Hold up

I hate to say it, she says – still saying it – it's in wartime that we get the great art, the great creativity, she paints silver linings to your nuclear fallout and you know she's not wrong. It's just there's so many decades of disaster alongside it. Who can even afford to do art in this economy. New York City laughs at you in expensive. A clown yells at a hero in a house that was supposed to lead the world.

The thing is it's not just me I'm mad at, it's you. You, universe, with your callous indifference, with your reluctance to release any more magic; I know you could, I've seen you do it. 

I've seen you do it to me. 

If you're trying to push us to our breaking points to see what rainbows might be extracted from us, you're doing it right. But there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. 

How can we forget what we have seen?

A Clearing

Spring announces its impending arrival, sends reminders in the form of afternoon sunlight and snow drops in tree pits, ignoring your pleas for another hundred years of darkness, your incredulity about ever feeling hope again. Spring does not care. Spring is the honey badger of the eons. 

You try to shield yourself against the light, against the way your lungs are lighter, try to protect yourself against the devastation that may follow in the wake of hope. I am not strong enough to survive the downfall. In the dark cave, at least I know I can endure. 

Spring isn't satisfied with simply enduring. 

The years pass by us unannounced, unyielding. They don't allow for negotiations, for breaks to think about if this is how you'd like the time to go. It is the only certainty, and it offers no consolation. 

Staring at the sun never felt so much
like succumbing to a black hole.

You Can't Carry It With You

You wake early again, sunlight climbing across the horizon at a different rhythm. You know the change is coming. 

Moving out of illness is hope on your brow, while your wounds are still raw. It's the energy to breathe but running out of steam a mile into the run. Your father asks if you're making enough money and you say no, but things will get better. You always were a bad liar. 

At the writing bar, his face greets you at the door, defeat like a hundred pounds across his shoulders. Do we move to Italy, he says, and you don't know how to explain that emigration sits in your veins like platelets. You want the blueprint? I've got you. 

Your sister writes to say she's applying for citizenship. 

The world changes before our eyes, chess pieces moving across the board in ways we didn't know was legal. Legal takes on a new meaning when the Emperor crowns himself and has no clothes. But inside your creative mind, the colors still paint themselves according to rules all their own, stories whisper their dreams in your ears, you know this was always your only way. Magic is made in suffering; diamonds are made under pressure. 

You owe it to the world to keep at it.

Once There Was a Way

Digital photo albums are traitorous, treacherous, they may inspire you to playgrounds you'd forgotten but just as well remind you of playgrounds you had forever lost. How the years disappear from us, the joy in our eyes, how everything fits in a to-do list. I take a walk to the old wharf, disappear under giant cranes, imagine steel creatures in a faraway land. I step on icy snow drifts, remember how as a child I could spend hours just breaking ice, just moving snow, no purpose except to do just what I was doing. 

The muscles of imagination stir, stretch in the late February sunlight, shake themselves off and stare bleary-eyed right at me, as if asking me for answers – as if I had any to offer. I test them out again, bolder this time, sitting in silence and allowing the stories to come, running with them, looking for magic in the margins. Little sparks fire off in synapses long sleeping. 

Nothing is lost forever, not really. It may look different in the light of this day, but you mustn't mistake that for oblivion. It may take a little coaxing to stretch its limbs into the sunlight, but how worthwhile when it does. 

You're never so far gone
that you cannot come home again.

Log

Sixteen years you've been coming to this watering hole, sifting through the madness of a life and finding the kernels of Truth between its pages; thousands upon thousands of entries dissecting a day, a life, a city that refuses to be contained. You love it as much now as you did then, but it's different, perhaps, a little more frail, a little more hard-earned. Your edges are scuffed, but somehow the city looks past it, accepts it, lets you back with your scars and flaws, has a spot just for you even at your darkest, just like you commit to loving it even when it hurts you, spits you out, forgets its own name. 

The young man at the bar makes eyes at you, tries to insert himself into your conversations with the bartender, tells you how he just got back from spending some time in the Berkshires. You try to read his age by the crinkle in his eye, the gray by his temple, try to gauge his mind by the content of his contributions. The bartender dismisses him with the periods in her sentences, but you are all commas, all ellipses, you had forgotten what a run-on sentence looked like. Winter sits so deep in your synapses you had forgotten what a response looked like. 

It's trying to kill you, you know. That's what winter does, what it is. You cannot blame it its nature, it's only doing what it's meant to do. It brings you to the bottom, so you can feel the sprouts grow within you when the spring sun returns. 

It's just,
when you hit the bottom rock,
what you have to do is use it
to push off to the surface.

Vermont

You try to speak of creativity and writing but fall back into the torrent of current events, time and again. What can we do? he says, and paints dreams of a future in Vermont, of a life where his love life and ideas may remain legal, both. All we can do is keep writing, I say, and we remember the last time around, how we made magic in the oppression, how we were daring in the dangers. 

The war is darker now, the woods more tangled. But there are sprouts in the ground, sunlight through the thicket, there isn't a path but a place to plant your next footstep, we never know what's around the bend, we only know we have to keep moving. Wrap these tendrils around you, build a mountain of stepping stones, make the path by walking it. Tie ribbons along the way, make the journey clear behind you, offer others a way to the exit if you can find it. 

The war is darker now, the woods more tangled. 

But even woods have to end, somewhere.

(history)

(thumb through pages past, year after year of Februaries scattered in your wake, always with the same beginnings in darkness and ends in surprised sunlight. you die every year, every year you let six feet of dirt cover you, but every year you outlast the dark, and when the sun returns, so do you. 

there may be a lesson in there somewhere, but it's too simplistic, too asinine. send it to an agent and hear them say it's too unrealistic. like you didn't have four decades of its scars under your skin. 

it's only disease, it's only disease, it's only a cancer rotting your flesh from the inside and once it passes, you will see your thoughts as they are, again. 

it's just every year the groove gets a little harder to step out of,
the familiar tracks get deeper in the mud. 

all you know how to do is add more pages to the pile. 

even if what you're building is a pyre.)

Collapsed

There's sand in my lungs. 

I didn't mean for there to be, didn't mean for the days to get so convoluted. The remains of a writing day lie in the gutters around me, wasted, unused, I want a do-over, I demand a recount. But tomorrow is a school day again and there are time sheets to complete. A full moon shines in through the window of the little closet where I work, everyone else lies sleeping and I am glad for the company. 

I miss Avenue B. 

It seems I started a life that was halted by death and despair, I threw it out and hit the road, I ran to the horizon like I always do and I don't blame myself. 

You did what you had to do. 

There are a million lives we didn't live, infite paths we didn't choose. It'll do you know good to think on them now, they are lost to the star worlds, linger in your spine like dust the kind that gets in your eye. 

Like sand the kind that lands in your lungs
and rattles your cough when you were trying to
breathe. 

We lived through a plague and were rewarded with the downfall of an empire. Winter remains, heavier than ever, longer than ever, no wonder we are more gutter than rainfall, more dam than flood. 

Your words are better in agony,
but only if you survive long enough to

write them. 

Train

An hour into discussing your childhood trauma with the bartender (who claims that listening to patron's sorrows is not something she does, despite her profession), a young man hops down the steps to the bar. The Irish accent says he's here for training. He shakes your hand. Maybe you seem important, maybe your piles of papers make you seem like you belong to the bar, and to be frank, at this point you sort of do. 

The trick to anything, you've learned, is time. To relationships, to knowledge, to love. You cannot fast track it, cannot breeze past the baby steps. You don't have to impress with your power moves, you just have to show up. Return, return, return. Look people in the eye now and then, nod. Lace your running shoes and just acknowledge the road. Return to your manuscript even when you think you've been away too long, and are ashamed to hold it again. Read your poetry word by word by word until it multiplies and branches out around you. Walk these city streets until you don't remember what it felt like not to know its air in your lungs. 

Time escapes us and it feels like a loss, like sand running between our fingers and a life slipping away, but it is the opposite, I promise. Time adds up and layers and builds a life, fortifies your synapses, creates your miracles. Time is not a thing lost, but a life gained. Say it louder for the people in the back 

Time is not a thing lost

but a whole damn life

gained. 

(but then)

(but then, you spend a day immersed in words, yarns of your own spinning, page turners from the lips of others, you spend a day swirling around in worlds far beyond where your fingers can stretch, and it's the greatest gift you have ever known; you forget, and forget, and try to beat into your head an adventure you didn't want to lose but you never really lost it, it seems, it was only a muscle that fell weak from disuse, only a memory that faded from not being recalled. 

the magic doesn't go away just because you don't see it. 

but you do have to look for it, to find your way back.)

Life Outside the Music Box

At some point the City, or I, will have to prove we really want this relationship to work out and are willing to fight for it. At some point it won't be enough just to be here, to be happy.

Fifteen years it's been, since I first returned to New York and dazzled in our honeymoon moments, delirious with the possibilities of having made it back. Every new corner turned was easy then, was another gold coin added to a bulging purse, the setbacks only fodder for emerging grit. I am older now, tired, I take the corners for granted, trying desperately to remind myself to find awe in their whispers. Can I ever find that tingle again? I am older now, tired, I lost too many years to a pandemic and an illness, are these all excuses?

Surely there is magic still to be found in this love story? Comfort in longterm commitment, a security in having seen each other through it. The bodega downstairs drags Valentine's bouquets into the street, rustles up some Pavlovian bell rings to alert dozing partners to fulfill their most basic requirements. 

That wasn't what I was looking for, New York. That was never what we promised one another. It's just, I can't seem to remember what you promised, at all. 

And I wonder if I just filled in the gaps, on my own.

Doldrums

It's only winter, right? she says, unwilling to order a drink, unwilling to take her coat off and commit to the bar. The bartender already gave you your drink for free, a strange friendship built in the ashes of what burned from under you. You forget sometimes to be grateful, it seems the worst sort of indulgence, how dare you be blind to these jewels when they're given. 

It's only illness, right? you whisper to yourself in the stillness, less question and more plea. Years and years of the same desperate wish mumbled into the night sky, and still every time I sit at the bottom of the well I think no, but this time it really is just that everything is meaningless. A tyrant king sets your country on fire, and you wonder if this isn't the right time to finish writing your book. 

Every road leads you back to your writings, after all, every tumble into the well, every mountain peak scaled, the only beacon that has never extinguished is your devotion to creative twirls. You forget, sometimes, in the deluge of daily monotony, but it does not forget you. 

That's why you know no better love than its unconditional, reliable, existence. Why you know no other love, at all.