No Decorum

The heat broke, at last. I went for an endless run along the river, under all the bridges and past the Wall Street crowds with their evening drinks. Past a hundred Chinese couples out on their late-night walks and quiet contemplation. Past the Pasta factory across the river, until my legs grew accustomed to the dull ache and my heart slowly beat every last thought out of my mind. The days are beautiful and painful all at once; you stumble into bed and wake at sunrise, there's no sense to make. She calls from the hospital, alone and waiting for the surgery to be over. You can't bear to think of that hospital. You still wish you were by her side.

When you come home, late, too late, too disheveled and you can't seem to put yourself together, your bed's been made. You tuck yourself in between crisp, stretched sheets. Sleep soundly without nightmares. Welcome the reprieve.

Jukeboxed

I cried today. There was a moment after an early morning run, when I sat stretching in the shade (because it was already a hundred degrees and unbearable) and it just came over me, unrelenting but unapologetic and in just a minute was over. My senses continue to be wrapped in cotton, everything is dulled and my responses are slow. I try my best to wade through with a machete, desperately holding on to the clearings where light trickles in, but it's not always easy to see the point. 

Imagine it would be easier to fight for life if I did. 

Your Rolling Stones Records

The heat returns, the humidity. Sweat runs in rivulets down throats, along hairlines, it pools in the smalls of backs and darkens cotton threads. The New York City summer nights are wild with life, people peering out from their air conditioned isolation chambers after midnight, moving tables into the streets and catching up like after a religious fast. In a corner apartment in the East Village, a small tornado runs amok.

It is too easy to tear everything apart, to scratch and claw and succumb to the overwhelming darkness; it is too familiar, too comfortable. She curled up on the couch and said it's my safest space and my most encroaching prison at once, and you remember now exactly what she means. The days, the weeks, the life, they catch up with you, they stuff your head with cotton and make you afraid of the light. Your roommate dashes in and out, in breezy summery outfits and freshly painted bronzer, trilling about her various engagements, and you don't know how long you can smile and nod in her direction before it becomes clear that your insides are performing a nuclear meltdown. You search desperately for airline tickets and are at a loss for what to do when you find them, because he said not to run away and you can't imagine the alternative.

You are determined to take the difficult track instead, to stare your demons in the eye and ask them what they want. It's just that there's a heat wave outside, and a roaring fire inside, and you're pretty sure the demons wouldn't mind just a moment's snuggle before they let you send them away.

They are such old friends, after all.

Post Title

His voice comes clear over the line, for once without lag and confusion. He speaks of jobs he's applied to around the world, we speak of the Southern Hemisphere in fall and apartments in the north. You are reminded that this is the life you still crave, that airports are your home no matter the world beyond or the company at your side. They speak of returns, of a city that has changed like the river but maybe there's a way to swim back into the current. Or maybe we take our family to Africa, build something else completely. 

You consider a life moored to just the place you were born, a place with no unknowns and no overwhelmig adventures. You reaffirm your devotion to a different life completely. Decide to work like hell to belong to the world.

Exit Strategy

I wish I had done this more, you think regretfully. I wish I had gone there, if only once. Your bags lie packed in the corner of their guest room, you refuse to pull the blinds because it's the last light night you'll see, and your early alarm already makes the travel jitters tingle in your body. There's a sense of home that lies in hearing voices and movement behind closed doors when you're trying to sleep. 

Your lids are heavy, your breaths already slow. Tomorrow everything will look different. So let it. 

Just be here, now. 

Express

You wake up too early; the morning is late but the hours you slept are few. There is a dry sheet of sand paper in your hung over mouth, and your skin is too warm, still too pink from the previous day's sunshine. Smells of an open fire waft in from the living room, as you slowly make your way out into the quiet house: a gentle rain falls on the grass, into the lake. You still go swimming, after the fire has died down. After she tells you of all the things she saw written in her veins when winter was dark. After he tells you what it's like to carry on when nothing turned out the way you had thought. But I'd like to think we're the kind of people who can change our minds. You see easily your own crooked paths winding unsteadily behind you, and realize that you haven't a single answer for them. Your only redemption lies in every morning you still wake up, every day you can put behind you that you survived. Some days that is well enough. 

The little clearing in the woods looks the same after the last words have dissipated, the water lies just as still and just as quiet. You think there should be a way to tell them that. 

Imagine the best way may be to just go for another swim. 

Tigers

It's there when you wake up: sunlight, streaming through the shuttered windows. In your heart you already know: there will not be a better day than this. Go for a swim early, the water is cold, but impossibly refreshing. Drink more coffee than your tattered body can handle. Run through lush green fields and count the flowers. Trace lineage through the wrinkles of those around you. Go for another swim; dive deep into the lake and resurface brand new.

We wrapped ourselves in warm wool sweaters, stuck our feet in boots three generations in the making and waded through the deep grass, past the pastures, to the little clearing at the end of the woods. Took our clothes off and stepped carefully into the water. I have to swim naked here, she says, because this place is mine. We swam out to the middle of the bay and looked at the house where she dreams they'll one day live. One day, and the door is always open. By the time we made our way back, shivering with cold or with magic there's no telling, the sun took its few minutes of respite before climbing back into the sky. By the time we went to bed, the clearing in the woods was already light, the trees alive with birdsong. My skin was warm with sunlight, my chest full of exactly the peace I came to find. All the worries of the year, the stress of the trip and the heavy burden that is life, were suddenly all worth it. The sadness of mortality washed off my exhausted limbs, and I crawled into bed to sleep the deep sleep of the countryside. Tomorrow, all this will be a dream, but no matter. 

Dreams are life, too.