Your dreams are waft, wavy, lightly pulling hopeful longings across the skin on your forearms. You are reminded of your ambitions, of the light you see on every horizon. The illness wakes you before dawn, draws the lungs from out of your body, hits your over the head with demands for rest. You drink honey tea by the buckets, count down minutes until you may lay your head on your pillow again.
We do not reach the sprouting of spring,
without first enduring the death rattle of winter.
Illness rages through my body like wildfire, dividing and conquering my cells like foliage on a forest floor. Everything aches.
(Sometimes,
when one has a mind that tends to do
the raging,
This is a welcome relief)
When I wake up in the early morning, my voice has abandoned ship. I try to speak but all that comes out is wind, is imperceptible apologies. He writes to say he wishes you the best, and you cannot yet gauge how the farewell sits in your senses, though you are tempted to feel free more than anything else. A season spreads out ahead of you, the road spreads out ahead of you, you feel your body change to fit your own narrative.
The illness takes you back to bed, hinders your fireworks into the sunny afternoon. You are not angry. There is no room for anger in your chest, it is full of forward motion, now, this illness sweats the last of winters stagnation out of you, drives the pretend play from under your nails.
The shoots are sprouting from the ground,
now.
It is time for you
to unfurl as well.
The B61 waits when you run up the F train stairs: returning to your nook in the neighborhood at the edge of the map is easy some nights, and that’s how it gets you. The sommelier waxes on about romantic relationships and if we really need them, as he pours you more free champagne, and it seems you have built the best life for yourself without the rom com endings you were force fed in your youth.
It seems you have built a life around the city of New York, around the people who saw you through the worst of it and brought you out the other side, around the idea that if you could go to this city, live madly, and write, you would want for nothing.
It occurs to you that you want for nothing.
Fortune favors those who keep their eyes open to see it.
The days catch up with you, as they are bound to. There's a cold in your lungs, a twitch in your eye, a doubt in your veins. You trudge through work, thumb through your plane tickets, self-soothe with ideas of new futures, bright unseen highways across the country discovering a vista where you did not know it would appear.
For better or for worse looks different when you never really had the better. The road looks sweeter when you thought you might resign yourself to get on without its freedom.
The nights are longer, when your hours are only your own.
I mean that
as a good thing.
May is coming.
You learn the rhythm of the inter borough transit system. Don’t take buses in the afternoon, don’t turn them down at midnight. Don’t expect the express trains to run smooth, don’t forget there’s a river between you and the island and you do not decide when you can cross it. Appreciate the time of being in-between. She says she will not come visit you in Brooklyn, but you think that’s a process she’ll need to work through on her own.
You begin to think about visiting California.
He tells you to stay in his midtown apartment even while he’s away, make the transit easier, but he doesn’t understand that you are not suffering, that you are not enduring the railroad apartment with the mid century living room lounge, that find joy in the strange isolation of a neighborhood at the center of the universe. He doesn’t understand that you fought so hard to be here that even your demons gave up eventually, and they were built by the definition of perseverance.
Doesn’t understand that you love New York the way spouses love each other 50 years into for better or for worse. I do not cherry pick my conveniences with you, New York, when I say I love you I mean I love
You.
(it's here, it's come,
there's a moment every year where you aren't quite sure you'll
make it
and then it arrives on your
doorstep, like
a breath of air after
drowning, a
warm embrace after
years in the desert, you
forgive every desperate day, every
hopeless heartbeat, you
are washed clean by the sunshine,
by the way twilight
lingers
past your bedtime,
by the way you wake in the morning
already smiling,
You know there was a time
you were sure you wanted to die
but it just doesn't matter
now.)
They move the clocks forward like it isn't magic, like it is not a gift to give sunlight to darkness, give spring to the thawing ground. You know it at once, like a silent alarm inside your bones has begun to vibrate, like an armor has been welded to your rib cage and you are invincible. You made it, somehow you made it, to the other end of winter, with nothing but blooms and brightness ahead. It was less cruel than it has been, you are less frail than you once were, a year ago the ice broke from around your shoulders and you felt again what it is to be alive, the moment has etched itself into your memory and you revel in it now, let it melt on your tongue like a butterscotch, smooth, sweet, joyous.
You wrap your work early, bring your computer to the little writing desk in the closet, look out over the afternoon light over the Red Hook projects and churches. Wonder if you'll make friends with these streets in earnest. The trees are barren, still, brown with survival, but knobby with impending sprouts. Everything that is to come, is on its way.
Take a step, just one step, then take another. It doesn't seem like much now, but eventually you will have walked all the way into life.
Would you like to stay longer than May? they write into the ether, just as you are musing about how you have fallen in love with the creak of the wood floors, the light in the windows. You turn a corner to find the boxed up remains of your life on sixth street, letting them spill into the corridor and picking among the jewels for little wafts of magic to bring upstairs. Spring feels just out of reach still, and though you know it will appear, you write them that you do not know yet what May will do to your bloodstream.
Back in the apartment, you revel at a moment's peace, at a moment when no one is trying to reach their hands through your walls. You wonder what it means that you don't want their hands right now, but it is too soon yet to say, too soon yet to worry. Daylight Savings ends tomorrow, you know how it sparks in you like promises, know how it twists your ear drums until you hear music on the breeze. What could I possibly tell them about May before feeling that?
I go to sleep in a stranger's bed,
but the sovers are all mine.
It's too soon yet to know what that means.
I'm holding on too tight, I know I am, creating knots where I wished there was need, creating obligation where I dreamed of joy. I was always either/or, could never sit still on the balance beam. I think it both scared and drew you in, I think I feared going out in search of that peace in case it lost your interest completely.
I dig my heels into the little nook of Brooklyn, but my hands are reaching for the Big Sky.
I wrap my arms around your body at night,
but my legs are already
running.
You wake at last in the neighborhood you've courted so long. The nooks and rooms of the apartment stretch in different directions, like a labyrinth, ready to discovered. You feel right. Out of the kitchen window, between tree branches, you see the Statue of Liberty rise to the morning, and it feels just like that summer in Greenpoint, when you sat looking at the city and thinking only of how this was quite where you were meant to be. In a few months, the view will be shrouded in foliage, it is a cycle of gifts.
I sit at the little writing desk in the window, looking down on Brooklyn backyards, rising projects, the dots of water towers. A heat riser churns behind me, the ground lies bare yet, but all I see is spring in the sunrise. There are words here, I can feel them, can sense the return of stories in my blood, and as such,
I am already home.
Wake early again, stretching into jet lag like a familiar friend, one more morning of midtown skyscrapers in your periphery and you have never been mad a day in your life at the bones of this city, no matter how the finished face looks. Your own finished face looks paler than you remember, a few days ago in their tropical back yard, than you remember, a week ago on the savanna. It seems impossible for it to be just a week, you refuse to do the math. One day we left our mothers' embrace for the last time and didn't know.
Spring sits just at the cusp, dangling its legs over the side of a skyscraper, waiting for the time to leap. You watch with bated breath, watch with heart beating out of your chest, there's a brief moment in every ounce of joy ladled with fear, there is in each moment of life and ounce of death, we are not without our contrasts, I did not know love until I knew
the emptiness of being
without.
If you want it, the place is yours, they say, hand outstretched full of keys, windows wide open to the sweltering heat of iron radiators, pronouns amended with the life journey. You can see your storage unit from the bedroom, can sense the Statue of Liberty from the kitchen, can smell spring in the way the sunlight streams through the rooms. You take the keys before you've even remembered to ask any of the relevant questions, this was always how you made decisions in love, was always how you committed to homes. New York always met you where you needed it to.
Later, in the coffee shop down the street, you feel the city return to your blood stream, feel the life return behind your temples, you know again the stirring in your gut that alwas moved you forward after winter. There was a brief time when the stirring remained absent, when you sat stagnant in the death and mulch, but what use is there to think of it now, what purpose is there in lingering in past selves when the current one is actually alive?
By the time the train rolls into Penn Station, I am reluctant to step off, like riding the A train is something I could do for days. (And maybe it is.) The New York afternoon is mild, a kind welcome as I drag my heavy bags west across the avenues, even as my sunburn fades before I've even reached the 28th floor. She writes, come by and see the place any time before noon, you measure the days and compare them to your current leaps, realize it would be the longest you'd have stayed in one place since you left the little shoebox on sixth street. I'm better for having been here.
Spring appears in me in time with the crocuses and snowdrops, makes me want to stretch my legs and set off in step with the whirlwinds of the season. I find myself wondering how the little station wagon out west is doing, wondering how far my saved airline miles would carry me, before I've even unpacked my bag.
Perhaps it was naive to think
we could ever change into different people.
Charles de Gaulle before dawn, the shops aren't open but the smell of coffee (real coffee, you hear yourself think) sails across the terminal. You feel your sunburn start to cool, you feel your heart still beam, in a few hours you will be in a north Chelsea skyscraper and while you cannot yet imagine what your heart will say against its skyline views, you know you've never landed at JFK in remorse. This is a gift, it is not lost on you. Words begin to return, she says see you at our regular bar when you land? I'll get a table with room for your bags, New York whispers to you of stories yet unwritten, somehow you walked off one day in search of the world and found answers you hadn't known to ask for.
You find yourself wondering what would happen if you stepped off in Paris.
Final days always disappear in a whirl, in a flash, two weeks of a trip feels like two months but it's a ruse because time is a construct, you see your philosophies simmer like the hazy tropical days you are leaving behind. You know nothing lasts forever, but it's so hard to accept in the parting. He stands in the window outside the terminal with farewell waves and your heart aches despite itself. Separations always tore your heart in two (why then did you insist on making so many of them on your own?).
Later, at the gate, you try to wade through work long abandoned but your heart isn't in it. Your heart is elsewhere, maybe everywhere, your heart is a million miles wide
your heart
grows and flows beyond what you thought it remembered how to do.
Years you spent buried in the quagmire, forgetting how it might be to feel this way. But they do not matter now.
What hides underneath the ground
is of no concern
when you spend your days
flying.
Lazy Saturday morning, wake before the rest and tip-toe down the stairs to find coffee, only to be stopped at the last stair at the iron gate, keys hidden, alarm on. What strange worlds unfold around us. Africa sits like a song in my ears, like rolling waves of madness and peace. I return home changed, but it is too soon yet to say how. I will wait for the gate to open.
I will see what is on the other side.
