Set

The only thing you can ever do is start over. 

I wake bruised and tired, pummeled by a week's worth of waves, of dark storm clouds and apprehensive tip-toeing around the abyss. Make a cup of coffe, gather myself in words, wrap myself in piles of ink and word processors, read and re-read, polish, taste their meandering sentences on my tongue. This is where you live, a voice inside my head whispers. She is not wrong. 

I come up for air eventually, the demands of an outside world at last upon me, but I am reminded that those demands are only a means to an end. I get knocked off course and I forget, but this fact does not change. 

The only thing you can ever do is dust yourself off, get back on the horse. 

Remember where you're going, and head that way again.

Nox

The weekend swelters, primped New Yorkers spilling onto streets like it's Europe in August, it's hard to imagine we ever suffered. Droplets of sweat run down my back, coasting back and forth along sixth street to drinks and joys and gifts in the afternoon. This body looks different now, has experienced things I never intended, has been wronged in ways for which it never asked. 

Perhaps that's what it is to live a life. 

We sit in their garden later, the sounds of the East Village muffled behind a hundred years of bricks, under strange canopy rooted in dust. Summer is here now, unapologetic, unwilling to move backward, your life is racing ahead from under you, it feels impossible to catch up. There was a time when you knew just what you wanted out of this life, and now you fear you are too tired to find the treasures you've forgotten to name. How many of these stepping stones are built on cowardice? How much of any life lies on complacency? 

Perhaps life is too short to do differently. 

I pack up my things and go back inside. Turn the AC down low, let it cool my burning brow. He says how are you feeling in that way he does, like he means it. I tell him I'm trying to deal with the swirls of the storm and he says maybe I understand. Something reassuring in the spaces between.

The to-do-list yells at me. I turn up the fan. Don't know where to start.

Jubilee

Wake up early, the birds are at it again, the fire escape a hot bed of early morning mania, how can I be mad? Muscles aching, I step blindly into the morning, everything is the day after the storm now. I break and I break until finally I am done, it is that easy, it is the hardest thing in the world, I don't recognize my body anymore but the stubborn conviction has been with me all these years, I have no intention of hashtag improving it away. 

Friday arrives muggy and warm in New York, like summer so often is, all sweat and slow movements. You remember how this works. 

I think I remember how this works. 

We've all been away such a very long time. Welcome home, take your shoes off. Stay awhile. The water's fine, if you let it.

Wake

The morning after rises hesitant, weak in the knees perhaps, but bruised more than anything, wobbly and unsure of its footing. I had so many dreams, but what were they trying to say? What am I trying to say? It's so hard to listen with all this cotton in my ears. It is June now, a still summer rain outside the window, the city holds its breath trying to calculate what is to come. 

I make a cup of coffee, step slowly over the rubble in the living room. Know in the back of my mind the day demands much of me, because I shut the door the day before. I try to tell you I am scared, but the words come out convoluted, come out in poetry, gratifying in creativity, in the tangible amounts of paper they provide. It's street sweeping day again. Did you know I saw this place in my dreams and now it is mine? 

Life is a lot to get through. 

The coffee cools in its oversized mug, the streets remain quiet under the morning rain. You're doing the best you can. 

Keep doing it.

Process

All day you pace around a messy apartment, make excuses for the piles of inadequacy, the blank spaces on your word processor, as the darkness curls and winds itself at your spine. You know this game, have played it long enough, it isn't funny any more, I am not laughing anymore please stop. 

On the floor at my feet, piles of poetry flutter out from the typewriter, a reliable stream of blood when you have emptied yourself of tears, I don't have time for a mental breakdown you hear yourself explain across the line but collapses do not ask permission, they enter uninvited, you are pushing yourself and the brink closer together, like children playing house with dolls, will they won't they, you're flirting with disaster, toying with the audience, this post reads like a poem without rhyme

metaphorically, too. 

After my innards run out into a puddle on my sagging wood floor, dripping down the chipped paint on the rickety banister, the room around me lies silent. There's a calm after the storm we rarely mention. It is tired and fragile, unsure of itself and hesitant to step back into the stream, but it is quiet, holds just a morsel of space where something new can grow. 

I step out of the rubble. Dust myself off. Open the last beer in the refrigerator and sort through the piles. 

It wasn't what you had scheduled for your evening. But perhaps there is something of value there to salvage.

Letter

I wake confused, unfamiliar with the bed and with the darkness, the street sweeper passes by and I don't understand the calendar. Last night we sat outside a dive bar on Tompkins and everything about New York is changing but feels familiar. We said, I feel strangely nostalgic for the quarantine life in unison, and it seemed a forbidden sentence to speak out loud. I fear this year leaves us irreparably damaged, but then anything in life has the power to break us. It's on us to find the power to put ourselves back together again. Yesterday I sat at the typewriter again, so long absent, and remembered that I build myself through ink on pages, every time, one curled letter after another, this is how I make my self make sense.

The days are long and short all at once, the life rapidly racing towards inevitable ends, there's an answer in there somewhere and you are so determined to find it. 

The streets are quiet in the mornings now. Summer drapes its hazy perspective across the avenues, across the pandemic children emerging from their hideouts. What a strange and wondrous life, after all. 

And perhaps, that's the answer entirely.

New

The calendar pages twirl in unseasonably cool breezes; apparently it is summer. You look over your paltry piles of words from the last few weeks, a great sadness in your chest over how easily you let your visions trickle through your fingers. A hangover drifts along my brow, more reminders that I squander my dreams at the demands of others. There was something I was meant to do, whispers itself across your to-do list, across your shivering skin, reminds you you built this entire castle in the sky on purpose. It will not make itself clear. 

The truth is, it was always as clear as it needed to be. 

You close the book on your lists, put away the voices that tear at you from the outside. On your windowsill, an old typewriter waits patiently. unruffled by the passage of time, by the storms of inconsequential minutiae. You lift the lid, take a deep breath. 

Begin to remember why you came.