Turvy

The day starts out crooked and gets more twisted from there, missteps and mishaps at every turn, you wonder if the Universe is trying to tell you something about New York, which would be worse than if it was trying to tell you something about yourself. The weather is gorgeous, late April breath of fresh air, a breeze from the sea, a benevolent sun, why do we spend our days wrapped in digital screens and darkness, why do we waste our lives. 

You know it's only May tingling through your synapses, making it hard to sit in one place, you know it's only millenia of your ancestors coursing through your veins, whispering, what else? and you're dying to find out. It took too many odds for you to even be alive, who are you to throw it away at a computer screen. 

The little red station wagon, lingers in the street below, you can see it waiting from your fire escape. The gas tank is nearly empty but it's got miles and miles left in its spirit. You are tempted to pack everything up and leave. 

You can't outrun yourself, they say. But what if staying put is the attempted escape. What if a body in motion is the self that is you? 

I open the window to the fire escape. A Fire can be so many things.

Routines

Spill coffee in your keyboard, it begins a strange and frazzled journey across the documents on your screen, telling its own stories, unleashing its vulnerable secrets into a world unprepared. You disconnect it, wipe it down, give it a moment's rest. Think how you've done something similar for yourself of late. You've been reset and come back better. Your mental illness wanes in the background. 

Everything is May now. Everything is the chance to get away, to start afresh, see potential beyond the horizon. It took you longer to get there this year, winter an endless sludge around your senses, but you arrived at last in the sunlight. Now you get to spring forward, now you get to be the parts of yourself that are easy to love.

Now you get to live. 

When you say spring is a gift every year, that is what you mean. When you say May comes in like the first breath of air after drowning in the sea, it is not hyperbole. When you spend so much time just waiting to not have to survive anymore, wanting to live becomes a treasure above all others. 

Now you get to live.
So you intend to.

Brooklyn, NY

Pennsylvania disappears like an ocean of bad drivers and pricey turnpikes, you grumble all the way to the East Coast but find a parking spot around the corner from dear friends and spend a night on their Philadelphia pull-out. A toddler wakes you in the morning before you race the last few miles to the Verrazzano-Narrows and slide into a Brooklyn side street, all the plants intact and a giggle bubbling in your chest. You love the country, but the Manhattan skyline is what lets your soul rest at last. 

There's no road map yet for solving that equation. 

But you're not about to stop trying. 

You came two thousand miles across the country, did you bring the dark Word, or did you merely bring the Wow, is it you who are angelic or is it the road you leave in your wake? I am already nostalgic for a roadside inn in Nebraska, for a styrofoam coffee and a thousand unknown miles ahead, for counting cars on the New Jersey Turnpike and remembering the America I already found, time and time again, trying to see it beneath the thick coating of this dark black cloud. 

We are still here, America. We are trigonometry that refuses and easy solution. 

But we're not about to stop trying.

Ohio

You leave Missouri and cross Illinois in the blink of an eye, good riddance, the Mississippi River far behind you. The scenery changes, trees begin sprouting, the temperatures rise in hesitation. The little car that could rolls through larger towns now, impatient drivers and fewer semi trucks for company. New York beckons at the other end of the continent. 

This country is hellbent on kicking us out, on making us regret our choices, on rescinding our piece of the dream, but don’t you know? Clawing your way to a better life is what this country was built on. Settlers feed the machine. 

I am not done with you yet, America. This heartbreak isn’t ours today. 

Rerouting

You wake late, bludgeoned by a blackout curtain and a quiet highway, disoriented in the timezone of the middle. Race down a misty highway but take a wrong turn and curse your naive time optimism. The GPS winds you through industrial zones and lush, suburban neighborhoods; you do not know how to grasp the scenery. Agitated, you force a stop, a breath, a reset. Realize you are in some sort of lovely park, spring breaking through like a new tooth, a blue heron eyeing you suspiciously fromt the edge of a pond. You are crossing America, you can stand to be sidetracked.

You are crossing America. 

If you have to get lost now and then to realize how lucky that makes you, 
then maybe that's on you.

Rock Port

A thousand miles approach, it took half of that just to shake the weight of generations in your blood line. Wyoming disappears in a thunder cloud, Nebraska a carpet of cows, until at last the fever breaks and you can breathe again. The rain rolls across the plains until you pass into Missouri, American bends and stretches underneath your wheels. You wonder why it feels like a farewell tour. 

Wonder why it feels like America is slipping through your fingers when you're still woven in it. 

The sun sets over a rest stop along the highway. It doesn't care for your questions. You cling to that calm like your future depended on it.

Stride

Departures approach, you revel in the limitless feeling of filling a car, of two thousand miles before arrival, of a moment in limbo. America trips and stumbles around itself, but you know that I-80 stretches itself from ocean to ocean, ties a nation together which refuses to be joined. It reminds you the marvel of arriving on its shores, how deep the breath in your lungs. You want to see that it is still there, that all is not lost. 

You're not sure what happens if this is not the case. 

It's time to buck up, America. 

I am not ready to lose you yet.

With Nothing to Say

Your head is all song lyrics, all steady beats and predictable key changes, a breath aligned to order. A desert sun appears above the valley, reminds you of 30 years in its folds. Thirty years of warm skin and just the slightest taste of freedom always on the tip of your tongue. You trace directions over road maps, see your wheels slide across America, wonder if it's a swansong or a vow renewal. Sometimes these things aren't apparent until firmly in the rearview mirror. 

America, are you willing to carry us over the burning coals, or will we turn to ashes underneath the weight of your love? 

America, I'm addressing you. 

I'm talking to myself
again. 

But You Can't Edit

The flowers on your mother's windowsill stretch and bulge and dazzle with their vigor, put you to shame with their will to live, their aptitude for hope. You walk alongside a spring brook and try to feel the same, try to muster the courage for another step, and another. They're trying to break your spirit, you hear across the airwaves, and you know they are right, you know it is the time to look for plaster casts. You're almost ready. 

Driving home, late in the night, the mountain pass turned itself inside out to a wakeup call of a blizzard, dark roads and lone semi trucks painting a scenery around you that spoke only of vastness, only of space. You are so small, so insignificant, and it was always your greatest comfort. Now we must be small and significant, somehow, and you do not know the way. 

Everybody's looking for the exit. 

Why must you be so hell-bent on diving into the depths.

Spring Rains

Arrive in the desert to find heavy rain clouds draped across the mountain ranges. Thirty-two years of landing in this valley, each step feels more precious now than the last. How many more times will you discover this place, before it is taken from you yet again?

There's a reason I cling so the people I love, to the trinkets I own and the homes beneath my feet. Time and time again, that which I desperately wanted to take for granted was taken from me instead. I lost you over and over, until I started throwing everything away before I ran the risk of losing it. I left you in the doorway, don't think I don't remember, don't think the look on your face isn't etched inside my skin, you didn't know I was all quicksand and bushfire and all you'd be left with were wounds. 

A car sits in the driveway, awaiting further instructions. Everything you own is drawing nearer to itself. You are gathering up your belongings, for what? 

Are you leaving,
or are you the one being left behind?

Check In

You cling to the ticket like a lifeline, teeth clenched, hissing, you've saved me before so you better save me again. It's a one-way ticket, you scrub it of symbolism. Is this our last hurrah, America. Is this our last cross-country embrace, two thousand miles of farewells before the earth scorches my feet once and for all? Generations have come before you, seen worse, seen better, endured. Who are you to waste what you've been given.

Who are you to demand the city on a hill, then not get buried when it tumbles to the ground?

I pick a window seat. Pack a bag light with content, heavy with fear. Brace yourself for what you might find around the bend. 

Stomach-dropping

You venture into old waters, try them on for size, find it harder to float, find the rocks at the bottom to cut the soles of your feet in a way you swear they didn't use to. Everything is rip tide, everything is a tumble to the bottom, you try to catch your breath in the in-betweens but they are too short, too full of silt, your lungs contract in rebellion. 

Do you remember that Christmas in Los Angeles, the way the ocean seemed to lead to forever? It felt like the only truth I'd ever need, then, but now I think it wasn't even me on that beach. I think I was a caterpillar, painting large eyes on my back, putting up fronts I had no business pretending, and I'm only now in the chrysalis, breaking down my every part into goo before I can make myself real again. 

I didn't mean to show you these broken bits, these wrong turns. I didn't know I wouldn't be allowed to be remain a camouflaged caterpillar forever. I fear winter will come before I break out of this cocoon. 

I fear winter will take us all
before our time.

Varje Måne Trasig

The Universe rages, strips you of meaning, of understanding. You try to remember how to hold on to hope, to hold on to art, but it's been to many days without to now suddenly be with. The grooves of the wagon wheels' incessant treading have become canyons, depths the sun never reaches and you don't know how to climb your way out. Is all your life just going to be a question of whether or not I want to make it to the end of that day?

I loved you once and thought maybe that meant all the other questions had been answered. 

There's nothing special about that,
I learned.

Showers

The weather teeters, barreling from freezing rain to steam to sunshine and back, there's no point in keeping up. Dress for all the weathers and hope for the best. You haven't done laundry in weeks anyway, so what is wear. A woman sits on the floor and reads her trite poetry and you think, I can do better than that, but can and do are not the same. Instead you spend hours looking at real estate listings, like dreaming precludes you from having to make decisions at all. 

Are you done living other people's lives, yet?

Are you done being available where they need a buttress?

It's so little life we are giving, so few minutes, such frail cargo. May lies on the horizon like a lifeline, like a promise that maybe you'll feel an itcha again and want to set out. You know no other ways to live a life. 

You're trying to figure out if it's too late
to learn.

For Show

The day is drizzly, a chill runs through your apartment, no sunlight makes its way all the way into your nooks, you are not mad. Little flutters of ideas, of stories, make their way through your synapses, all you ever wanted was to tell a story and it's there, somewhere, but you are only almost able to grab it, it slips through your fingers. You draw up maps for a summer on the road and wonder how you can feel so lost when you haven't even left yet. 

Wherever you go,
there you are. 

You know that's the problem

You just don't know the solution. 

Is Your Land

It is not time, you hear yourself think. This is not how we go. Thirty years in this soil cannot be lifted from my roots with an airplane ticket. Those around you scramble to jump ship and you wonder what stubborn nerve it is that always keeps you in these fires for so long. 

It occurs to me that I am looking for a fire hose.