21

How many years have passed since that bright spring morning at the end of March, at the end of innocence.

(Do you remember how the air went out of you? How you retraced your steps to see what you could have changed, how you could have a saved a life intent on not being saved, how you could have caught a body determined to leap.)

It's been twenty-one years and I still think of you every time the ledge gets too close. Remember what it means to end a life, what it means for a life to end.

I saw in you the hope I had not dared wish for myself.

Wildfire leaves too much for the survivors to sort through, to carry, to breathe. You couldn't survive the flames, so you singed everyone in a mile-wide radius, left them scarred forever in your wake. Some days the only reason I live is to contain the smoke in my own lungs, and it's as good a reason as you can get.

I went home that day and made my loved ones promise that no matter what happened, they would never make it their end. I promised the same in return, and didn't know how much of my life I'd spend fighting to keep the promise. It was an awfully high building. It was a sunny day at the beginning of everything.  You changed my life and I will never get to tell you. 

 * * *

Mostly I remember what you left when you went away. Life is finite, you have but this one. Your family has but this one, your friends. 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.

the Nothing Art

Sundays are best kept to themselves, puttering on their proverbial stove tops, left to their own devices to meander through an afternoon. The secret to getting things done is taking a step back and letting them happen of their own accord. The first cherry blossoms burst in Brooklyn, the first awkward sunburn appeared on my arms, all of the questions are still unanswered, but you got a little reprieve and this time you do not turn it down. 

It nearly kills you, every year. 

But every year, only nearly.

Alight

Eventually, the sunlight becomes so bright that it beats itself into your synapses, no matter how hard you clench your eyes. You try to remember why you wanted to die and find it difficult, just a trick of the lights, try to make meaning of disease and find nothing of substance. It was just illness, and now, perhaps, it is over. You escaped the allure of the reaper, and now you are forced to live with the consequences. 

There's a moment in the liminal space, just before you find your footing, where you feel a great emptiness, feel yourself returned to Stardust, could be weightless, could be nothing and all you can do is hold your breath and wait to find out. You are not anchored by hope, yet, not elevated by meaning.  

Have you come for me?

Not today.
Not yet.

A Seven Nation Army

You lock your door, prepare for a revelation, but sit instead with bubbles in your throat and question marks in your ears. This isn't the great insight you had been asking for. 

The world outside your door demands answers you cannot mold with your own two hands, the clay runs through your fingers like sand, you are afraid to take the first step because of all the others that demand to follow, this isn't the dream I was promised, America I have given you all and now I'm nothing. You used to believe the path would be found in poetry, but now you seem to have forgotten how to read. 

It occurs to me that I am America

 

I'm not sorry. 

Through the Days and

You lose your days and nights into lotus apathy, indifferent to the passing of time and the loss of your dreams. How long can you sit here paying rent without reaping the magic you were promised? There was a time I believed in the lightness of breath, a power in my step, a love in my words. I was so sure of it, and now I begin to question. Sometimes illness drags the life from my eyes, and each time I forget that I have been here before. I convince myself the days have been sunshine and daises up until this point and that now, somehow, I have lost it all. 

But the daffodils are sprouting along the Buttermilk Channel, this afternoon I went for a run along the East River and there's a manuscript on my desk that is getting better, we passed the equinox and you aren't dead yet. Something, something will come of this, your life isn't over yet. You are bleeding, yes, but scars can look like maps when they heal.

Resonance

The Bowery is sunshine and smiles, bright yellow daffodils beaming up at you as you pass, but you are busy beaming up at the sun in return, busy walking your beloved Manhattan streets with your eyes closed because they have never steered you wrong before, you've never been lost a day since you landed on this island, it's only been rain clouds in your vision, they confused you sometimes, but you were always grounded in your palace in the sky of New York. 

The technician pronounces your name right, says all you have to do is lie still and enjoy the break, and you nearly fall asleep in the noisy tunnel, wonder if there's a future in which we are free again. The Tuesday bartender is not the same as your Monday bartender, you do not know how to explain how your roots have seeped into that corner table and don't know how to leave. 

The truth is, New York, I don't know how to leave you. I don't know how to be torn from you again, to build a life in a world that isn't yours. He calls you a fascist for staying but he doesn't understand. This bar saw you through the end of the earth already, these streets carried you past your own destruction, this grid gave you love the kind you never thought could be for you. This country gave me a person I never dared believe I could be, 

what disrespect would it be
to turn my back on it
now?

Train

The unbearable weight of the world lies draped over your brow in the late morning, the cloud cover outside mimicking the sentiment. You cannot shake the feeling that everything is going terribly wrong. He says by staying where you are you're aligning with the fascists, and you cannot begin to take on what such a friendship does to your soul. 

By late afternoon you are desperate enough to ignore the ache in your knee and lace up your running shoes. The piers are gray and windy, only a handful of runners out, and you are glad for the peace. Each step unloads a burden, each quick breath fills you like a balloon. Manhattan lies across the water, colorless, quiet, awaiting your decisions. You wish it could tell you the future and make those decisions for you. 

The first clover leaves have sprouted in the park. 

It's about time I went searching for luck, again.

Crush

The illness circles back like a storm on the horizon, you feel the pressure change before you've even looked out of your window. A week ago, how sure you were that the return of sunlight had washed your senses clean, that you were leaping into the freedom of remission. Now, instead, you grapple with the crumbling columns you'd built to hold yourself up, see them falter against the light of reality. List your failures in a neverending loop behind your eyelids, stack your virtues on the scale and see where the Ferryman takes you. You promised someone a long time ago you would not die, and it has cursed you to endure the unbearable for an entire lifetime. One foot in the styx, one eye on the horizon. 

Nothing matters. 

How can you make it so that you do?

Point

March always came with such a painful pull. Of course it hurts when buds are breaking, you were raised on the pain, your lineage knows nothing else, but you forget, everyt winter you forget. Was it always this painful to live?And the answer isp robably, yes. Even when it gets painted in such a rosy hue, even when your memories get blurry, softened with age, raisins picked out of a cake on which once you choked. 

Your endless optimism is starting to falter,
your eternal sunshine is at last grown dull. 

There was so much I wanted to do before this happened. 

Now I wonder if I'll get even one accomplishment under my belt.
If the world will fall apart
in step with me.

Standing

The ache remains at the base of your spine, the core of your self; physical pain indistinguishable from emotional, you know longer know where you end and the Universe begins. The lightest of your breaths yearn to be normal, but any air that reaches the bottom of your lung knows, it knows, what you really want is the cosmos. 

How can we settle for the concrete when we know the sky is just beyond reach?

You twist your limbs inside out 
but you never get where you thought
you were going.

Greenhouse

There's a restlessness brewing, its itch is spreading inside your skin and cannot be blamed entirely on the lingering sunshine, the mild afternoons. It says perhaps you are not where you are meant to be, says perhaps there is a freedom somewhere out there that would put your mind at ease. It scours apartment listings but also dreams of a house in the woods, wonder who it is you could be if you stretched your limbs to where they didn't know they could reach. 

You get nowhere in an instant. 

Every journey worth taking
is a thousand miles
and more.

It's the End of the World (as we know it)

The mornings will not start, the sparks appear with the sprouts but there is no fuel in the tank, there is nothing to light. You find an old letter, 26 years but the handwriting is still yours, the wandering mind still familiar. How you saw the end of the world, how you asked where to spend its dying days, how the madness of power hungry men always seemed to eclipse the needs of the rest. 

You still have to live, is the thing. 

You still have to carry on until your dying day. The days will not die for you. 

Might as well do something with the time you have 

left.

Title

It's a lifetime of hope and hope lost, is it not? It's a pile of days, an unending stream of waiting for it all to begin, when truly some of it is already over and you forgot to enjoy it. Spring leaps into my chest like a young child, unafraid and unconcerned with your scars, but my lungs are still full of soot, I am not ready for joy, not yet. There are steps to this dance I never quite figured out, and it makes my palms sweaty still to try. The rhythm seems perpetually someone else's. 

I do not remember a time when I
was not broken.

MRI

That's a great knee, the doctor says, laughing, before he tells you they need to look closer for whatever criminals are lurking in its depths. You ask can I keep running like it was all the matters, and in that moment you realize it is. He speaks sunshine into the spring afternoon, smiles blossoms at your broken bones, everything seems possible and you walk down the Bowery with your jacket off. 

You know it's happening, well before your spine has caught up. There's a lightness in your step, a breath in your lung that deceives you, reveals the returning life before you dare fully utter it out loud. You try not to look directly at it, try not to let yourself give into it, lest it get scared off at your enthusiasm. Joy is skittish like that, before it gains its footing, before it sinks its teeth into your shoulder and holds on through the shakes. You have been skittish too, but every now and then you stretch your fingers into the earth, let yourself exist and remain, and that's alright. 

Another winter passes when you did not die. It is over now. 

Now you are allowed to live.

Dismantled

A nation founders, moves forward on wobbly legs, muscles and bones cut off from the inside, it will not last, but how long until it crumbles? Will you make it out of the rubble in time? 

Patti Smith sits in a venerable old hall in the Cooper Union, speaks of art and creating and silly anecdotes and bits of magic. You remember again why you came to this hodgepodge of a city, why you built your veins around its pulse, inserted yourself in its buildings and let yourself dream of belonging on its streets. A nation crumbles around you, now, what are you willing to do to save it?

I am only looking for answers, now, New York, no questions, no dreams, I have my bags full of those. I want only your solutions now. Show me how we can stay together; metaphorically, too.

March [On]

A new month rises outside your window. It brings sunlight, little sprouts in the ground, signals of hope beamed to those who know where to look for them. You are on high alert for every last one, tracking sunset minutes, sensing vibration along the surface of your skin. You are tired, now, down to your last breath of air, your last leg, but you are alive, and the sun will let you sprout out of the husk you leave behind, its decaying self leaving nutrients and energy for the new self you grow out of it. 

The cycle continues, unaffected, unabated. It is a comfort, when everything else falters. 

A young girl on the subway platform asks if she is going in the right direction. It's her first time riding the subway. She's here to see all the things TikTok has told her to see. She is excited and terrified at once, you know the feeling well, adore her wide eyes. She asks if she can sit next to you on the train, tells you her itinerary, tells you she's never going to take the subway again but you tell her she will. You'll get the hang of it. Try to remember your first time on the subway. It must have been a six train. 

You always did love the six train. 

The years pass by you like caresses, you think it's all suffering and weights, but when you actually stop to look, have you not been blessed with the most magical days? New York came to you in a dream, eveyrthing came to you in a dream, you've been hiding in the darkness for a few months now but the sun is back now, little darling, life is back now, the magic is just getting ready to return, this is not the time to close the door. 

This is the time to sprout.