DUB

We’re still awaiting your incoming aircraft, booms across the speakers. The line grows as your patience wanes, your food ran out ages ago and if you lived here you’d be home by now. It’s a different airline than you know, it’s a different hub and the makeup of the cabin doesn’t look the same as usual. Still, every airport vibrates to the same rhythm, still every ticket burns the same fire into your back pocket and you do not fret. You have no connections to miss: you are only going home.

A tan fades from your legs, slinking off in silence like you didn’t know it was fleeing. Like you didn’t know you set your foot not only on home ground but on a season of getting back to work, of putting your shoulder to the wheel and of making things right. Like I didn’t know how I spend my days is how I spend my life and it won’t look like this anymore. They claim the flight will board in five minutes but the hours pass, it begins to rain.

Take this last sulk through your lungs, breathe a deep sad breath and grate your weariness against your heart. I’m giving you these five minutes. Then dust yourself off and get the fuck back up again.

I’ll wait.

Extend

There’s a heat advisory for New York. You pack your bags and put on a thicker sweater, the air is lousy with fall, you’d take it as a sign but the universe doesn’t care enough even to toy with your emotions. An old lover writes from a nearby island, begging you to come over, it doesn’t mean anything you just always got along so well. You close your bags and go to bed. Tomorrow there’s a bus to an airplane to a whole other life (yours), you long for it so your heart aches and mostly you want to sleep for days. Did you find the answers you came here for? You never do. They wheel your father into the operating room with fewer answers than questions. He comes out with his heart beating again, and you have to tell your mother she does not need to go pick out kitchen tiles just today. She collapses at the permission. You think maybe everyone needs someone to hold them, sometimes, even when they look invincible from afar.

A year ago today I walked down Fourth Avenue, composing witty words to unknown ears, and a smile grew on my lips that did not wear off for months. If I had known then what I know now, would the words I drew sound any different? Would I have wrapped my heart a little more tightly before prying open my chest?

Everyone knows 
It’s going to hurt 
But at least 
We'll get hurt 
Trying 

No.

Light It Up

The sun returns, albeit hesitant. Everyone shivers, her childish skin turns to goosebumps with the wind but her determination wins every time: she shows you the jumps and tricks she’s learned over the summer as you both dive into the water a hundred times. Does she remember how you threw her in the air in Central Park all those summers? Does she remember how you raced around their apartment or went to the zoo or jumped off the swings or learned New York slang together years ago? She asks you to read her bed time story and you think nothing matters but this moment and that makes all the difference. He asks later what is the hardest part now and I think of a million things that sound trite, the truth is simply the days were better with you in them. We went back to the water later, the last bars of twilight echoing across the bay as our laughter dissipated with the coming of night; how dark it is in August, how sad.

I drank too much wine, we listened to too many songs, I suppose I spoke a hundred truths but I wouldn’t have it any other way, does he remember we’ve spoken a thousand truths before and I still can’t go to that bar on 23rd street without him, I wouldn’t want to. You carry people you love in your heart: the weight is immense and nothing at all, I would carry you to the ends of the earth and never regret it, please remember that if nothing else. The bartender let us keep the fancy bacon I gifted him in their cooler and asked I didn’t tell the health department. I miss New York so my heart aches, every sorrow borne of love is a treasure. Tomorrow it will rain but soon I will dive in the water again.

Let me show you the tricks I learned. Let me tell you I love you a thousand times still.

South Island

Land back in a capital town and recognize her face instantly in the street. Three countries in three weeks, you weave in and out of each other’s lives, what a comfort. Her apartment looks the same, this neighborhood looks the same, I lived in a beautiful little morsel of space at the foot of this hill, on the street with the church, I know I stumbled but oh, how the sunrises sang to my confusion. I ran along the water in the late afternoon and remembered a time when this was home, and what a sweet gift it was though I hesitated to unwrap it. She writes from the Californian coast and you both caress the insight you’ve built in the space between your time zones. Do I want too much when I have so much already? she says, and you wish for her more than her heart could ever know to desire. You don’t owe beautiful things to stay with them because they have been good to you. She buys me another beer and we wonder how life deposited us here, what we make of the tickets we were given. I speak half sentences and she knows just how to finish them: this is family. 

I sat on the train today watching a late summer landscape unfold around me. This land which is my home and yet to which I no longer belong, we could stare at each other and make amends with the heartache we’d caused. I scribble in notebooks: all I ever wanted to do was write, and it’s true. I miss home so my heart aches, there’s a hole in my heart where you used to sit, there’s an adventure in my blood stream that makes my skin tingle, and it’s true.

This life is short, and fleeting, and beautiful. I’d take this heartache over complacency, every damn time you asked.

Journeys

The town looks the same, all my life I’ve known these streets and as much as I may want it to, nothing has changed. They live their entire lives on the same blocks where you all were children; the stagnation eats at me even as I try to find comfort in its predictability. Her parents asked about you, I hadn’t prepared a response, and you reappear in my dreams on subway trains headed for adventure. I miss you. We biked home in the late night, the last wisps of twilight still on the horizon and a thousand stars spreading out around us. I know this road with my eyes closed. The bike is fast, gratifying, I laughed today like I was 15 again and this was all there is.

The point is that it isn’t. The point is this was only a short moment of status quo, you were given a chance to see it, you were given the choice to reject it. You ran to the ends of the earth and here’s the point I’m actually trying to make: you did the right thing.

It’s a beautiful place to keep in your memories. Adventure lies where you’ve gone after.

Get the Fuck Back Up Again

Across the ocean, your father rolls in and out of hospital rooms. He sends a smiling picture after coming home, before your mother follows with one of him passed out on a bed again, monitors and wires playing tag around his body. They can’t find anything wrong, she says, but isn’t that a ridiculous thing to say? In the old hometown I say my farewells (again, again, every day is a series of hello goodbyes and you think your heart must be a very strong muscle with all this practice) and board a train north. The sun shines without apology. This morning I ran along the water, along twists and turns I’d know in my sleep, sidewalks I’ve walked home late nights and early mornings, trails I’ve run in joy and in tears, the sun shone every step as if to say we’re all okay, and I suppose it’s true.

It’s only weather.

It’s only life.

The time has come to make it something more.

Firewood Yet

Your father is in the emergency room, she writes. I stand in their window with my wine glass in one hand and a cigarette slowly dancing in the other and try to figure out how I’m supposed to feel. Nothing comes to mind, seems appropriate. You wonder if the cries you hear are wolves that never were, but how little your sensible nature will help you the day their teeth have torn down the door. I wonder if my mother is scared, all alone in those woods, and I realize the backbone in me is all her doing. We do not frighten easily, we do not break. He tells me how his father came home drunk without keys and broke his ribs falling at the second story window. Sometimes you have to let go of the things you cannot change, he says, as I blow smoke into the late summer evening. How’s your book coming? 

I watched an ex walk past me in the street today. This sweet little town, how nothing changes, still he looked like a stranger. I did not say hi. The water was colder today, the cliffs crowded, I forget to whisper gratitude into the sky but you know I mean it. We have only this short moment to make something extraordinary of ourselves. Don’t ever forget that.

Everyone knows you're going to live
So you might as well start trying