But Its Gone Now

I figured we were the same. 

The nights are full of strange dreams, dawn creeping into convoluted storylines, where I am neither victor nor spoils. I wake in a strange twilight, like someone raked a distorted symphony of emotion across my chest. How are any of us meant to live a mundane existence when the wonders of the world simmer underneath the surface? 

Along the river, a Chinese man catches a fish the size of my leg, lets it wriggle and gasp until the last breath disappears from it. I find a four-leaf clover in the same green patch where I’ve found nothing for days. A heavy fog lies across the East River. Summer begins. 

You count down the days until you may simmer, 

too. 

to be Kind

Spring has never been so long, so lingering in its cool air, I wore a sweatshirt today and reveled in the feeling. I waver at the edge of the precipice, at once so near and far, so steady and yet so frail. He sends a song and you wonder if you might take that into the dessert and call it a day. Management writes to ask if you might consider negotiating still, and your newly beating heart doesn’t know what to wish for now. 

I dreamed of you last night, all safety and comforts in unflinching eyes, in knowing just how the muscles curve around your elbows. I woke in joy, but I woke, too, in the incalculable distance between us. 

I have this old car and a tank full of gas. I’m driving it wherever the road takes me, until it tells me to stop. 

And what I mean is

there’s room in the front seat, if you want it. 

Till You See the Sun Rise

Is this how people feel all the time? you ask, incredulous, so many years since you knew what it was like to be people that you cannot remember on your own. There's a lightness in your mornings, an ease under your to-do list, a spark in your eyes that feels like it was familiar once. I cross the bridge, again, again, each time returning with eyes wide, skyscrapers at twilight, microcosms bubbling, bridges towering, in every window a world is happening and it could only be happening here. She writes, If you don't want to come back, you don't have to come back, and I realize we're having different conversations entirely. 

New York, my darling, I've been away so long. Even as your streets passed under my feet, I couldn't see you for all the darkness across my eyes, wasn't truly here at all. But I am here now, New York, I see you again like the days when we first met, when you nestled your fumbling hands into mine, when I woke with your name on my lips. And the things to come were too fantastic not to tell lingers in my blood stream, 17 years after it first slipped in. We've weathered a storm, New York. 

But we weathered it together.
And now we can revel
in all the fantastic things
to come.

Memoriam

Return to the East Village on a sunny holiday afternoon, the streets full of parking spaces and the air full of summer. A new season is ushered in, a dawn of potential, you collapse on your couch and wonder what comes next. The to-do list runs rampant in your head. The coins in your piggy bank aren't adding up, but everything else sounds like freedom. She writes from packing boxes and panic, you do not speak her language. June sits on the horizon, everything sits on the horizon, this shoebox has been so full of questions, and now you start to see the answers it's been telling you all along. 

It is not perfect, all of this, but it is better than it has been in a very long time. 

You are happy to start here.
Keep walking until you see the sun rise.

Rash

He passes you on the 6th street foot bridge, a flash of a bright memory, the Universe winks at you in the most unexpected ways. You smile into the approaching storm clouds, make your way home to the piles of paper, the half drunk wine bottles, the post its that declare there is something left in life to discover. Fuck it, let's find out rings loud across your temples, everything feels like an old sweater you are ready to shed. 

New York, I think we need to take a break. I think I have to leave you to remember what it is to miss you. This shoebox was everything I had dreamed of, but all my dreams are of ferries and trains and going somewhere else now, I wake up in your arms and I feel nothing. New York, this doesn't mean it's over, I just need to stretch my legs, need to feel the grass under my bare feet to remember how much I love your electricity in my veins. 

New York, don't you see I'm doing this for us?

I've paced this block in circles so many times,
I'm leaving a scar in the concrete. 

We deserve better than these wounds we've given.

Classics

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. 

I stay up past my bedtimes, and nap in the afternoons. Everything is upside down, everything is silence. A change rests on the horizon, like a storm front still trying to make up its mind. You are like cracked earth desperate for rain. The typewriter beckons you like an old friend, like a limb you had somehow separated from, you wonder how you got by so long without it. You begin to create mental packing lists: bring all of the paper, the books from this shelf, bring these notebooks, these dumbbells, a coffee cup that might bring you just the right type of juju for the next Great American novel. 

Google fire lookout jobs. 

Whatever comes next - and you do not know yet what does - it feels like opportunity. It feels like being guided by curiosity, not fear, feels like a chance to rediscover parts of yourself that entirely fell away in the depths of the Darkness, it feels like hope.

After years of cracked earth,
the time has come to learn
again
how to grow.

If You Can

Everything catches up with you, eventually, grabs you when there is nowhere just to run, the shoebox full of walls. You think again of Big Sky, of neverending sunsets, you lose your patience, how the demons have all been waiting for your return. You thought you had answers, but looking around the little apartment, you feel as though you forgot even what the question was, see yourself stuck in the same old quicksand that robbed you of so many days. 

You feel like that feeling says something. 

But you are not yet sure what.
It's best not to burn everything to the ground
until you can hear it clearly.