Myself Dry

All day you're tired, staring into the bar and distracted by the slot machine music, it's like your brain won't settle, and nothing turns up right. But the desert air sinks into your veins, the kindness of strangers and the words whispered through tumbleweeds, you settle and see the magic through the dust. Tonight we drove out into complete darkness and when I opened my eyes, the entire Milky Way stretched out into infinity around us. I laughed and cried at the same time like it was the exact same thing and in that moment it was. A star shot across the expanse, you wished for all the gifts of the universe and felt already they had been given to you. He sends you music; it seeps into your spine. The hotel sheets are soft to the touch. You sleep like you never felt fear.

Stories unravel into the dark. You catch them like the river between your fingers.

Shoots

Sunrise over a quiet motel parking lot in the Nevada desert, you tie the shoe laces before your brain begins working and make your way to the back of the sleeping town. Start running at the edge of the trailer park with only mountains ahead. A little rabbit outruns you in an instant, the altitude beats its lack of oxygen into your lungs but the valley ahead carries you, the regular beat of your shoes against the dirt  road. He sends a picture of the city, and your heart swells in longing. It is a precious gift to have something to look forward to. 

By the time it is warm outside, we make ourselves at home in an old saloon that smells of cigarette ash in ancient carpet, that smells of slots played before noon and a world without windows, without time. I sink into a red leather armchair and let the words wash over me. They tell me their stories without prompt, build inside my chest and swirl around my tongue, I walked across America to bring the dark word and the only Word I had was wow. 

Wild

The room is dark, and cold, and quiet when you wake, how well you sleep in the west even as you miss the cacophony of your own street corner. The dogs pace around your bags as you load the car and you leave as the morning rush slows to a trickle. 21 years by each other's side and at last the Road lies ahead, open, unwavering, free. You look at him and laugh in a rush as mountains fly past, deserts, brush. The Wild West spreads out around you and it is all yours now, a gift that you give each other, that you give yourself and I am ready to take it now, I am ready to let the dry desert air rush through me and beat the madness to the surface, I am ready to leap from this mountain top and see where I land. He gave you the good book once and the entire world, you think perhaps the madness lay in you all along but he told you to look for it. My heart swelled with gratitude a hundred times over, remembering.

You are here, now. Embedded in the star trail, lulled in a silent vacuum and there is nothing else to do but explore what comes out of it. Ten years ago today I drove across the entire land and here I am flying down the road again, Jack lives on in me even as my skin gets old and my bones grow weary, because the fire that lives in your chest does not slow with age.

It will rage until you die, and all you have to do is let it.

Burrow

A new voice seeps into your blood stream. It rushes past your temples like a river, or like spring in the lilac trees. You do not sleep. When the alarm rings it is still dark and you have just the time to think fall before it evaporates. Splurge on a car and drive in silence across the bridge; see the old pasta factory careen into the gentrified metropolis, see the waterfront buildings burst forth like mushrooms. But then, over the back of an airplane wing, see steady, reliable Empire State Building weather the storm unyielding. I toss and turn; it remains. We walked past the old apartment at 28th and Lex and I thought, I have a history here. I have loved and lost and tended my roots; I, too, built something new on these streets and hoped I would one day become unyielding, inevitable. Turn the pages as I go and stack the years like notebooks on a shelf.

Wonder how they read, should somebody else pick them up.

Maybes

Manhattan lies still, dark, nowhere in particular to go and unperturbed. Some nights, the city will just let you be, let you wander aimlessly as you'd like and it will not bother you. The park staff did kick us out at midnight, but 42nd street breathed patiently and I don't know how many hours passed in its lungs. A silent alarm rang this morning and shook me out of a dreamless sleep, everything looks different in daylight.

But your blood boils, all the same.

No Alarms

The river looks different from this shore, gentle, blue, whispering secrets it knows but not you, not yet. You make a note to find out. Later, the air is warm but not imposing, a familiar wind from the west but entirely unknown, you lose your direction but do not feel lost. It's late and you are anything but tired.

Maybe this is how it starts.

This Perfect Pill

Open the flood gates, Manhattan swims in a flash the exact minutes you need to transit, and you arrive with your sneakers like inverted boats on the Hudson. Later, sit on the 42nd floor and watch the storm pummel the sky scrapers, watch lightning dance across the harbor and leave New Jersey in angelic sunset of peach and purple. I addict myself to the window like a drug, try to fill my veins with the lights from Financial District office windows, with the impossible nearness of Ellis Island refuge and the freedom of silence a thousand feet in the air. I walked home through blacked out downtown, through buzzing SoHo streets, through disheveled Bowery remains, and thought the country burns, yet we remain. I remain. The world eats at your guts, but the city feeds you.

I have been so tired, lately, so worn and lost. I stumble down wrong turns and crooked one-way streets to dead ends and haven't the time to gather myself and look at a map, but no matter. At every turn, when I falter, this city picks me up and guides me home; at every misstep, it kisses my bruises and covers my wounds. We sat on a fire escape on a quiet street in the West Village one sweltering summer evening and listened to Bach from the corner and I thought everything is magic; New York was old to me then but it's far older now, it has etched itself into my muscle memory and fastened its vines around my every joint, it sits in my wrinkles and buzzes in my hair, I no longer know where I end and it begins.

And that was all I ever really wanted, after all.