Tomato, tomato

Rain arrives, cold air and gloom, for the first time since you don't know when you welcome it with open arms, light a candle that smells of old bookshops and hours without end. When you were a child, did you know time? Did you understand how it needles itself under your skin, breaks apart your luster, your ability to climb trees straight out from your window and veer down rabbitholes? 

No. 

And that's exactly the secret. They get you by eating away at the parts of your soul that thought time was a plaything, was a malleable clay, they tell you that each minute is weight its worth in coins and if you're not weighing it in coins it is worthless, this is how they get you. 

So it turns out your ignorant youth was right all along. Burn the scales, burn the lessons in which they teach you fear, keep their parasites out of your blood stream. 

Pay your rent, forget the rest. These trees were meant for climbing.

Ambition

I rise at dawn, strange dreams of old lovers in my blood stream, I am surreal for hours. Try to weed whack my way through a few pesky deadlines as they grow and gurgle around my fingers on the keyboard, forever a jungle and never a clearing, see the window of my own imagination closing as the demands of a supposedly real world grow heavier. When at last I shut the lids of the word processors and go out into the New York City afternoon to actually process my words, it looks lighter than before, easier. 

Return to words of my own making, the familiar sting of a bourbon glass in the margins, an entire world drawn up out of nothing, remember again why I came to this little town, why I came to these crooked conclusions, the world will mold and mold you and sometimes you are right to give in, let it change your shape but oh, when it twists your nerves do not relent, do not give up, those nerves bleed poetry the kind that makes you hear your own name the way it was given, makes you certain again without any doubt that your strange and wondrous image came out right after all, came out
just
how it was intended.

Indeed It Should

Return on the BQE in the early afternoon, a hazy skyline draping itself across the distance, Delancey street forever a traffic jam, I turn down 6th street and find a parking spot just steps from the front door. New York is benevolent when it wants to be. On the fourth floor, the tops of the honey locust leaves have yellowed in my absence, but the avocado on my windowsill sprouts a new branch. Tropical fruits guaranteed before the end of the decade. A change in season promised by the end of the week. 

I refresh the fall foliage map on my browser. This is me embracing change. This is me with a growth mindset. 

Do you know, I had the strangest thought today, in the little shoebox apartment just off Tompkins Square Park, the feeling of fall coming in the window, the piles of to do lists tumbling pleasantly around my feet, a novel manuscript warm in my hands. I thought, for just a moment, that I was happy, and that I might look forward to things to come. 

When you have been crawling so long on the burning coals, with only the goal to keep breathing,
hope seems an awful lot like an oasis in the desert.

Agains

The answer was always there.
Perhaps the great challenge of life
is to learn how to listen to it.

Crash

Fall asleep to waves, wake to waves, breaking against nearby shorelines, the ocean is a tonic at every turn. I go for a long run along the eroding bluffs, watch them crumble into the sea, see my cheeks burn in the autumn sunlight I cannot anger. In the late afternoon, sprawled out on a faded towel at the edge of a grassy dune, the words all return to me, the poetry, the dreams. After a year and a half of dread, somehow I can still feel joy. We are nothing if not incessant optimists, forever turning pages and dreaming them into rainbows. 

Perhaps that is what life is. Keep turning pages and believe in the ones whose colors bring you joy. 

Turn enough pages and you'll always find one that does.

Try Try Again

Your cheeks turn brown in the late season, belying the October truths as they fall from the trees, but in your chest you have bought yourself another month before you go under. We run a long trail to northern beaches, past the obscene villas, I feel my muscles strain and remember who they are. I begin to think the same of myself. The warmer days lead to quiet evenings, I squander valuable minutes in the inertia of regular people, is this what it means to live a life? I had been hoping for more. It's possible life is saying the same about me. 

We go to bed early. I lie in the oddly decorated leftover bedroom listening to crashing waves and cicadas outside the window, is that not the gift in its entirety? To have the ocean at your very doorstep.

Remember this, when your head fills with cotton again. The sea will heal you when you are not paying attention. 

You can make real the wishes that you never even dared speak.

Dipper

The morning warms. I speed through the mountains of work until the sun beams down on the splintered wood deck, what is life on the gold coast if not a carefully manicured humility. We sit on the beach and watch surfers feign casual while their wallets bulge, watch dogs careen along the breaking waves and everything has an air of suspended time, nothing is real here. 

Later, we stand in the dark and watch the Milky Way cloud itself in a ribbon across the skies, a web of stars pulsating against the insignificance of our impossibly short lives, my hair still drying from salty waves. How small we are, after all, and yet how much room all these insights can take. 

I go to bed alone. 

The life feels longer, then.