to Sleep

She had a good last day, she writes from across the river in suburbia. She passed on Thursday and I got on a flight the next day, I couldn't be home. 

Lives pass underneath us. A favorite singer of my youth says here's a classic and you realize it's coming up on 17 years since she wrote it. A classic from first trembling steps on Manhattan grid, a song that will forever make me happy when I am here and sad when I am not. Your voice was in my ears this morning again, but it doesn'ts sound the same, you don't mean the same, I grew and you stayed behind in another time, it's alright. 

I ran into a friend on Second Avenue, chatted briefly in the street like in days before the great explosion. Went for a run along the river and it felt like spring might not be far, like maybe there will be a time when it feels like it did then. When I walk up to the bar, the bartender just looks at me and mouths the usual? across somebody else's Guinness order, and something in my heart warms that has not thawed in years. 

Lives return in little steps, little heartbeats, the snowdrops have broken through the ground in the community garden across the street and I think perhaps this is how it happens. We die in gunshots but recover in rehabilitation wings, painstakingly relearning how to take our first steps all over again, how to make our lips form the words we are so desperate to put into the air. I woke up this morning with the blinds drawn up, I cannot help myself. Sunrise creeping across the 6th street treetops, a flock of birds relaying hte morning news on the roof and a mourning dove warming up in the escaping heat on my windowsill. We stood on a rooftop smoking one night, but it's not the same, I greet the dawn feet first now, greet the dawn by myself, but that's not how it's different. 

I fell to the bottom of the barrel, but
how it's different is
this time I'll be climbing back up again.

Never Been Great

Your father still writes on his laptop like it was a 1970s era typewriter, one index finger at a time, emphatically recoiling inches off the keyboard with each strike. It's perhaps his most endearing feature, hundreds of thousands of words written in this way, at the speed of any modern assistant's record. When he stares at that spot just out of sight and tells you I just fear I'm running out of time and I haven't told all my stories yet, it's the closest you ever get to each other.

At the bookstore, the unclearly gendered barista tells you they turned off their Wi-Fi. It's 2023 now, they say in a way that you couldn't possibly be mad about. The café is quiet, a welcome peace on a Thursday morning after a day of monsoon winter rains. The sun rose like March, birds ignorant to the calendar, they say it's the longest New York has gone without snow in centuries, and you know it means we are all about to die, but it's so hard to despair. A bookstore without Wi-Fi, a Thursday morning without panic, the light sing-songs of creative swirls unfettered by inbox dings. I know you've been having a hard time lately, but I have to believe we will make it through, I have to believe spring will return, because if I did not, what on earth would be the point of any of it.

My keyboard taps are just as loud as my father's, despite my correct finger placement, despite my coming into computer literacy in the 1990s, they echo through the bookstore like I have not a moment to lose, like I have to punch all these words into the ether before it is too late. 

I haven't told all my stories yet.

But I have to believe one day
I will.

Neither Fire Nor

Mondays back at the bar, I flinch to see the wrong bartender's back turned to me, the one who doesn't know how to sink into East Village congeniality, who doesn't know how to remember a drink order. You instruct the pour, at least he plays White Stripes, at least your seat in the corner is free, you hear yourself tell a doctor that things are pretty good, the devastation of 48 hours back like a stumble you might expect, like an expression of your clumsy charm. But isn't that what it is? Aren't we all made of bits of crooked corners, bits of flowering fields? The bartender plays Hotel California and you have to try to forgive him. You always made it miles on a tank of sunshine, when bitter lemons would stutter and stop after the first corner. 

The clock behind the bar is forever set to 9:41. You try to remember a time when you felt magic, when you felt like a stopped clock hinted at whimsy, you believe it can still be there just underneath your skin and if you could only set a spark to your nerve endings, you could set this whole town on fire. 

You came here smoldering,
don't forget,
you came here ready to
become.

Tumble

Can you come pick me up?
I fainted and they won't let me leave on my own.

You race up to midtown, 42nd street like a strange safari on a Sunday afternoon but you revel in the brief burst of light against your temples. She walks out defeated, how our demons sometimes resurface when we least expect it, how cruel the blow to an ego caught unawares. I return to a parking spot down the block, the Universe rewards devotion. 

Upstairs, my apartment remains a disaster, Christmas tinsel still draped around the fireplace and three days of coffee cups strewn about the living room. You think the mess is trying to tell you something but it is too late, you are too tired. Tomorrow is another day. 

You are ready to greet it, now,
glad to see its sunrise on the horizon.

Swirl

Did you know that it is possible to live an entire life and be no wiser than you were to begin with. You look at words from decades past and they are all the same melody, twisting their words to form the same feeling in your chest, you are forever who you were. 

January gets me at last, comes thrashing in like an unwanted relative, dirties your home then criticizes your lack of cleanliness. You cancel your plans and try to appease the relative instead, a useless game it is impossible to win. The demons line up to take communion at your feet, to eat your flesh, to drink your blood, and all you can do in return is say bless you. It's cruel that way. 

It occurs to me that maybe the cruelty is not the relative's,
but mine.

Freia

The air in the morning after a storm is always clearer than any other, the water more peaceful though the tide is high. A tentative sun climbs up behind the Williamsburg skyscrapers as you try to retrieve your senses. Last night, a flash that surprised you, like January erases summer weather from your memory, the violent smack that followed in a heartbeat setting you straight again. Later, a raging downpour while you race toward a deadline late into the night, you were never happier than reaching for that line, than when it presses the yoke of its adrenaline on your shoulders. It helps you ignore all the other voices that yell from within you. 

Earlier, at the reading, you stand staring into the bar, trying to hear the magic between the words. You’ve been so far from any magic and you wonder if that isn’t why you pad yourself in all this self-harm. You are a cliche. 

Friday arrives, the beauty of a sunrise after January thunder. You absorb it like you still believe in remission. 

Malibu

Return to the shoebox in Alphabet City to find the heater in the basement broken. You close the open windows and try to find the wool socks in the back of the closet. The pointsettias in the corner by the fireplace seem strangely out of place this side of a holiday season that feels months behind us. In California, you sister surveys a broken beach in the wake of a storm. You choke on the allegory, and your shoulders ache with tension. An unknown voice confirms your appointment. 

It's so hard to tell which lifelines lead to sunshine and which ones only seem like blue skies from afar. You determine to keep walking, but it's scarier to do it, now.