Being There

Holiday weekend and the neighborhood rests. An old curmudgeon complains that Tompkins Square Park is only empty now because the people who live around here are rich these days and leave the city, but I say let them go, good riddance. I run into my neighbor in the stairwell, 39 years in this apartment and she hasn't gotten an AC yet. The birds have babies on the windowsill, I feel bad shoving them away.

We sat in a bar on the Lower East Side, painting the world in our grand plans as if trying to find our purpose. Do you know, one quiet summer evening I started speaking truths to you along a river and I never really stopped. It was like so many years of subtle glitches and suddenly everything had lined up like it was supposed to. Like so many years of walking with a limp and finally I'd come home. Every conversation since has simply been another verse in this melody.

I walked home along Essex eventually, young kinds scrambling to fit themselves inside bars, my headphones in my ears but the playlist turned off, because the city is a better DJ on Saturdays, like a little  gift. I know I write a hundred to-do lists and think I can construct my life in theory first, but that isn't how it works. If you want to really live a life, just do the thing. Put one foot in front of the other, and eventually the magic will catch up.

Exploring

The static sound of white noise quiets; it leaves a dark vacuum in its wake for which you were not prepared, and you spend a minute gasping for air like you had been pushing against it this entire time and now there was no foe left on the other end of the shield. A slow piano melody appears in its place, infused with so many nights of bleeding for answers, so many questions spoken into the dark, empty night. But that was ages ago now, I tell myself, and I think I made it out alive. I let the melody play as I sink into words. Pretend the reminder is harmless.

The day begins in an unknown bed, the room dark and undisturbed. I slept poorly, there was a bright blue light shining in the kitchen and for someone who sleeps so well in the middle of a busy street corner, the light's effect on me was surprising. Perhaps the light had nothing to do with it.
I see the stories I'm trying to tell; I see the forces inside me battle for power, battle for survival. But you know what's on the other side of the chaos you pursue. Aren't you tired of walking these same circles? Let it go, even if just for today, give yourself a moment's rest. Here, I'll hold your worries while you regain your strength. The rains are coming, they will wash clean the streets of our histories.

One day everything will be reduced to rubble, will be ash at our feet. I will be here still, then, standing next to you, unwavering: that is all I know. Surviving the storm is the only thing that never seemed like a fight, when I think about it.

Papa

The writer waxes on about solitude in the Hemingway outback, seeking kinship and finding only the remains of a determined suicide, what is there left to say? We like to paint death in romantic colors to distract ourselves from the finality of these little lives we lead. At the end of the day, you either did or you didn't. Which is it?

I woke in a haze, a boulder on my chest and unanswered messages in my phone. Tell me where you are and I'll drive you home, but don't they know the subway system is the only thing that grounds me, when the fireworks have broken my bones into pieces and my body threatens to float away? The Brooklyn night grew long and windy, the crooked roof with just the slightest reprieve of a wind: it's too easy to be soft in the presence of magic, it's almost like I hadn't forgotten what my muscles feel like around it, I nearly tripped for a second but don't worry. All's well that ends well, isn't it?

The A train rocked steadily westward through the tunnels, a collection of quiet, tired stars and stripes, and I was grateful for the community in solitude. Here is where my skin ends, here is where my feet stand. They are not the answers I was hoping for. But sometimes any answer is better than none at all.

Vermilion

Would you date her? he asked, nodding toward the ragged girl smoking on the corner, faded black tank top tied behind her back and bleached tresses struggling at the ends of her black hair. I shrugged noncommittally, my body a closed shop, my heart a tangle of thorns, but did I not fall in love with her for a minute when we found her later behind the bar? We haven't opened just yet, she said in the beating midday sun, but have a seat. She poured tequila like we were harmless, like the wooden bar would not budge under pressure. We drank like we would not either.

We let the afternoon run away from us, spoke truth into lime wedges and I don't know what the Universe is playing at but for a minute I didn't care. We picked up a roving poet at the edge of the bar and I scribbled illegible phone numbers on napkins and receipt tabs. Everything was a riot, everything was tearing at the seams, I avoid questions like landmines through no fault of anyone: I just don't trust my words not to expose this desperately clinging heart, this uncontrolled wildfire in my veins, this itch at my fingertips that will drag innocents along for the ride if they do not watch themselves.

Yours were the only questions I never avoided. Yours are the only eyes from which I do not turn away to construct quips about the weather. I walk this open book around the city as though it hasn't been a full time occupation to build muscles and scaffolding around the rubble you left behind. It's so easy, it's impossible. The fireflies were out in Brooklyn last night, and all I could think was, alright then.

Garden Apt

Heat roils Second Avenue even early in the morning, I drag a motley collection of survival gear up the numbered street. Fumble with keys to a quiet apartment, with that strange air of abandonment that houses get when the people who should be there leave. I'm here instead, I whisper at the cool floor and clean lines, feeling insignificant. But I open a back door, walk bare feet across rare East Village garden tiles, sit under a large tree and drink iced tea, pearls of sweat forming on my upper lip. I sigh in that way women do when they get old and believe they live in the South. I spend so much of my time lately watching the dregs that make up my life swirl the drain, and I can't figure out if I should try to catch them or not.

An alarm interrupts my meditations. Tell me it's time to zip these frayed edges back up, paint on a smile, step back out through the doors into unwavering streets, and carry on like moving forward didn't require your full attention.

Up That Hill

He writes again, soft with humility, to marvel at how your minds think alike, how the air is thick with magic. You think only how you are back to your usual ways, how kittens play with dying mice, how badgers will bite down until they hear the bones crack. The sun set in beautiful stillness tonight, twilight foliage thick with fireflies; they fired off their neon greens in choreographed chaos and I had to stop to look at them. I couldn’t help but smile. The four-leaf clovers have all been mowed into oblivion, but you’re not so sure about luck anyway.

Life continues to be overwhelming and confusing at every turn. You put crackers in your boot. Think perhaps it’ll sound enough like crunching bones and the badger can give you
a moment’s reprieve.

Make Happy

We're halfway through the year, she says, while the group stretches Monday limbs into the ceiling, and a breath gets caught in my throat. Halfway marks mean everything is racing towards its end. Halfway marks mean summer is almost over, mean life is almost over, mean you are running out of time and what do you have to show for it. She reminds the group to breathe, collects the frantic threads of our minds and the cellular phones in our hands, switches the sign on the door. I settle into a strange hum at the height of my temples, forget the space outside, and return to work.

Halfway through the year. Where were you in January? Where did you think you would be now? I look at my piles of lists, my pockets full of checkmarks, the unchecked tasks hiding in shame in the linings of my clothes. The truth is I don't think I'll ever be satisfied. The truth is I don't think I'll ever see my progress as anything but failed attempts at perfection, and I don't know yet how to measure that metric. An astrology chart lies crumpled in the corner of my room, mocking. What does it matter how we assert dominance over our own demons and feign freedom against the dark, if the puppeteer gods will pull at our strings any way they like and send us reeling across the Universe at a whim?

When the time was up, she chimed a gong and opened our doors again. I walked into the sunny Soho afternoon, blinking into the light and wondering at the warm air on my air conditioned skin, wondering at the strange and curious life inside of it. We break and we put ourselves back together again.

Where will you be six months from now? What will you have to show for it?