Troponin

Your father has been having chest pains, she says across the line, her normally stoic voice tinged with just a quiver of concern. It's a conversation no one wants to be having, but the acknowledgment that it might be time to go to the country clinic passes over it like a relief. By evening, they've sent him to the big hospital in the other valley, he sends pictures of snowy mountain views but every message is an exercise in carrying hope. You find yourself distracted at every turn, a gnawing sense of unease in the periphery. Your mother eyes her ticket to New York and you both tread quietly around what you already know. 

Life waxes and wanes across your to do list. This is how it is meant to be. You, yourself, wax and wane across the plans you had for yourself, after all. 

We are but leaves in the wind.

Wash Away

There’s a turn in the path, just before you reach the esplanade, full of concrete and crooked branches, a moment of silent nothing, belying the magic that lies beyond. A few more steps, a deep breath, a turn, and the world explodes in a sea of pink blossoms, of birdsong and light steps across green grass. Every year you think you’ve seen it before, and every year you are proven wrong. You’ve never seen anything like this before. 

You’ve never felt alive like this before. 

Spring rails into every cell of your being, bursts like mini grapes, like champagne bubbles in your blood stream. You think maybe this life is worth living, you think maybe this life is worth making the most of, you are ready to decide what that entails and to do it. You are ready to hit the town, hit the road, spring forward straight into space, May lies around the corner and you can feel it in your bones. 

If you were looking for a ride, now might be a good time to speak up. 

If you were looking for a ride, now might be a good time to set fire to your hopes. 

Starlight

In the space within your rib cage where your lungs normally reside, in the space within your schedule where most days you have panic and scramble, for one evening you make room for words, your little stories. Time becomes irrelevant in the little wood-paneled living room, they write to say, stay as long as you would like, and you wonder what you would like. At the coffee shop, neighbors and strangers speak with each other like they're in a tiny village in the woods, not a great beast of a world metropolis. It warms you. Outside, a cool wind blows the cherry blossoms across the street. 

You long for nothing, yet you long for everything. The world lies vast and possible beyond your door, your door, but it lies vast and impossible inside your ribs as well, it is an equation you have never been able to calculate successfully. One seems to take too much from the other. 

Both give more
than you could ever have hoped.

Revel

How the days rush beneath your calloused hands, they wax and wane to no end and you are powerless to stop their passing. And yet, would you stop them if you could? Is it not like damming the river, like trying to hold the spring flood? One cannot step in the same river twice, but all that means is what a delight it is to step in as many rivers as you simply ever can. You spread your fingers and watch the clear water trickle over your fingers. 

An early morning run, Red Hook is empty save for the dog walkers in Valentino Park. You flail along the water, your muscles still sleeping and your head elsewhere. Brooklyn rises in spring blooms, your life rises in colorful petals and deep breaths in your lungs the kind that lift you off the ground.

Life is finite, you have but this one.
You do what you will with it, of course.
But it seems wisest just to live it, after all.

There may come a day, when you won't regret it, and that day is worth all the wait.

Apply

The house sitting website unfolds itself before you, one delectable life after another serving itself up for perusal, for consideration, for you to think, Do I want to play pretend here for a while?, and all the options are limitless. You make a profile, paint yourself in all the desirable colors, you know how to angle your illnesses so they look like just the thing someone else was looking for.

This much mental damage deserves some sort of benefit, you think. 

You're losing too much hair lately, your body is too restless when you wake, it knows May is coming and it will be time to leave again. May was always the time for running, it's in your bones. You sit in a coffee shop and breathe in a Friday afternoon in Brooklyn, wonder what else you could be doing with your lungs.

The road calls you again. 

You're starting to think there is no cure for what ails you.

Dock

You wake to the sound of cars in the rain, to the soft sense of a world muted. In your kitchen window, a cruise ship covers the Manhattan skyline, and you think how great it must be to board a boat on a rainy, gray morning and know that soon you will be where the palm trees are. You make coffee and return to the wood-paneled living room, sit and write in the silence, willing yourself to ignore the deadlines that loom on your own horizon. Outside your window, the trees are popping their sticky green popcorn kernels into existence.

The budding trees are a precursor to May, and May is a reminder of the Road. Your whole life, spring has been the time to run, to burst forth like those sticky buds and explode like a million tiny sparks of glitter across the continent, has been the time to put everything you own away – things and people alike – and be light as a feather. This gift is not lost on you, nor how it may look like a Madness, depending on your angle. 

And what choice do we have, but to unwrap the gifts we've been given,
see what lies in the unknown beyond?

Waterways

The early evening sun hangs low like an august sigh, something in the air smells just like summer breaks of your childhood, you weave through the docks to reach a ferry landing and everything breathes in you like life is ongoing, unbothered. Cross the water in just a few minutes, upended on Manhattan shores like you haven't moved to the ends of the earth, you ride a quick bike through Chinatown, the route so familiar you'd forgotten to miss it. Find her in a small nook of a bar in the east village, heady with unscented perfume and thick drapes, think, this would be a perfect date bar if dates were something you entertained anymore, and the bartender walks you through their elaborate cocktails like he's never been hurried. 

By the end of the night, trying to make my way back in the maze of Brooklyn subway suspensions, eventually I walk back under the BQE, smoking a cigarette that followed me from Africa. On a stoop, I find a bright red bicycle helmet, and I'm not too drunk to see a sign when it appears. I bring it home. 

There are moments when I wonder why I continue this exhausting living, when I wonder why everyone carries on for decades and decades like they do, why we do not simply return to the ground from which we came. But then there'll be a soft summer evening on a ferry in the East River, a golden sun spreading across the Brooklyn bricks, and you'll take a deep breath and feel perfectly at peace, and that moment

That moment keeps you carrying on another
day.

CHS

By the time checkout arrives, the great rains have piled in over the coastline. You can imagine 18th century hurricanes drowning colonizing entrepreneurs, making their money off the backs of shackled humans and thriving off their own daring leaps into the world. The histories of the one doesn't exist without the other, and it is a legacy the sweltering peninsula has yet to reckon with. 

The drive to the airport is a dive in the ocean, you know the delay will catch you well before it appears on your screen. The stereo system plays Here comes the rain again and you wonder if it's on purpose or simply cruel irony. And while all you want is to return home, to sit quietly in the crooked apartment at the very edge of Brooklyn and watch the sun set over Manhattan, pacing an airport brings you just as much peace. It may take a lifetime to build a home, but once you get there, it remains with you. 

The desert calls you again, the road. Your suitcase is full of new itineraries, your head is full of dreams. This town broke you once, 

but you have yet to be broken.

Ghost Tour

In Charleston, slavery lies thick like an August afternoon across the streets. You know this town, you have seen it before. When you think of it now, all you remember is how it was the beginning to the end of a great love. You know this is not the city's fault, but your heart has not forgiven. He leads you through cemeteries and speaks of boo hags, but the only thing that catches you are mosquitos and the great exhaustion. You wrap yourself in a robe and fall asleep like you didn't have an alarm set for before dawn. 

Ghost is a relative term,
it's no more - and no less -
than what your mind makes it.

North Island

The days batter the hours from out of your gut, you walk barefoot in the low tide and collect oyster shells like you had somewhere to put them. By the time you return to the docks your neck is flushed. In the early morning, while breath still swells in puffy clouds, you run to the beach and dive in the waves before it is too late to turn around.

The sea has saved you time, and time again. Why would this be any different? 

You go to the ends of the earth,
but truths will follow you both there and back.

-By-The-Sea

You wake at dusk, watch pinks and lavenders stretch themselves across the horizon, see the sun rise in the break of the wave. Drift across the coastline like pelicans on the breeze, taking it all in, letting it all sink to the bottom of your chest, it sits there peacefully. 

At the arboretum, you arrive just in time to watch a goat be born, the timing seems impossible and you wonder at wonder, at winks from the Universe. The new hotel overlooks the ocean, too, the afternoon sun turns the dunes into long fingers, stretching into the sea, the palmettos a particular shape of gold. You wish you had more time, always more time, you want to see the whole world and only wonder how you can do that and still have a dining room with your grandmother's china. 

The world does not reveal itself to you. 

The answers lie hidden like grains in the sand.

Re:Set (II)

The storm passes, and the pool opens. The resort livens up again, despite the chill of the wind, despite the deadlines on your brow, your remote work setup on the 18th floor balcony leaves much to be desired – work ethic, most of all. How can there be work when there are palm trees? How can there be reality when there is suspension. You think you could live an entire life like this, and it occurs to you that you do. 

You know there was a time you struggled even to put air in your lungs. But it seems so long ago now, it seems so impossible in contrast to how the air twirls through you now, how the sun seems to rise in your eyes. 

I know there was a time life seemed a cruel joke. 

But that time is not now.

Hook & Barrel

Taxi to the runway closest to the water, so you feel like you might just tip into the Long Island Sound, ascend into a storm so big it doesn't fit on the radar, it shakes you all the way to South Carolina. You emerge like Dorothy, shaking off the dust and stepping blinking into the ocean. What are you doing here? What did you come to find? The hotel room is larger than your apartment, the sea is wilder than your thoughts at night, you think perhaps if you let yourself go to the whims of the Universe, eventually it will give you wings. 

You stay awake much longer than you mean to. 

The Universe might swing by in the night,
and you'll want to be here when it does.

Only Fools

March ends with a content sigh, leaning into cherry blossoms and gentle breezes, dragging light weekday rains across the old East River docks. You drive the illness from your lungs with determination, honeyed teas, and more rest than you've seen in ages. It is stubborn, but you have survived worse ills, you remind it, you have survived a Darkness and once you can dig yourself out of Death, you are invincible. 

Another airline ticket stretches in your back pocket, nothing ever feels better than having one foot on the tarmac, you collect yourself and remember that all this frenzy leads you to an arrival, and that makes all the difference.

April begins with a whisper,
but you do not chide it.
You have begun entire dreams with a whisper

Have moved mountains
with the lightest nudge.