Feel His Disease

The unease begins to settle in my stomach, it refuses to go away. I feel restless, but my moves are so slow. Perhaps reality is beginning to kick in.

How long it was all I could do to focus on the move. Pack your bags, get out alive. Deal with the rest when you know if you survive. Now a whole new life appears and demands my attention, my efforts. People around me ask of plans and road maps; they have years and years properly outlined, how can I not? But I have nothing to offer them, nothing to offer myself. Every night is the end of my foreseeable future. I have gathered my roots in a shopping bag, and the slightest gust of wind may carry me off. I adore the thought. I abhor the thought. I run in circles until my legs are sore.

So many years, and how little you have changed. How the itch still tears your skin into a boiling shelter, how your fear of heights still keeps you from leaping. You wander in limbo until your dreams and your nightmares are one and the same.

One day the awakening will be rude.

Get Used to It

Afterthoughts

Blistered feet and my shoulders turn brown quickly. A trickle of sweat down the small of my back and I go to the grocery store in silence, savoring moments alone, the opportunity to greet this city. You and I, Stockholm, we're going to be friends, I whisper to the streets. When the sun shines like it does today, it's not hard to imagine it whispering back.

My words have changed; I can feel them rearrange themselves and pick their stories from a different palette. I miss the ones that disappear in the move, try not to mourn them, not yet. My body races with adrenaline and a thirst for adventure. I think of you all the time. My heart beats the same fired blood as ever.

South Town

The walk home was long, but lovely, and I knew my way the whole time. Stockholm so quiet but the sun not quite down, a layer of pink and peach and warmth spreading across the old buildings, over the moon. The drink became drinks, the sunlight became dusk and a million possibilities in the making. I will see you Friday, she said and we giggled.

This is home now.

For what it's worth.

(And right now it is worth everything.)

Slussen

At the edge of the Old Town, a pier in the water, and it's my first minute to myself since I arrived. The sudden silence surprises me; I sit in the afternoon sun and let it sink in. This is my city now, my home away from whatever home I supposedly have. An Australian girl sleeps in my bed on Morton Street; it is not mine.

This is all I have.

How familiar it is, and yet how foreign. I try to wrap my head around what has happened, and cannot. I fall short of words. Those New York streets, gone. Familiar faces, familiar airs, gone. I slept with the window open last night and was grateful for the trafficked streets; the sounds soothed me. A new life in the making: mine.

I stub my cigarette in the wooden boardwalk planks, gather my things, go to meet an old friend for a drink in the sunlight.

A new friend now. I can but roll with the punches.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

When I was eleven, my family moved to America, for the first of what would be countless times. I have heard the story a hundred times. How I stepped in through the doorway, into that confusingly large atrium in our new house. How I set my bag down. How I proclaimed Well, this is home now. And that was that.

A million lifetimes later, I drag my heavy bags up unending flights of stairs in an old building in the sunny city, the streets littered with coffee house chairs and holiday moods. I tuck my bags, my only possessions now, my snail shell contents, into a corner of the familiar room. There is no telling what this will all become, what lies ahead. I do not ponder it.

This is home now.

We take our champagne bottle, head out into the day that never becomes night, and go where the road takes us.

The Verge

Happy Last Night in NYC! the text buzzed my phone. People were clearing out, going home, tomorrow is a work day and these goodbyes are better off ripped like band-aids anyways.

I do not know what is going on.

We laugh, we reminisce, we make fun of each other and move on to the next wine, the next meal, the next step, it is all surreal and I laugh through it all. My dear, dear, dearest sit on the stoop and we have nothing to say except I'll see you soon. Just yesterday we were on a porch in upstate New York sipping Gin and Tonics and singing the blues. No wonder life seems surreal.

There are too many words to sum up, too many feelings to dissect and recall. There is no use. I get silly drunk, talk of details and pretend this moment is forever. They slip me trinkets in carefully wrapped boxes; I sleep with the reminders of who I am, where I've been.

Tomorrow, tomorrow I will digest. Tomorrow I will let this all sink in and I will miss you, I will cry for you, I will put into words the feelings that I cannot now reach--I didn't even cry when you walked away, did you notice that? Tomorrow I will cry. Tomorrow I will sit on a plane across the wide blue ocean and I will realize what is going on, and there will be no way to get off. That is when tears will form, when words will form, it will all hit me and that which is now a vague dream will become real.

Revel in this last moment of innocence, dear. You may be in, for a a bumpy ride.