at Most

It's funny
Years later
You book tickets
and they have the same magic power over you still
No age can defy it
no wisdom
I book the tickets, I forget who I was
I believe who I can be instead

It soars in you,
reminds you the world exists in you
and you in the world,
reminds you of mortality
and immortality at once

It's so like falling in love

Or maybe that's just what it is.

I sleep so well in its comfort.

Too Late

Two a.m., I wake in a start, the ceiling light bright above me. Before I have the chance to open my eyes, the room is dark again. A sliver of light remains by the door; the end of an arm reaches through it to retreat from the light switch before shutting the door with a creak. I jump out of bed to pursue my intruder, but no one remains in the hallway. My roommate comes out from her room in confusion, I stare bewildered and search the apartment before retreating to my bed and staring at the wall for an hour. Someone was there. The light was on. I saw them.

He told me once of a presence by his bed, how clear it was, how there. He wrote all the falsehoods of a life and let them burn on foreign sand, he invited the devil in, let fear rage through the room and turned the lights on.

I woke late in the morning, pondering the ghosts of my muddled conscious. I wonder what falsehoods  thrive in the corners, what I would burn if I could. A small voice whispers, I strain to hear the words I'm not sure I dare see: What if there is no there, there?

Glade

Hudson River glittering, late afternoon sunlight like unending summer vacations of youth, I do not tire. What was it like a hundred years ago? Three hundred a thousand? Much the same you reckon. There’s a zen bubbling in your blood stream that isn’t easily riled, there’s a peace you’ve been searching all spring to find, here it lay waiting, you could not have guessed. Jack’s words sift through your silence, he speaks of mountains to climb and you think change is good, I woke this morning to birdsong and slept last night under the stars, I was not made to be stagnant, how did I forget? A train barrels down along the river, you return soon to your own madness but you are different now.

You are gathering your strength. Soon your storm will arrive.

Upstate

Yes but can you imagine living here? she says as you trudge the three blocks to the other end of town under a tropical sun. It amazes you the ways people choose to live their lives; or perhaps just as often how their lives are chosen for them. The old house creaks, at dusk the rabbits move into the backyard and the soles of your feet turn dirty with summer. Later, in a quiet room, two small bodies wrapped themselves around me at strange angles and demanded comfort; I sank into the safety we had created and thought I have never been broken. The heart heals and heals anew, I have comfort enough for a small army, you must understand I was born alone but fill my cup by carrying yours, this is the heart I was asked to own. It breaks and breaks but is not broken.

There’s a reason we whisper our lover’s name in the night.

Hudson

Ma’am this is Penn Station, your train leaves outta Grand Central, you better hurry. I groan, roll my eyes at myself, calculate transit times and run off east, a sweaty mess barreling into the cool vast waiting hall of the Terminal with surprisingly much time to spare as I fall into a window seat laughing. Soon, the sharp contours of Harlem brownstones give way to rusty iron bridges and lush creeping vines, before the wilderness of the north reveals itself in all its rural bliss. The land feels untouched, instantly, you imagine the view of early explorers or native inhabitants not far different from your view as you roll along the river to a sweet retreat, you breathe differently, it’s a gift and you’ll take it. A lifetime ago over two calendars you spotted overlapping travels and asked for mutual Touchdowns in the middle; now you don’t know what to do with the space you carved out, it sits there like a weight on your chest and makes it harder to breathe. The train passes Poughkeepsie and you remember a mad train ride with the dilapidated youth of yesteryear, how innocent, how sweet. Everything I love I leave, you told him, and it would be years before you were proven wrong, you loved to leave, you didn’t stop for anyone. Until you did.

My head swims in poetry lately, it cools my fevered brow, it softens the punch lines. I tried a turn of phrase on my tongue last night and it made me smile. We build our lives morsel by morsel, when the towers topple over we begin again. Select carefully which of the pieces we know will make it to the next.

Independence

The alarm clock rings earlier and earlier, as you try desperately to lace your sneakers before the tongue of the heat wave rolls across your promenade. Your roommates squeal as the mouse leaps across the room and leave you to stage the massacre; not two nights ago in the West Village, New Yorkers with far more years in pre-war walk-ups under their belts merely shrugged when a similarly long-tailed shadow brushed around the corner. Oh yeah, he's back, he says, but at least they haven't named it yet. You think there's a lesson in there about the unflappability of New Yorkers; it's comforting.

Here's the thing: I assumed that eventually I would hit rock bottom at the dead end of where I had steered my life and there would be nowhere to go but up. I assumed that when the time came for me to pull myself up by the bootstraps, or collar, or whatever it is one is supposed to pull oneself up by, I'd know, and I would. It seems instead I am skating along the rock bottom comfortably, round and round in this cul-de-sac, looking around at all the lives I could be living and choosing instead to refill the vodka in my glass and postpone any action to climb out of this hole yet another day.

I only ever knew change through packed suitcases and one-way tickets.

How do I even start to build a ladder where I stand?

Dog Days

The heat, when it hits, is overwhelming. I tumble over my own slow steps up Broadway, disoriented, and forget what I was there to do. The heaviness in my limbs matches the weight in my chest, they keep company all day and don't know quite what to do with each other. There is an emptiness next to them too loud, too there, they can't make up for it on their own. I begin to make bargains, but no one is listening: I have nothing to offer in the trade.

I sat on subway stop in the Bronx yesterday, drawing maps over unknown neighborhoods and coloring the fabric of my love for this city with new shades and riches, every street I get to know whispers a story that I long to tell. It is time for a change, I know it is, this suitcase has turned too heavy and my muscles too comfortable to grow.

(But you never felt like baggage. And I wasn't ready to let you go.)