Grace

(You say, you have no home. That the years spent tearing from one place to another pulled the home right out of you, and that you spend your days desperately drifting to reclaim what was never yours. But it is not true.
It begins when you cross that last mountain range, and see the familiar valleys spread out underneath the plane. It's in the smell of damp earth under midnight sprinklers, in the sounds of crickets, in the way the sun shines so impossibly bright but the air is dry like desert. It's in the slight lull of your accent, a lingering twang that appears with the first stranger you meet.
This is the land where you grew up. This is where you found a voice to speak with, a soil to plant your roots in, a strange tapestry into which to sew your heart. For better, and for worse, this is the place: this is home.)

Far Rockaway

Two minutes before the alarm rings, you wake with a start. 03:58. How you tossed and turned in the dark last night, counting hours and subtracting minutes of precious sleep. Try it again, with feeling.

The west village lies sleeping outside your door. The last scattered remnants of drunk Saturday night youths lie strewn around pizza slice joints and 24-hour tobacconists. The lack of tourists is gratifying, the abundance of empty seats on the train. The construction reroute doesn't worry you; you've gone in and out of these airports a hundred times already. Last night looking at old pictures and realizing just how long New York has painted itself as the magic backdrop to what you thought was such a useless life. 

Dawn rises slowly

over John F. Kennedy airport. 

You decide to forget everything

that has come before.

Paint your life

only

in magic. 

Allez Retour

You'll never make that connection, she says, and you know she is right. I can put you on the first flight out in the morning. So you take your bags, your new slip of airfare paper and make your way back through Queens. The streets smell of unknown foods, the store signs in strange symbols; you think perhaps you do not need to move to the ends of the earth--it's enough just to move to Queens. New York is your pearl, again it redeems itself and you never doubted it would.

A voice travels to you from across the ocean, with that velvety lull to it that softens your resolve and makes you smile at the ceiling. You vow to save your pennies.

Whatever happens,
an airplane ticket can save your life,
every time.

In August

Asocial isolation ends with a bang, much sooner than expected. Every night is a new round of margaritas in the velvet evenings, and you stumble home to your messy room and fall asleep with your clothes in another pile on the floor. You see yourself building a life in New York, again, starting at the bottom with the scattered bricks that remain from previous attempts and glueing the base with endless optimism and maybe this time it's all different. Perhaps without ignorance you would simply resign yourself to passing out in the mud, so you allow it to create your futures for you.

They write you from their new life, with a void the size of New York City in their chests, and they do not yet know how to fill it with anything else. How long ago it seems now that the City was new and our every step on its pavement delicate. Now you walk like you are invincible and can never fall off. It seems an impossible prize. Try not to think about it. He sends you pictures of sunset over the open sea, but you no longer know what it means.

All you know is concrete.
All you need is here.

And You Had Time

If you look at the lamp posts in the park, and you find this number here, you'll always know what street level you're on. Her young voice trembled with excitement as she ran circles around me in the Ramble. New York is hot, again, I recognize its air now when I walk home late at night and it feels like a sweet concession. They offer me a job over margaritas; every day life is a new twist and turn to follow. I booked an airplane ticket yesterday but it didn't leave the usual ripple. The addiction deepens.

She says she'll come as soon as she can. That she will live in my room of teapots and work a dive job and we can spend the nights creating and practicing our tobacco habits. You can't help but think it an inviting idea. You think perhaps it just might be the best way to live a life.

Just look at the lights. You'll always know where you are.

Upon Your Shore

Every morning I wake, too early, with a panicked feeling in my lungs, and do not know where I am. Feel the window fan across my feet, hear the dog pacing outside the cardboard door, fit the pieces together until the image is clear. She writes to say that they are sailing around the world but are landing in the city for a week and would you like to come out to play. You consider stowing away in their boat, instead. He writes from Morocco, but you've dulled your senses now, and you refuse to paint the pictures in your mind.

I return to the little room on Morton like an inert whirlwind, desperate to commit but perpetually torn from its comforts, rasping my nails against dresser drawers and crumbling walls at the gusts. You belong here, they say, but you don't know what it means to belong anywhere. Some days you think perhaps you don't actually need to.

Always keep your bags packed, your storages cleared. Never be weighed down by the comforts of a familiar bed. Run madly into the world and live to tell the tale. Perhaps happily ever after, is a sacrifice worth making.

Burn everything
to
the
ground.

4 July, 2014

You are whole here, in New York. 
We see it in your face. 
The note lay in an unassuming white envelope, among the piles of credit card offers and mail addressed "to resident". They're gone, now, but it's too soon to understand what that means.
Days pass in quiet exhaustion, as I begin to reinsert myself into the treaded paths that are mine. I walked along the river and saw the city covered in a heavy, brown haze. It looked almost like the end of summer. And there, at the end of the pier where it seems the city and the sea lie both at your fingertips, I realized.
I do not fear fall.
I do not fear rootlessness or my own
impoverished future.
I do not fear anything.
Because I am here.

Welcome home.