Maybe It’s His First Time Around

Awake in sunshine. Walk past the apartment where you used to live, ride a tram past the school where you became who you are, it’s all been too long and you don’t feel a thing. Ring a doorbell to an unknown home but find the hearts within beating like you’ve never not known them. Have you seen what they’ve done to our pasta factory, they say, and New York reappears behind your eyelids like a spectre.

The sun carries on. We take the tram to the ferry, walk to the end of the island until we see only water on the horizon. I dive right in and take long strokes in the clear blue until the dog swims out to corral me: she’s only trying to protect her flock, so I let her. Everything is magic, I breathe a steady rhythm. You should be here, I have time to think before the ferry picks us back up and our skin glows with summer. We sit in their window, later, smoking cigarettes into the sunset and singing blues songs like we had seen heartache only in pictures. The apartment is white, designed, old and new at once, you sink into your heritage. Back home there’s a heat advisory. I sleep with the windows open and try to hear the city outside. If I listen carefully enough, perhaps it’ll whisper the answer.

I fall asleep before it has a chance to.
Wonder if I’d even recognize it if it did.

Salt Water

I sleep a heavy sleep, each dream stranger than the next. The little cabin is silent as the grave, dark, unintrusive. When we wake, the clouds hang heavy, Monday morning and fall is coming, a dread lingers in the air. We make our way to the cliffs; every stranger’s brown skin speaks of an unrivaled summer but you have yet to see it, the loss digs at your gut. The Universe reminds you that it owes you nothing.

By the time we dive into the water, the rain has started, but the sea is warm and kind. You let the salty water rush past your teeth, feel the seaweed between your fingers as you swim along the ocean floor. We tread water and speak of lives lost -our own- and wonder what happens now.

Some days I tire of the constant mulling in my brain. Tomorrow the sun will shine again, everything will be okay one day and when you are ready to turn your life into fireworks, you will. The Universe doesn’t owe you fireworks, after all.

You do.

Souldier

Sunday afternoon, traffic moves into the city but you pack your bags and move out. At the dock, a salty wind whips at your skin but the sun makes the ocean glitter: everything is summer. Catch a ferry and let the islands slip past; we get off at the last stop and trudge up a hill to the tiny cabin. One room, two cats. The only grocery store on the island closed hours ago, but we find potatoes in the pantry and ice cream at the outdoor bar, we do not starve. By the time conversation slows, it is night out, August night and you don’t panic now because the dark doesn’t own you like it did, you have left it. I jumped in a river this morning and the trees hung their branches to ripple the water. Everything real is so far away, I breathe without reminders. But you were supposed to be here, and I see your footsteps in every beautiful scene, see the absence of your smile in my every delighted giggle. Summer is beautiful on its own, it doesn’t need you.

I still think it’d be better if you were there.

Train Tracks

He said no, she says, and the silence that follows is deafening. She shatters in a million pieces, spills her every last confidence into the emptiness that remains. The thing about grand romantic gestures is sometimes they’re too late, the thing about our demons is usually they’re willing to wait however long it takes for us to find them again, for us to make room and let them devour us whole. You meet her on the corner of a neighborhood you once owned, streets you once knew blindfolded. The same tram still runs west, straight to the ocean, you watch familiar turns from its window as she speaks of the fallout. He’ll live in the apartment, so as least we don’t have to deal with dividing that up yet.

When you reach the cliffs, the winds whip the waves into a furor, but the rocks are warm with sunshine. You dive in without a second thought, quickly carried away by the current and both laughing. In the sea there is no failed past or fumbled future. In the sea there is nothing but keeping your head above water. You come up panting, but you come up alive.

That’ll do.

Lag

Land in familiar corridors and still be surprised at the language that echoes through them. Everyone looks like you, but more brown, more blonde, more raised in the woods. Walk familiar hills, ride familiar trains, everything is like home only duller: you’ve made this trip too many times without  adding anything to it, who do you think you are. She says she’s writing to plead for second chances (or third, or fifth, but a leap of faith for sure), and you love a grand romantic gesture but wonder what his heart tells itself at night. You unpack your suitcase and repack it again in a different shape: there is no standing still. The late night is still light outside the open windows. You know exactly where you are.

It doesn’t mean you’re not lost as hell.

Newark

The day swelters outside your window; you refresh apps and calculate costs. At last stumble down the steps of your stoop and into an unknown car, these are the gifts you give yourself. Snail through the West Village, remember the first time you took a car through these streets to the tunnel, how everything you owned rested in the trunk of that car and New York slowly faded behind you. Another sunny day, another throng of traffic, how you cried into the comfortable silence of a cabbie on the phone.

Later, at the end of a terminal, sit staring at the city from afar, as you always do. It's a habit, borne of love, 12 years you've sat in this strange space and stared at it, sometimes in tears, sometimes only in the joy of knowing it is yours whether you are near it or not. How I've tested your love lately, New York, and my own in return: this is what life is, and we do not break from the trials. We merely bend, recoup, and find our way back to each other. This is what love is.

A strange calm settles over me, it always does in this strange space, I should have remembered to expect it, I should have had faith in the process. I can leave you, New York, for a minute or a month, you remain etched in my muscle memory regardless. I can leave you, New York, without leaving you behind, I can run into the world without running away, I should have known to remember, forgive me my momentary stumble. I spoke with the Universe this morning and everything is under control: that which will come, will come. My heart loves and loves and grows by loving, I miss you now but only in fondness. Soon I will sleep in your mad peace again. This heart will remember your name until then.

A/Way

The woman at the drugstore hugs me when I say I'm going away. Dilapidated old drugstore, they put the Village back in this neighborhood. The old Chinese woman who invariably sits smoking on her stoop no matter the hour I pass her smiles, and I nod; we are not ready for hugs yet, it took us months to get this far. Return to my apartment to try to fit this chaos into a suitcase, eat as much of the expiring food as possible. I look around my room like it's the last time: an oddly familiar feeling, I try to shake it quickly, that's not what's happening here. The back of your spine is a weather vane better than than the newscaster, a silent beetle spinning in circles before the earthquake even begins to tremble. I only pretend not to see it out of fear for what the storm will ask of me. In a cold, snowy, Brooklyn window I saw the year spread out ahead like a miracle, like an obstacle course, like a Life, and here we are, deep in the mud but still racing. I spoke to the Universe again this morning. It says hello. It promised to look after you while I'm away, or was it the other way around, it doesn't always speak so clearly but I think it has everything under control.

A ticket lies in my back pocket. I plead with it to tell me something I don't yet know.

Vow to make this not a year without fear
But a year I am fearless.