Brand New

I have dreamed about this city so long. I didn't even think it was real, somehow. And now, here I am; I don't know what to feel at all. 

We spend our days slowly meandering through the magical city, weaving through tourist attractions and secret back streets alike. I spout out historical tidbits at every turn, but I'm not sure they're why she came. Lower Manhattan spans majestically at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge; Central Park is lush, and warm, and winding, Greenwich Village is as ever titillating with its stories of poets past. No sugar-coating necessary, no grand elaborate setups. Whatever the lumbering masses demand, it provides. Whatever the shivering refugees need, will be there before they know to ask for it. We look up our forefathers in the Ellis Island registry, see their names handwritten into the old pages. Blue, Blond, speaks English, declared healthy of body and mind. Forty-eight dollars to their name. They came here hoping for a better life.

Did not we, too?

Presenting this city to one who has never seen it proves to be a treat. I rediscover the nooks and crannies I no longer see in the mad dash to get to work, get to life. Remember that I once wanted to run my fingers over every brick and every flaw in this entire city. Realize that I still do. Oh, New York, how you are the only thing in this heartbreaking world that ever made sense.

When I have trouble sleeping--and I do every night you know, she says as we lie in the dark in the cramped bedroom on Morton Street and let the day sink in, I imagine myself going to sleep in New York. 

Now that I am here, 
now that I am here,
I don't know what to dream
anymore. 

From Adam

Marcy avenue BQE music and there's a soft breeze across your sunburned shoulders. The roof was beautiful, all mid-summer scorch and still dry enough to breathe--didn't you try to cut the humidity with a knife yesterday? We had a picnic in Harlem today, the Mexican parade making it hard to cross Central Park West, but the grass was newborn lush under your bare feet. It's Sunday, so the M doesn't, run, but you are in no hurry. 

If you think it will be great, you should go, he says, and wasn't that exactly what you were thinking? Your arguments of sanity don't make much of a dent in your sense of adventure. You promise yourself to consider it, despite the tickle in your veins. Summer in New York is just beginning, you sing louder now even when people can hear you. 

And I'm free. 

(Free falling.)

First Position

You don't feel you could love me

But I feel you could. 

Lincoln Center five minutes after curtain and the plaza clears quickly, the fountain left to its own steep rhythm. The security guard tries to woo me with talk of his businesses, and I have nowhere to go but encouragement. Bygones. When we finally stand there on the second ring, hearing the soft tap tap of pointe shoes patting across the stage floor, aren't you immediately removed from any ennui? Taut bodies worn into the tools of their trade, the tulles of their trade, they leap and bend and you don't realize until the final beat that you were holding your breath this entire time, gasping into your applause and smiling in the dark. You immerse yourself into art lately, you cannot get enough, like a newborn in appreciation, like you didn't grow up at the stage, it means something different now because you try to see their dedication with other glasses than the ones you've been told to wear for so long. 

I look forward to trying things and failing, you hear yourself say and know it's true mostly as a hypothetical, but it seems a promising start. We order another pitcher of sangria and laugh into the Queens Friday night, but the silent spaces between are deadly serious, and we let them. The city has been covered in a thick mist all day, you can still cut the humidity with a knife. 

On the subway home, I know it again. I love this city more than I knew I could love anything. It knows me, it knows me, and still it lets me move through its innards perpetually. 

If you needed saving, what other place could do it but this?

Pale Moon

The music wasn't necessarily the kind I'd listen to at home, a little too much Memphis twang and too much of the old man in his lyrics, but when that band got playing it seemed they all forgot there was a few hundred people outside the stage lights watching them. We forgot, as well, I think, whisked away into endless loops and solos, suddenly finding ourselves keeping a soft beat but otherwise frozen. I said I was mesmerized but it sounds so trite, now. One of the backup singers sat near the door, after, selling the merchandise.  

But I saw them with different eyes this time, traveling around the country on some carefully negotiated bus and collecting their own chords (also) off the stage as the crowds were going home. I saw in them not the usual assumed attempts at stardom, not the bitter failings of is that all there is. I saw instead the immense freedom of doing what one loves to do, no matter the size of the venue, no matter the fill in the bank. Such liberation has never reached me before; in that dark wooden barrel of a venue, I breathed lighter than I have in years. The art is the journey, is the goal. If you let it breathe through you, then the circumstances around it do not matter. 

We went to the Brooklyn piers today, his little toddler legs running wild in the soft grass as we picked dandelions and looked for fish in the docks. The summer sun is finally here, good proper sunlight that'll restore a pulse to your veins, and I stood there looking at the south tip of manhattan, painting itself in that incandescent glow, crooked buildings piling themselves into a corner like so many LEGO blocks, and I thought this city makes me happy every time. And I knew it was true. 

If I am to fall apart, 

And start again,

Build myself into a human being 

(A real one this time)

Then there is nowhere else I would rather do it

There is no one else I would trust 

To hold my pieces

In the fall.  

Pier 45

The day is perfect, after all, the temperatures not too hot and a soft warm breeze in the air. In Swedish we call it pre-summer; we have more seasons than you lot and such an obsession with the weather, but can you blame us? Monday afternoons bring just the right amount of people and no one demands you share their leisure with them. The trees along the river are slowly turning green and though the forecast called for clouds they are pleasantly absent. 

My hollow shell of a person sits parked on one of the wooden benches, trying desperately not to crumble into the brown swells, despite lack of a backbone. I read short stories, riveting but humanly flawed, and I try to guess whether I could do it better. The problem seems not to be perfection but humanity. People cannot reach you if you are not real. But you won't reach them, either. 

After a lifetime of unmovable Truths, I stand suddenly washed up on a whole new shore, not certain of anything. It is supposed to be liberating, but so far I grapple with even the simplest tasks of existing. All the things that supposedly made me a person (or made me a supposed person, really) lie shipwrecked in the sea behind me, bobbing nervously and far enough out of reach that I may just let them go. 

Perhaps I turn out to be not who you wanted. Perhaps I am not what I expected. It seems late to start over. 

But what choice do I have?

Revelations

I make so many mistakes, you know.
I never told you how much I appreciated your kindness,
because such admission would also reveal weakness,
and I am afraid of sharp teeth.

I opened my bedroom window yesterday
and let my bare legs swing
over the lush, green backyards
of richer people next door
and yes, I was crying,
but there was a great lightness
in my heart,
too,
so the wet cheeks
didn't seem so bad.

This free fall
is less a jump from a bridge
and more Alice
tumbling down the rabbit hole.

It'll lead to a new Adventure
Eventually.

Mirrors

(There is much going on,
in the space between,
of course.
There are open roads
and western sun,
desert stars
and snow.
There are revelations
my heart is still too green
to comprehend,
and trembling fear
in anticipation.
I wanted to tell you all that,
too,
of course,
but I'm trying to know better,
to learn from my
naive ignorance
my ignorant innocence.
Perhaps this all starts
over
now,
and the slate is clean
and the world lies at my feet;
perhaps
now
I
live.)