Novel

There was a time when this was all new
and we had all the time in the world. 
I wish you would hurry.

Words return when the bar opens again for the fall season. The bartender plays that song and you want to go home. I have only the Word and it has to carry me to the ends of the earth. There is no other way.

I know what you smell like
in the morning

It's over.

Infect

Words evade me. It occurs to me that perhaps feelings do, too. I pass out exhausted every night but numb, gratefully numb, the days will pass and the life and you will not have had to feel a thing. She passed in her sleep, they say, it was perfectly painless. If it does not hurt to die, you weren't really alive when it happened. The August night lies dark outside, it snuck up on us when no one noticed even as the days remain warm, sweltering. I hear your voice but it's not the same now; we look the other way and wonder what happened. Traffic is a bitch every morning, a lethargic snake draped around the island bypass. I laugh in the face of every sad, gray commuter I pass on my bike, I am free.

For years, I've said that New York is the drug I cannot quit, is the urge of which I never rid myself, but perhaps it is the other way around. I go back, again, again, I rub myself against its concrete and fill my reserves with its madness, that one day I can no longer run out. One day, New York will be sufficiently etched into every fiber of my being, every cell in my skin, every vein in my limbs, that no matter where I go or who I am, it will remain in me. That no matter what I do, I own a little piece of that place that can never be taken from me, again.

We will never be whole, you know.

But we can fill in the cracks with magic,
and be better off than before.

The Other Side

The days pass, I do not write. I can not explain it. People wear jackets in the streets now; it gets hard to bike home in the evenings without the lights on. I go to work with my head safely on my shoulders but oh how the nights fall apart. My apartment takes on the air of cardboard box underneath the bridge, all piles and hoarded potential.

The Escape key on my computer keyboard has fallen off.

I have no idea what I'm doing.

Facing the Courtyard

The subletter fell through, she says.
If you want your old room back,
it's yours.
 
The days count down quickly.
But the stars align
at a speed
all their own.

Forecast

The sea was perfectly still, a silken peach lull over the slow currents drifting to shore. We looked at the sunset: vast, quiet, setting fire to the cliffs across the water. August is impossibly beautiful like that. What is it about summer, she said as her baby fell asleep in my arms, that makes it so happy and sad at the same time? Her husband stared cynically at the last returning sailboats and said, That is the essence of what it is to live where we do. In the life of summer lies the promise of approaching death. It is the same, every year.

I went to bed alone in the dark cabin, the sea black and ominous outside. The peaceful quiet suddenly more a sign of abandonment than of urban escape. I slept a heavy sleep, again, filled with strange dreams impossible to interpret. Come morning, the sky had clouded over, meeting the ocean in a pale shade of grey. I pace impatiently, wait for impending rain.

Wait for the summer to die.

Vindö, Revisited

My grandfather turns 90. He is old, he takes innumerable naps, we have to speak twice as loud and half as fast, but damn if he doesn't love that akvavit after lunch. We crowd into my aunt's house in the country, first cousins once removed, second cousins, great-aunts and in-laws, an invasion of flies and unlimited cookies. By nightfall, the secret smokers sneak onto the back porch. I hear untold stories of my father's youth, where we would stand on the balcony and spit on the passers-by, and jump on the slide so the crystal chandeliers rattled on the neighbor's ceiling. Detect similarities in our faces, trace lineage through a curvature of the hip, a crinkle in the eye. My parents call from across the oceans and lament their absence, but they spent most of my youth avoiding these things. When the devil grows old, he finds religion. My cousin in New York Skypes in and everyone crowds around the screen to make jokes and express longing. There was a low marking on the doorpost, 1987; how we have grown since then, and still we are the same. She feels closer now than ever.

We repack our bags, escape to the archipelago. I lie for two full days on a cliff and watch my skin turn brown. Live in a swimsuit and try not to get webbed feet. Write lists and count down days. What am I doing with my life and should I be doing it differently. I read small press anthologies and see nothing but dystopic futures painted on science fiction-esque backdrops. To be a good writer you must be an avid reader. I fall asleep with the pages plastered to my cheek. Sunscreen glue.

Thunder rumbles in the distance.

I am not afraid.

Journal Excerpt

...And in the midst of all the uncertainty, in all the things I adore about my life in Stockholm, I long for New York so my heart aches. Like if I just come home, maybe Everything won't be okay, but at least I'll know the soles of my feet are burning.