Mart

(There was a moment 
today
when I stood in the basement
of the discount department store
all sad, windowless minimum wage
and Made in Taiwan
disposables
but they had rolled out 
the Christmas trees
and colored lights
and glittering ornaments,
that I breathed in the 
idiotic scented pine cones
and my whole being 
capitulated 
to one, short break

from the tragedy that is

Life, 

and I was exempt. 

New

I wake shivering. The riser has gone cold overnight; angry notes for management to turn on more heat litter the mailboxes downstairs. Strange words float through the silent apartment, plans forming along timelines of foreseeable futures. There's a tickle in your spine where May lies, and you imagine the delicious gratification of running when it bids you. His smiles sound trite, suddenly. There's a ring now where there wasn't one before, he looks happy. Things that kept you up at night seem centuries away and buried underneath a thick layer of dust.

Sometimes when I'm returning to the city, it just scares me, she said, as the last washes of dusk lingered at the top of skyscrapers, and a deep dark black settled around its edges. We roared into Manhattan from above, the city spreading out ahead of us and me with that giggle that always swirls through me upon homecoming. How could this city ever be frightful, how could it ever wound upon re-entry? This city that cares for even the most lost and weary, simply by letting them hold on.

I hear your words, I know what they're trying to say. But they cannot touch me here. I am fine.

Beacon

Bright blue skies, the last of the fires of fall piling up along the parkway in mounds and swirls of orange and yellow, flying across the George Washington bridge in the early afternoon and miles of road underneath our feet. A week washes from my system in our wake. I breathe. 

In the small hamlet upstate, decades of questionable art spreads out in the giant factory. Crowds of intellectual urbanites wading through the commentary, trying to add their own but not creating much more than an Instagram speck. Your head roars suddenly with familiarity, with things to say and memories of once having tried to say them. Your commitments strangle you without compensating for the damage. They write from far away, so far away you can barely hear their muffled invites, reminders of an art you've lost and a world you fought so hard to let embrace you. 

The pretenses fall away, their carefully curated Saturday art gallery fashions become blurry in your eyes. Outside there is a bright sunlight in the cold wind, raging storms inviting you to dance again. You miss them terribly. 

Drive back to the city in silence. 

Schedule

The porch swing has a gentle creak to it, it cuts over the steady lull of cicadas and rolling trains in the distance. The trees are turning, but autumn in the South is warm, humid, it reminds you of late nights in Alabama and how thick the vines would grow along the road. You're not sure where you thought you were going then, on that long trek across the country, but it's even harder to say if you made it there. The smiles of strangers are quick to come, their eyes inviting and easy. You hear the lilt in your voice return to mirror theirs, feel your cold New York exterior relax against their manners.

You remember how you love to travel. How you love to feel a different soil beneath your feet and another air inside your lungs. There is somewhere else you've meant to be. You forget, sometimes, but the Somewhere Else does not.

It waits for you, quietly.

But it will not wait, forever.

Tennessee Nights

It's over, he says in a moment before takeoff. I don't know what they'll do now. And all those dreams of New York, of a life together after years apart, they drift into the mists of things that no longer are. A Ludlow street apartment suddenly cramped and unforgiving. She asks me later if we can fill the days, take her mind off what awaits behind the door.

You board your plane lightly, happy again to be traveling. The lights of an unknown town spread out below, a warm southern wind whispers welcomes into your ears. Put one foot in front of the other. 

Eventually you'll end up anywhere but here. 

Hello

You know it's there. You can feel it, hear its raspy breaths and labored steps approaching every time the air gets quiet around you. The Darkness that owns you, that carries your truths when no one else knows them. So you run, you turn the music up and order another drink. Keep the waters calm for another day. 

There was a time when you relished the pain of tearing open the wounds, when you would lock the door and let your body sink into the rushing blood. It reminded you you were alive. It gave you hope of a bigger purpose. 

Perhaps the scars get thicker every time they heal, perhaps I'm just old and tired. I abhor meeting again those demons, content to simply walk these streets and believe it is enough. 

But paying the rent

isn't worth the sacrifice. 

Sleeping well

does not mean you are alive.  

Conditional

The line crackles, the call drops every five minutes and you mind your words, knowing unwanted guests listen in at every turn. He hears the weariness in your voice, and you've never found yourself wanting to be in a war-torn country at the other side of the world as much as you do now. How you long to raze and run, to weigh no more than a single suitcase and clear your own cloying narcissism against despairs a thousand times worse than your own. His voice is tired, he longs for home, but how addictive the satisfaction in his voice.

I crept into a bath so hot it burned my skin, scrubbed every inch of my body until it tingled, tried to reach that point where my insides aren't numb and ignorant. You know there's something else you're supposed to be doing, something better you are supposed to be, and it doesn't go away simply because summer ran around with you in insipid gratification. The leaves turn brown outside your window.

Let your insides burn, instead.