Maasai Mara

The bridge has been washed away, he says, so we’ll have to take the long road. The long road turns out to look a lot like it’s been washed away, too, but eventually the truly all terrain vehicle reaches the camp by the river. Our hosts arrive wrapped in their cloths, bright spots in an otherwise camouflaged Savannah. 

Later, standing in the open roof of the car, watching the elephants walk by unperturbed by your awe, you think there was a time when I did not believe it would be worth to live to see this. The feeling is so distant now that your outstretched fingertips cannot reach it. At night, your hosts lead you through the bush, careful that you do not run into the hippopotamuses that live along the river banks at your feet. The sky is a million stars. You think, my heart is full. Fall asleep to the sounds of the world. Fall asleep like your life is worth seeing. 

Part

He begins to pack his things, prepare his departures. We wander around the tropical garden, remarking on our sunburned bodies and full spirits, and you are awash with gratitude that your trip is far from over, already plotting your returns. Africa nestles its eons of birdsong under your skin, any lingering winter on your brow alights with the morning coffee on the veranda. He says to pack your safari bag light, we leave at dawn. Back in New York, other voices say other things and you forget how to hear echoes across the oceans. Surely it'll return to you, surely you can be more than this one trick pony of escapes into the wilderness at first sign of stillness. 

(You want to believe it, but you haven't seen the proof,
yet)

When You’re High You Never

Returns down the mountain are quicker than the ascent, you run hand in hand and her eight-year-old body squeals with delight. Come morning everyone sleeps a dreamless sleep under twisted mosquito nets. You watch hippos leap in the water and spend the whole drive home with African stinging nettle burning along your thigh. 

You still haven’t the words, haven’t the capacity for what it all means. She writes you from Manhattan and asks when you’re coming home, but what she’s really asking is when will you land 

and

the thing about it is, 

You’re not sure you truly will. 

Naivasha

Arrive at the top of the mountain in an exhausted daze. Look at the volcano rim in silent awe, unsure what could possibly be said to match its quiet majesty. Later, by the large lake, with cicadas conversing and lights blinking across the water, the silence says more than words, anyways, so you stay quiet. 

You tell her you only see differences now, only obstacles. She says isn’t that what people do when they try to self destruct. 

The moon is full  

I take a long drag of a cigarette, look at the haunts of ny past review before me. I remember who I am. 

It’s just, on the road of your life across the oceans, the blinking lights beam wherever you hope they take you to go. 

Big Five

Lessons in Kenya: 

When a lion lies to rest against the side of your car, you stay put.
When a rhinoceros picks a fight with another mountain of an rhinoceros at an arm's length from your eyelashes, you gun it out of there.
If a giraffe appears out of the canopy ahead, you can remind yourself this is real life and not Jurassic Park.
Backyard concerts underneath starlit nights in a neighborhood you couldn't find again to save your life can sit forever at the base of your shoulder blades instead.
Friendships built over decades and continents do not need to sit anywhere, because they are everywhere.
Sometimes love feels like lemon juice on a perpetual paper cut,
and still can be your most precious possession. 

You can spend years building a stable home, a predictable periphery, convincing yourself the tranquility and safety will let you sleep soundly at night. But one day on the other side of the world, one day of wonder, of madness, of sweet fragrant tropical nights and madness in the eyes of familiar strangers, can crack open the shells you've laquered around yourself, can let your covered spirit flow out like lava into the open air, burning the reliable ground beneath you
but also
setting the sky aflame
with magic.

Asante

Morning arrives in the highlands long before dawn, a tempest of birdsong in the trees outside your window. You sleep too little, so many nights of bright starts and REM deficits, but you step barefoot onto the back porch with a cup of coffee in your hand, and cannot remember how to be angry about it. 

While the house sleeps, you have every intention to take the chance to work, but work evades you when words fall into its place. The air is sweet with exotic flowers and mosquito repellent, a light breeze lifts the unassuming clouds in and out of your line of vision. The water in the pool is warm, the grass against your bare feet soft. One day your parents carried you for the last time, the life is not lost on you. You pick mango fruits right off the bough and think perhaps there is more to life than you're currently giving it credit. 

February withers in the margins, molts from your pale winter skin. Embers of joy travel along the inside of your skin and send shivers down your spine. There was a time when you did not remember how to want to live, it's not that long ago, but in your chest it feels like the words of a whole other person. A sun rises over Africa. You begin to look for tickets to keep in your backpocket, again.

To a Friend

You fall into a deep sleep, the kind that only the remains of a red eye, translatlantic flight can offer. When you wake up, the Red Sea lies below. A man is praying in the galley, his prayer mat travel size, the silence around him heartening. You splurge on an hour of Wi-Fi to download work, only to find that the work refuses to be downloaded. This may be a sign. 

The anticipation of arrival evades you, like you cannot imagine what lies on the other side of that Arrivals door, and your lack of imagination surprises you, was this not your strong suit? You only imagine you've packed too many sweaters.

A new horizon beckons. 

You walk towards it as though you always knew you would.

Terminal (one)

Can you hang the key on the hook by the door before you go? he writes from somewhere over the Atlantic. You walk around the apartment and collect your things, close another chapter in the book you can't stop writing. The Brooklyn sun is bright, like it's trying to remind you that it knows the secrets of springs, that it will bring them to you if only you wait a little longer. The piles of snow melt quietly on the street corners, as you drag your suitcase to the L train, reveling in the transit that always grounded you to yourself, always brought you home. At the airport, you try to distract the agent from checking the weight of your bag, try to distract her from checking the weight of your expectations, your cheeks flush with spring sun, how can you possibly explain to her the freedom that sits in your ever-expanding chest. An exit row seat appears, your heavy suitcase disappears, you have all the time in the world now to sit and stare out the panoramic window as a city which has promised to wait until you return to it, a city that has promised to bring you spring if only you promise to come home. 

You are all promises, all confidence in the idea that somehow you can still have it all. 

That somehow, the pearl will be handed to you. Somewhere along the line there will be girls, visions, everything. 

It isn't hard to promise,
then.

Upend

You look behind the nightstand, in search of the end of a charging cable and finding, instead, a cockroach the size of a small bird, dead on the floor. Your time in Bushwick draws to an end, a great nor'easter drags across the borough but disappears in a sigh, the streets cold, the pavement wet. A ticket lies in your inbox, spring lies around the corner, there is much left to do, but you begin to believe, at last, that perhaps you can still do it. So many questions remains, but then, so do you. 

And as such, 
all is still possible
ahead.

Just Bear with Me

He wakes early, makes coffee while you stretch in a warm bed, a February morning rising over the lake outside your window, a dream of many voices on the tip of your tongue, something about leaps, something about departures and returns, you mull it over like a curious riddle, no longer like a fire to evade. On the train home, I stare at the gray February skies over the Hudson river, watch the northern tip of Manhattan cozy itself into view, like a morning hug from a lover you didn't know you'd missed in your sleep. 

The time is coming to pack your bags again, it's all you do is pack your bags these days, it feels like nothing more than exfoliating your skin in the shower, like nothing more than coming out brand new, time and again, like winter has nothing on you because one day you put everything you owned into storage and shed your skin until only the very heart of you remained, and the softer your heart, the stronger it is, you've learned this from all the times you thought it was broken beyond repair, you've learned this before. 

It breaks
and breaks
but is not broken.

There's a reason we whisper our lover's name into the night.

Go Ahead

The to-do list turns hoarse from yelling at you about the things you are ignoring, you spend your days staring into the sunlight and thinking of spring as a metaphor. Come sunset, he picks you up on 14th street and you careen into the mountains, the winding paths more familiar to you by the day, the sounds of the forest when you leave the window open at night. How are we meant to work when there is life to be lived? You cannot make the math come together. 

And you're not sure you want to,
anyway.

Re:Set

All day, a tangle of anxieties, a knot of the galloping to-do list firmly ensconced in my gut. I get nothing done, on a week when I needed to get so much done. Inertia drags through me like a rake, like a trawler, like lead. My face in the mirror like death exited a cave after a winter slumber, forgot her airs, was painted sallow by winter, I longed to bury the day in the garbage and start over tomorrow. 

But the running shoes beckoned, the mild temperatures, the strange industrial back streets of Bushwick that promise you a moment to yourself. So you defied the late hour, the dark night, the howling to-do list, the shrinking hours and their demands, and you went out into the night. 

I come home with pink cheeks, with smiling lungs, come home with a mind on fire and poetry in my veins. Come home unconcerned with my deficiencies. I sit down instead to write, to drink bourbon and feel my soul float elsewhere, this is a gift. 

This trick has saved your life before. 
There is no reason why it wouldn't
again.

Beside the victory

When you rise to another day of sunshine, your lungs begin to believe it. The weight around your temples announce themselves only throught their absence. You bring your running shoes to Chelsea, bring your hope to the 28th floor of a skyscraper, still spent too many hours wide awake in the middle of the night, questioning everything, but come morning you sleep a deep sleep, wrapped in if not answers, then at least sentences that in periods. 

Come daylight, you sit alone in the glassed-in space, unable to stop yourself from singing into the Hudson River views. There is work to be done, surely there is work to be done, but you survived January, and that requires its own joyful mayhem and you have no intention of ignoring it. The riverfront promenade calls to you like reminders of a time before the Great Fall and you thought you'd never be rid of that plague on your heart but you do feel different now, you do feel almost like the person you were in the before times, just a little more tired, a little more worse for the wear. 

You survived January.
Maybe now, soon,
You may live.

Rise

After weeks of overcast gloom, the sun beams over Manhattan. Blue skies, blue Hudson River waters, blue reflections in Midtown skyscraper, bright lights lifting your eyelids from the depths of sleep, sweet reminders of where you've laid your head, the smell on the borrowed shirt like a hand to hold when you didn't ask for it. 

It shows up your self-reliant superego by offering things 
you didn't think
you even wanted,

depositing them on your
doorstep quietly
so you don't need to go through
the motions
of protesting. 

On the street below, yellow cabs make their way to the West Side Highway, Sunday revelers greet the sun along the High Line. She writes to say they've canceled their plans, they're ordering bagels and staying in bed. You find a bike, make your way through a city that's held your hand through everything, go to see people who've become family in sickness for a moment of health. Spring is far away yet,
but you feel hope begin to sprout
in your spine
all the same.

Supposed to Know

By the time it's time to wrap the evening, Brooklyn lies oceans away, the landlocked path of Chelsea like a beacon in its stead. You find a bike on Barrow Street, weave it through the tenth avenue yellow cabs, past the diner where you used to walk the dog, past the Marquee, past the doorman who doesn't  know you but doesn't have the guts to admit. The key that isn't yours unlocks doors that aren't either, but you feel at home anywhere you lay your words, you no longer tiptoe in hallowed spaces, and you're not sure yet what that means. 

In the late afternoon, they call you with news the kind that breaks your chest and turns your tears into confetti. You realize you've been holding your breath for nearly two weeks and when it releases from your lungs, you have nothing left to hold you up, nothing left to keep you from turning into a soft petal on the floor. You have never been happier about the collapse. 

The Chelsea apartment sits quiet in the late night, his absence like a soft reassurance you look for in the empty rooms, you no longer break in fear of the silence. There was a time you'd have given anything to have a key in your hand. 

It's hard to accept safety,
when you've learned to rely on the
opposite.

Are you feeling nervous,
are you having fun?

Don't be scared
Don't be shy,
come on in

The water's fine. 

Unsleep

All afternoon, you are tired. In the early evening, you sit in the deep bathtub and wonder if it's too early for bed. You long for it like a long-lost lover. 

But come midnight, your eyes are wide open, your mind a pin clear state of perception. Thoughts and questions align themselves, wait their turn, shuffle through your awareness like it's their day of reckoning. He gives you a key, tells you to come by anytime, to stay here, to make yourself comfortable and anyway it's closer to the hospital than your Bushwick sublet. When you tell him you are not yet ready for an apartment the kind you'd put your furniture in, his voice is sad in how he asks you why.

You realize the parts of you that do not fit the mold used to make you sad, too, used to make you think something was broken within you. Now you caress their soft edges, hold your oddities to the light and whisper how much you love them, that they not shy away from building strength in their prisms of color. 

Sometimes what we think is broken
is simply who we are. 

You take his key,
but you sleep at your own place,
tonight.

Groundhog

We make jokes that it’s more of the same, that we’re stuck in this time loop, but it’s too soon for such a joke, I am not ready to laugh yet at setbacks. I take meetings from a visitor waiting lounge and the clients fawn over the skyline behind me, the strange gift of skyscraper views isn’t lost on me. 

Later, over pad see ew, you tell him how you are not yet ready to land in a place that will have you take your things out of storage, and the sadness in his voice when he says Why? makes you think people are not ready for your fires, for your flights. You no longer see sadness in the way your roots refuse to depend on mailboxes, on furniture that nails you to the floor. 

You see only how they wrap themselves around other souls like tubes in a hospital bed, like upper east side hotel sleepovers, like circles of support that extend around you for miles across this island. 

You used to think your lack of a mailbox made you unmoored, a specter cursed to walk the earth without somewhere to land, but it isn’t true. You sleep secure in the embrace of people who’ll walk to the ends of that earth, just to bring you home.