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.
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