To Stand Still

When it rains
it pours
and floods
and drowns my panicked muscles
swallows my tongue
clouds my senses.

I go to parties and forget how to interact. I fight with my roommate and haven't the time to clean up the mess. I fail, I fail, and I fail.

She dropped me off in her cab on the way, leaving me at the wrong end of town but I decided to walk. The Lower East Side had been washed clean by the rain, and nobody wanted to come out and dirty it again just yet. I placed my wooden heels on the cobblestone.

Click.

Clock.

When all else fails, these streets reassure me I am still above ground. My head is still above the water's edge.

What You Get

I found a home in the dirt.

In the seedy underbelly, in the unfriendly New Yorker, in the disgusting words of my favorite writers' descriptions of that which we as people try to hide. Therein I found my nook, where I could feel like someone had seen the world for its true colors and not hid it, not polished it. How much safer I feel, comforted in that truth has been restored. It isn't pretty, but neither are we.

We are real.

The Great Escape

New York grew cold this week, big puffs of smoke flowing from everyone's lips and weren't their steps a little quicker, their eyes a little more glued to the ground? Thank god for accessories, because how cute the outfits appear beneath layers of knits. We agonize for half an hour, choosing just the right christmas tree; when we return home, our clothes smell of pine, and I find myself humming a seasonally appropriate tune. I allow myself to get swept away in the holiday, because I could just as easily forget, and I do appreciate the sparkle.

She has said she'll leave for as long as I've known her, and still we picture ourselves 20 years down the line, in the same apartment, in the same life. I go home to a friend for drinks; she says she longs to move back to the country from which she came. I say, will you say that for another ten years and never return? and she shudders at the thought.

The days amass; a hundred times I have thought my time to be up. But New York is home, and in the cold december air I open my eyes to it again. I straighten my back and look the city right in the eye. And there it is. Unwavering. I relax, lean into it, and for this short moment, all is well with the world.

After a While

I'm growing increasingly tired
of hearing myself
dissecting and digesting
the same damn words
feelings
"thoughts"
day after day
without getting anywhere
and without ever looking
beyond my own skin

do you ever feel that way
too?

The Climb

How high the hills, stretching ever upward and I can not muster the energy to even start. I hang out here on the bottom, making lame attempts at ascension, but I don't know where to get the energy. It is pleasant down here just now, if only that list of things to do would not grow longer by the minute.

Today the weather turned in New York; snow fluttered noncommittally to the ground and the cold air made us walk a little faster, made us keep our head down. In three weeks I will be on the verge of leaving on a long-awaited adventure, a journey to the ends of the earth.

The cold wind, the steep inclines, they don't seem so bad then.

Sounds of Silence

I went west. I drove down the mountain into the snowy valley, and in the absolute stillness I slept a hundred hours of heavy sleep, waking to wander the impossibly large house in my father's PJs and breathe in the fresh country air. My limbs stretched out, my eyes opened, my muscles relaxed. Words fell from my conscious and my pen lay silent, unable to create a mere morsel of a tale. Minutes and hours were instead filled with the laughter of my oldest friends, the comforts of my family. Life in Utah is effortless, somehow, and I tried to soak it up without remembering the remorse of not being able to stay.

And still, standing on that platform at Howard Beach, waiting for the A train to take me back to the city. How comforting the sense of home. The sense of my body, my clothes, my steps, suddenly fitting again, suddenly allowed to be themselves without reservation, without a makeover.

New York is the place where I am, without a makeover.

I open the valve to the radiator; it smells of a hundred winters in the city already past. I wonder how many I have yet to see.

Dead. Line.

And so it is, with deadlines. They come, they go, and the moment in which to savor a victory is so short, so fleeting. Suddenly it is December, and I am on to new things. How sad those last few hours with my piece, even if this is not truly the end, and suddenly how much more I had to say. How much life mimics art, the experience mimics the life.

In words, I see a world begin to make sense where it didn't use to. In my words, I see secrets I hid from myself. I remember that this is why I loved them in the first place, when I was still writing stories on my father's old computer in the 80's, the kind that only carried a word processor.

There is magic in words.

There is also magic in Christmas lights strung gaudily around bedroom windows. I realize it is not the same kind of magic, but tonight, when my word document is closed indefinitely, I lie in bed and look at those lights, and do you know, that is all the magic I need.