Dime

I wake early, again, the to do list splits at the seams and overflows even into my commutes; I sit on the subway, productive, running from one ask to the next. Something at the edge of my vision cautions, whispers warnings against the gratification of the manic, but I am too light, too fast, to hear it. Just let me have this bliss. I know it cannot last. On the Upper West Side, in a drab high rise among many, I turned around to see a small sliver of light between buildings, and there in the space, the Empire State shone and sparkled 30 blocks away. This building which sees me and finds me wherever I go, this lighthouse which reminds me no matter where I am on this island I am home. I stood there, dumbfounded, and stared at it for a minute, wrapped the moment up and carried it with me like a gift.

I guess that's the thing about life. Everything is a gift, if you let it.

Mended Fences

(The bar is quiet, winter is here and Mondays are black, rainy. My fingers get pruny with an unruly manuscript: I believe somewhere in here something burns, something smolders but it's still just out of my reach and I am at a point now where I can taste it on my tongue, the addiction is a gift. I have let you go now, I have let go of everything that dragged heavy stones through my chest and it's hard to remember who I am without them. The last time I saw my grandmother, she did not know who I was and still I carry those days like a treasure: death is not a punishment for those of us who remain, it is a roundabout gift. I wonder if I've made all the wrong choices but I know I made at least one or two right ones and maybe that's a batting average to admire, in the end. Tonight I sat at my usual corner table in a bar that feels like home, and swam in magic until I forgot the time, forgot my worries, knew only this story. If I do nothing else with my life but give myself the gift of this space, perhaps I will still have done enough. The last time I saw my grandmother was only the last time, and I had a lifetime of moments before that, if you are sad now, please know that you will not always be, please know that sometimes our boulders turn into balloons and though you will be lost when your feet leave the solid ground, the air is only a
new map
to learn.)

Arrive

We're going in shortly, he writes in a text I see when I stir at the far end of the dark night, her water broke. I fall back asleep and dream of healthy babies with our aunt's face, with a full head of hair and we're already making jokes. I dream I cry, and when I wake again, there are tears drying on my cheeks; I wake smiling.

The day carries on impatiently, with every stir of my phone I jump. He sends videos of her dancing, I make stupid jokes with lots of swearwords and wonder how quickly one could traverse an ocean, if one really really wanted to do it at the speed of light.

And then, while I step away from Friday night cocktails and icy Brooklyn winds to look at my phone again, he is here. I stop in my tracks, wonder at the wonder. How life is so hard, so long, with so many wrong turns and impossible walls to scale, how the wind is cold and the nights so lonely and how still in just one moment, everything can change and nothing is what you ever thought. A year ago, how we were broken, and suddenly how some pieces have melded themselves together, suddenly, how a whole new piece changes the puzzle entirely. Everyone is happy, is healthy.


My sweet little boy, you are too young yet to know what a miracle you are. Too young to feel in your heart the kind of love that breaks us open and drowns us and we do not turn it down. Too young to understand that just by existing, you are so much more than enough, so much more than anyone could have ever asked for. One day you will know that your parents dreamed you into existence, that you are their dream come true, and I hope that day takes your breath away the way you have already taken all of ours. 
My sweet little boy, everything you do from here on out is icing on the cake.
 
I don't know if there is
forever
but if there is
it always belonged
to you.

Overlook

There’s a certain freedom, when you’ve lost all the things you clung so tightly to, a certain weightlessness you could not buy with money, only only barter and sacrifice. Fulton street is cold in the late Sunday night wind, but you’re holding this umbrella now, it tugs at your arm:

it promises to sweep you right off your feet.

Re:Treat

A silence hangs in the air, sometimes life is too big and the space in which to fit it too small, sometimes the Red Queen runs too fast and I cannot catch up. I smile in the quiet breaths, and that is enough for now.

I smile in the quiet breaths, and that is enough
for now.

Frost

The cold moves in like a sledgehammer. Come morning, the gingkos have all lost their leaves before they turn golden; the streets are washed with green. Everything smells fresh, alive, this isn't how it's supposed to go. Dead before their time. I know the feeling.

Deep in Brooklyn, I walked around the park looking for a trail on which to get lost, for a bend in the trees where there is no telling you are in the metropolis. I kept finding my way back to paved wind tunnels, crying into the ether only to be interrupted by groups of school children learning about wilderness. It's not that I am sad, you say to the skies, it's that this body feels like lead and I don't know that I want to carry it anymore. I try to breathe hope back into my lungs, but they are closed to optimism and my breaths are shallow, escaping in little plumes of smoke as I choke on my despair.

Winter arrives in splendid sunlight and a knife to your back. It doesn't seem fair, you whisper to the Universe, but the Universe is silent in return. I find an old penny at the foot of a tree, covered in dirt but visible by a thin outline. I wipe more tears from my frozen cheeks.

Eventually I start walking, again.

Freeze

The temperature plummets, little flurries of snow surprising themselves into existence along the river and your extremities numb. The season of long, steaming showers out of which it is near impossible to step. You arrive at the bar early but your table in the corner is taken, the one with perfect lighting and rickety legs; you nestle into a back nook with orange string lights. For the first time, the Tuesday bartender knows your order, too, and you wonder if this means you have officially moved in. Don't be precious, the note reads, and what it means is don't be particular, but you have turned out to be the sort of writer who thrives on superstition, who craves the known to paint the unknown, you return to this bar because you don't know how not to.

I return to a lot of things in life, circle back and try them on for size, make sure everything still fits. Sometimes I'll leave sweaters lying in a corner of the closet for months when they don't, trying to alter myselt to make them make sense again, but I see now the error of my ways. I'm not the one meant to be changing.

If this sweater doesn't fit anymore, I am ready to leave it behind. The winter is too long, too cold, to go without what keeps you warm.