Stepped Outside

My teeth ache. They grind themselves to pulp in the night when I cannot convince them otherwise. I walk to work with a scowl. Spend the nights with a dark cloud along my brow. I try to know why but clarity eludes me. The days are too often muddled. 

We sat on the stoop last night, drinking the season's first champagne and eating strawberries. I chain smoked deep curling drags into the heavy air and passersby could not help themselves but comment on the appeal of our feast. We spoke of the packed bags in her apartment, of what it meant to leave New York. 

But I won't accept that all is lost and over just because we are making a change, she said. New York is our home, the restaurants may change over the years but we will always know these streets. If whatever comes next is so awful, we can always come back. 

We sat a long time on that stoop. We spoke of life, and grief, and futures. Neighbors came and went, stepping lightly around the spread, and when the time came to part I was more than a little intoxicated. Perhaps it was the last time we had drinks on the stoop together. 

But it doesn't mean all is lost. 

Wreck Me

It was somewhere near Battery Park City that the feeling hit me. Like hot air hits you when you leave the airport of a tropical land, and it is immediately all over you, it consumes you and assumes you and you can no longer remember what it was like to feel any other way. The New York twilight was dark, and scintillating, a hint of green across the New Jersey and the Freedom Tower looming impossibly tall, twinkling. A sliver of new moon wavered over all, and I stopped dead in my tracks with sweat coursing along my temples.

I have had enough now.

And somehow I believed it must be true. That I have had enough. Of this self-annihilation and ridiculous games of a pretend life that never is. Of painting images where none are, simply because no one takes it upon themselves to tell me off. I have had enough of living with one foot in sanity and one in madness.

I have had enough of not living in art.

I continued running after that, faster and harder until my feet hit the pavement loudly and I thought I would throw up with exhaustion. Coming home, I began to scrub the kitchen cupboards and sing until my lungs wearied and my throat was dry, my fingers raw. Books lay open to favorite lines and dog-eared pages, and I absorbed them like brand new truths, like sermons to the recently converted. The cogs and wheels began to twist and turn around my insides, wringing out soured desires and tragic dead ends. I feel my vessel clean itself out, ready itself for brighter journeys.

No one ever looks back at their life wishing they'd taken the straight and certain.

Lexington and 53rd

You've had too much wine, pretending it's Friday night even though you have work tomorrow and when you reach the subway the world is spinning. A rat lies dying on the tracks; you commiserate. There must be more to it than this. She writes from across the oceans to say she made it home alright. The pictures remind her of better times; the rat revives and runs away. The boy on the subway from work had that curly hair you can't resist: in my mind I run my fingers through it but he plays Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe with his girlfriend and you almost sleep past your stop. You pray the toothache is all in your head because you are too poor to do anything about it. Perhaps the right thing to do is cut your hair and get a job. 

He laughed so much to see me today, and all I could see in his California tan was that it is time to move on. Change is your only constant; you swim like hell to keep one step ahead. This will all end in tears. It will all end in tears. The only thing that can save your tattered soul is the art you leave in its wake. 

You must leave art in your wake. You must burn, and bleed, and put the stories  to words. Why else would life be so sad, if not for scattered remnants of magic?

Coney Island baby

The sweltering heat returns, all sunshine and humid air and the breeze like a hair dryer. Memorial Day passed quietly in the Village when all the rich folks were away in their summer houses, and we moved out onto the stoop with our cold beers and fluffy dog, it was perfect, like it always was. 

We take the train out to Coney Island, an empty air conditioned car and perhaps the kids are all still in school, and the suits are back at work, and the boardwalk feels like a whole other country. Wish you were here. We bought post cards yesterday. I've been meaning to send them one for months. The air smells like sun screen. All I want is to live like this forever with endless ocean horizon and freedom, but I don't know how I'll ever let go of Manhattan to do it. 

Showing her New York for the first time revives my love for it, makes it sparkle again like it always did. Stories resurface, begin to write themselves in the back of my spine and I don't know how I could have doubted them, as I did. 

It occurs to me that love runs two ways. So that when I doubted, all was not lost. 

Ellis Island Ferry

Hello, she said, What's your name? My name is Jasmine. Do you live in New York? She nestles in next to me at the railing. Next stop Battery Park. The breeze is cool, and welcome. That's the Freedom Tower. She points to the spire that makes all the others seem like walkups. My grandpa was here on 9/11. He went to buy some bread, and when he came out, he saw the airplane hit the building, and he ran as fast as he could and hid behind a bush. What's New York like? 

I tell her it's busy, and full of people. I ask her where she's from and try to imagine what she could hear that might stick. I ask her age; she was not born when 9/11 happened. Remember myself, in the shower, my college roommate coming in to tell me, how everything changed after that. How I thought This is no longer a country where my children should grow up.  Her hair is long, and dark, her skin tone not mine. How many stores, and restaurants, and neighborhoods were attacked because of the sound of the name of the owner.

I want to tell her it is the most awe-inspiring place in the world. That the streets are paved with magic and there is space enough in these buildings for everyone to fit their dreams. I want to tell her that the void of those skyscrapers are only one piece in the giant puzzle of stories from the people who make this their home. I want to tell her that this city is the place that makes me feel like myself, when no other place ever could, and that I still get tears in my eyes when I remember it.

It is too late, of course, she has run off to her friends to giggle and share Jujubes and get in trouble with their teachers. The south tip of Manhattan arrives quickly, its glass buildings towering over the little boat. I think of those poor immigrants, what they felt.

Realize in a hundred years, the stories haven't changed at all.

Choice

(All this thinking,
must be good for something;
all these floods of emotion
and whirls of literary construction,
must serve a purpose larger
than my own self-mutilation.

If they do not,
would I not simply
leave them behind
and
move
on
?)

Suspension

I dreamed of you last night.

And not of the way things were before the fall, but like perhaps the gash in my chest had healed. The scar may have been thick, but I wasn't bleeding. You looked at me with those sad eyes and I wanted to protect you from anything that would haunt you. Feelings do not disappear just because it would be easier if they did. The cable car moved on in silence. 

By morning, I'd forgotten most of what was said. 

But there's a dull ache, where that scar might be.