhattan skyline, to someone whose heart is ice?

He says he doesn't need to speak to references, says These are the cute keys, says the radiator is set to the Spanish Flu, and you know just what he means. You send him a deposit instantly and take the keys before you go. Sometimes you think the things you know do not fit on this island, do not fit in the realm of his embrace, could not be contained in a myopic love. But you don't yet know how to put that into the words of someone who doesn't listen in poetry. 

So you let it drift around like dust bunnies in whirlpool breezes, wait patiently for the sentences to align, make no questions that you have no interest in answering, at the end of this cobblestone street is the Empire State Building, at the end of all your steps is a city that still tingles in your hair after all these years, at the end of this story you still made a home in the one place that made sense, if that isn't poetry, 

you don't know what is.

of Time

Return to the city, again, again, returns upon returns, forever a grateful reunion, through the bowels of Penn Station labyrinths, through snowy avenues and tingling skyscrapers, how many times can you see this city as if for the first time and love it as if you'd never known a life without it? The gift is not lost on you. 

He says stay another night, says stay another lifetime, says Life doesn't have to be as hard as you make it, and you don't know how to trudge through a life if it's not heavy. Look at apartment listings and wonder if it's a mistake. You were never better than when you lived in a suitcase. 

There was a time when you thought that made your cursed. 

You're starting to think it's a gift you wouldn't have known to ask for.

Austin

Arrive in a town with none of your footprints on it, immediately begin to make them. Piece together a puzzle that reminds you of others but also of nothing. Remember how you went to Southern California one autumn to make peace with a city you thought had taken everything from you - and it had.

Only, the things which were yet to be given to you had not appeared on your doorstep. You couldn’t lose them in that fire. So now when they appear in the palms of your hands they feel strange, weighted, precarious. This town looks nothing like that one. 

Only if you’re trying to make it something 

you do not get to keep. 

Swell

They come in on their own, the tendrils of nerves that seemed so deep in slumber that they would not wake. They stretch and weave and make themselves comfortable in the little nooks and crannies of your being, spaces that have rested empty for so long, and once they switch on the light, you cannot stop thinking about them. This is the part that grates at you, that you had forgotten. 

Absence only appears when a light has been turned on to show it. And its image flashes across your retina even after the lights are off again, even after the door is closed. Now the absence is an object which exists. You move mountains to fill the void.

And all you find
is that you like the exercise.

Upstate

When you apologize for all the things you bring with you, he says, it's not that much, really. When you fall ill after dinner, he cleans the kitchen and tucks you in. When you disagree about your views on the future, it's a game of curiosity, not a duel to the death. The snow falls outside the upstate windows and you have no fear, because everything has been made light.

In the early morning, you tip toe downstairs to the kitchen, just as dawn paints the snow in pinks and violets, the streets quiet, the old house creaking peacefully, while he lies sleeping in the attic nook you've known and loved so long. Nothing seems different, but you do. Nothing looks different, but you are. Your ears ring with the silence. 

But your mind speaks volumes, all on its own.

Insurrect

A week passes, you forget your words. An illness returns, a fear wafts past your senses. You lean your head against the dog's, tell her the suitcases don't mean what she thinks they mean - even though in the end, they will - warm tears trickling down your cheeks to the satin of her ears. You think about love and leaving, think about the fires that have driven you to the ends of the earth, think about the grounding roots that have tried to bring you back. Later, on a stepladder in the storage unit that houses everything you own, you look at the future and try to piece it together like a broken crystal vase. Your friends open their doors. Your heart trembles on the threshold. 

Holds a suitcase
and wonder where it goes.

Happy. New. Years.

When the countdown comes on, you feel a strange tingle it's been ages since you knew. Your favorite bar - your sweet refuge in a sea of change - is as usual a mosaic of New Yorkers making their way through the world, and for a moment you are all the same. A flamboyant man in a small tank top gives you all beads, your favorite bartender throws paper party horns at everyone along the bar, the room erupts in joyous mayhem. At 12:01, a group of youngsters leave, and you are tempted to tell them, back in my day. Your phone explodes in wishes for a happy new year, and you think perhaps we have to hold on to these shreds of joy, when the rest of the world is in such shambles. 

You vow to hold on to those shreds best you can. 

In the morning, a new world lies silent in anticipation. Nothing has changed, but it is possible everything has changed. You look back at the year behind you, at how impossibly far you've come since the last January first, what beautiful, soul-affirming, awe unfurled before you, as you returned yourself to the world. This year, may it be just the next step in a staircase you've spent so much effort in building. 

This year, may you tie those shreds into a lasso,
may you use them to go forth and capture
the stars.