Generations

And I stood there, watching, as dad fought with mom to tear her out of the car. So that she couldn't drive off and kill herself. 
I was nine, but it was clear what was going on.
Your father was too young then, I don't think he knows.

The bar was growing quiet, Tuesday night on the soft, tree-lined streets of the Village and no one knew the storm was so close. My aunt sat before me old in her limbs but her words were those of a little girl. All your grandfather can say about that is that it wasn't the only time. 

My roommate tries to put on lunch for me, while I have my hands full with dishes. Her indulgence overwhelms me, feels sticky in its intrusiveness; I have to decline several times before she turns off the stove. You really don't like being mothered, do you? she says, and after four years it's like it's the first time she notices. After 31, it's like I can't get myself to stop.

I went back a few years ago, before she was too ill to remember. I guess I was hoping to hear that she wanted her children, at least. After all those years, she still couldn't so much as say that she loved us. But I guess we knew that already.

We parted ways on Seventh Avenue, as they caught a cab for Brooklyn. I walked down the quiet length of Bedford, overwhelmed with the story and the life.

Saw again how the blood runs so dark in our veins.

Ferried

Another day of sunshine, the little room in the Village shrinks and I must get out. I wander aimlessly down Seventh Avenue, weaving through busy worker bees on impossibly short lunch breaks and regret the lack of sunglasses. Manhattan in October is blissfully warm, kind, it refuses to remember the Storm that passed a year ago. I pass the Tower, it is enormous up close but the empty space from what was before remains. Some things New York refuses instead to forget. 

Battery Park is a mess of renovations, the ground is brown and barren, but the Statue of Liberty still beckons in the distance. I grow restless at the edge of the island, see the orange ferry close in on the dock, and I decide to go. Milling with the scores of tourists who heard about the priceless secret, I find a seat inside where no one stays who hasn't made the trip a hundred times before. Last time I sat here I got a root canal in a suburban haven in the middle of Staten Island, and the memory makes me shake my head. The water is not as brown as I remembered, it is a deep green, reminds me there is an ocean there, within reach. There's a line of planes landing at Newark. 

We pass Ellis Island, its bulbous towers tiny in the distance. Millions and millions of people passed through that one gate. Millions of people who had abandoned their every Safety, their every knowledge of what was life, of what was to come, for the dream that this would be better. Some never made it to the mainland. Most of them never again saw the Homes they had left. We pass the island quickly; despite the midday sun I shiver. 

On the return I end up first on the boat. The seats are strangely empty. The trip is telling me something. 

I can't figure out what it is. 

Monochrome

(My favorite part

of everyday 

is going to bed

in that apartment, 

by the window that faces

the courtyard

and looking out 

over the jagged buildings, the townhouses, the chimneys, the scattered 

lit windows and rustling trees, up to the 

never-dark sky and spotting maybe, just 

maybe, a star. 

It reminds me where I am, 

when I have forgotten. 

It calms

my troubled soul.)

In the Village

The air conditioner still sits in the window. There is no space for it inside, even once winter comes. It fits poorly, cold air rushes across my feet as I sit at the desk. The heat is on in the building; the pipes click, click, click at regular intervals, but I always seem to miss the steam when it comes. Finally I catch a cycle, the valve sputters and creaks and the vent hisses. It smells like dust and Christmas and a hundred New York winters.

In the hallway, a dying fire alarm beeps in echoes. An entire day passes as I disappear into countless wholesome Middle American family blogs, from crafty housewives and young parents creating a happy life for themselves. They make you wonder what life you have made for yourself. They make you question your scorn.

I wouldn't give this up for anything, your roommate says over red wine and acrylic paints. Being an artist is the only thing I ever wanted to be. She gave up the family, the bulging bank account, every sense of normalcy for a cramped West Village apartment with squirrels on the fire escape and making rich people coffee to pay the rent when times get tough. But every day she sits in that studio and creates queer images from her imagination; every day she is free. We are creatives, she says, we don't have a choice, you know.

There's an unease in your gut, but it is not entirely clear what it means. You return to your dusty room, close the browser windows, shake the questions out of your head.

I Wish I Had

There are padlocks on the windows, she says as she sends me a picture of sunset from her bed. The sky is a fiery purple, clouds straining in all directions and twinkling lights from the buildings outside. But there is no beauty in a sunset seen from an inpatient room in the emergency psychiatric ward. There is no rest in the sleep to be had there. How many years we have spent contemplating the looming clouds around us. I run to the ends of the earth to escape them. She is glued to the ground, like in that bad dream where you try to move but cannot, and they engulf her. She reminds me of Sylvia Plath. If only the image didn't end with her head in the oven. The allure of madness lies in abandoning what little hope there was.

My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that."
I looked at her. "Like what?"
"Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital."
She paused.
"I knew you'd decide to be all right again."

I long for winter now, for the darkness to descend. I long for the chill to bring the happy people indoors, and leave me alone with my City Streets in the Hudson River winds. That giant trap of sunshine and foliage frivolity, of well-paying jobs and only time left over to spend the paycheck at swank bars because it's the thing to do, it beckons at my every step. I no longer know why I try to avoid it. Perhaps I don't, either.

"I'm writing a novel, I said. I haven't got time to change out of this and into that."

Fall

The air smells
of pumpkin spice
and chill
The yellowing birch leaves
outside my window
begin to twirl away
in the breeze
and the waning moon
climbs its solitary gait
over the courtyard's buildings

I sleep a heavy sleep
dream of holiday magic

amidst withering dreams.

Look Pretty

The neighborhood looks so different now, a whole city appeared across the river and is creating a scene, but everything is new, everything is clean. Her balcony has a view that's worth most of the rent alone. She says she loves to sit there, loves to look at it, the Empire State glowing grandly just across the water and all three bridges in the distance. It just reminds me of that summer in Greenpoint, and the feeling that the city is so close, but much too far away. I am glad to return to my snug Village street, with the City's ground safe beneath me.

Charles Bukowski came on the screen tonight, disgusting old pervert Bukowski with young women in his arms and dirty fingernails from too many cigarettes, he talks so much shit but then there's that moment. At the front of the stage, with those papers in his hands, and the words that come out make you nod your head out loud but weep a little inside. He says to keep the ember glowing, even through that job, even through doubt and rage, and one day even that little ember can spark a fire. The critics twist themselves inside out to infer meaning, paint allegory, but let them have their way, they can't change anything. His windshield has a giant crack down the middle. It's beginning to look like me. It reminds you.

You do not have to be good,
or right,
or beautiful,
at anything,

as long as you are amazing
with the Word.