Born and Raised

Early mornings on First avenue are strange aliens scenes of the east village, wide streets empty, a quiet peace to the November sunshine. I pick her up from the train and we sail through an empty Holland tunnel, only to get lost on the New Jersey turnpike in the next breath. Philadelphia appears like a little spaceship on the foliaged horizon, by now I know the last of the way and everything isn’t as fraught anymore in the greetings. 

We go to bed late, the neighborhood quiet, the dogs nervous. It feels like all those trips of our youth, weekends of sweatpants and hair braiding, the comforts of unconditional relationships years in the making, and I think some things need time. 

Maybe more things than we realize. 

Ghost Coffee

The coffeshop buzzes with late afternoon freelance energy, manic Macintosh laptops oozing busy and important. The three older Jewish gentlemen are unfussed by this self-importance, arranging themselves in a tight corner and instantly demanding every attention through their vivid conversation. Do you know why they call in Manhattan? he asks his friends and in the same breath exclaims Wrong! They orate at each other, trivia from hours of poring over the truths of the world. Coffee arrives, and the old hippie in the corner pulls out an orange presciption pill bottle. It's cinnamon, he heaves at his companions, I put it on everything. I put it on tuna, did you ever put it on tuna, Ira? Ira looks at him with an implied eye roll. Putting cinnamon on tuna is like putting ketchup on ice cream, he ends the conversation and carries on speaking about the stars on the American flag. 

We look at each other across the laptop screens. No one will believe us, we mouth at each other, knowing exactly what the other means. This is why we live in New York. The men go on to talk of growing up in West Bronx, of Brooklyn accents and how the Torah comes full circle like a magic trick, and you think, the world is still out here, we are still out here, everything has changed and yet the magic of human beings has not. 

Ira gets up from his chair, makes an abrupt and important exit. The bar returns to its unencumbered buzz, I return to the myriad of tasks on my to do list. 

Pocket the gift for later.

Bootleg

The bill doesn’t add up, you remember whiskey shots and unknown friends along the sticky bar, everything smells of cigarettes and a time before polish. You revel in everything, taking deep gulps of a life so different from what you have all been offered in this your Golden age. The night grows late, you know you are meant to write the pages, do the work, go to bed on time and namaste into the mat but here is an anodyne better than medicine. 

You want to tell him all about it, know just how well your banter would fit along the bar, see how everything would make sense between the two of you but that was in the Before times and nothing is now as it was. 

You go to bed in a sweltering apartment, ask your super to turn it down but he’s busy washing your car to make up for his own inadequacies, we are all working through whatever we arrived with it’s a ruse, the journey is never over. 

You walk into the unknown with hope, at last

and it is all you could have asked for, now. 

On a Preposition

The morning after a big deadline is like the sea afte a great storm. It seems impossible for it to be so still. My to do list is scatterlings and orphanages, the apartment is at once freezing and rising in steam, New York is a ridiculous place to put your heart but we all do what we can with the cards we were dealt. 

I take a slow, short run along the river, legs stiff with disuse, the air cold now and the leaves clinging to one last desperate plea for attention. I take pictures dutifully, amassing them on my phone like relics of each season. Here it was fall, here it was spring. The nights are so dark now, I lie awake thinking how there is never enough time for all the things you want to do. 

The days are long but the life is short, is that what they say? It'll all be over soon. 

I return to the word processor, my to do list screaming from a corner, abandoned. You've made it work before. Why wouldn't you be able to pull another miracle from that hat you carry, really?

By the Way

There is a space that can only arrive in silence, can only arrive when you have closed the door, turned down the offers, cut yourself off from the things which serve to distract you. In this space, suddenly there is magic, and curlicued words, and all the things you thought your life was supposed to be. These moments, when they come, are so rare as to be delicacies, but so precious as to carry you on through the desert until the next oasis appears. It's a cruel fate, to dedicate your life to such suffering, such endless longing and short moments of celebration. 

But is it not a crueler fate, to have none of the fireworks, to trudge through a day in already worn footsteps, to clock in and out of a hamster wheel leading nowhere but back to the beginning? 

I dig for answers,
my hands come up with pins.

Take

An autumn bluster arrives, dark gray winds blowing the gold out of the honeylocust outside my window, I wake with the weight already in my chest. The sleep would not come last night, tidal pulls of all the world's questions appearing in the rare stillness and I was caught unawares. Are you ever caught unawares by the spectres in your silence?

The words come eventually, slowly, each one aching itself onto the page wrapped in my fears and assumptions. Is it all over now? The years beckon at me, remind me of a thousand late evenings staring into the darkness while words and smoke coiled from my open lips. I lit a cigarette recently and felt ill, is this what becomes of us. 

You vow to claw your way back. If you cannot write a sentence, write a word. If you cannot write a word, find a letter. Let it wrap itself around you until it chokes the fear from your veins, let it be the weight that sits on your chest until all that is left is stories, you know there is a little magic dust left att the bottom of this barrel and you are not giving in until it
gives
out.

Wilt

Feel the earth sink around you. 

Feel the soft drag of nostalgia, how it echoes inside your hollow barrels. 

See the words begin to come out: remember. 

Your words grow out of a stillness 

you cannot schedule between tasks 

on the to do list.