Terminal 5

You rush past the Friday evening slowpokes, all the time in the world and a week's work in their shoulders, you haven't the time for kind words. Sweat begins to stick on your back, a heavy pack pushing into the fabric of your shirt. You're late, so late, why were you so cavalier in leaving work and now you'll be late and then what will you do? 

But you step onto the AirTrain at Howard beach, and the cool air washes over you, the clean floors and wide open spaces, and you haven't a care left in the world. You follow the anxious murmuring crowd through security, smile as the guard picks at your tragic bags, move calmly, confidently through the mazes. Nothing can touch you now. 

The plane is late, after all. You sit at the window seat -always the window seat- and watch the late evening sun turn to fire on the runway. Silently keeping your fingers crossed of the flight route, that it will carry your side of the plane across the skyline, give you that moment which soothes your soul more than anything you've yet to know. 

The best part of leaving this place

is knowing you will be back. 

Thrown

To compensate for his ordinary shoes.

The weather forecast frightens for no reason, the early evening is blissfully mild, and a gentle breeze sings through the crooked streets downtown. I started walking, aimlessly, because the best kind of walk is the one that doesn't tell you your goal until it is in you. By the time I reached Chinatown, smelling of fish in the late summer if course, twilight had laid a deep yellow hue across the bricks and the gingko trees; everything seemed silent. I curved under the Brooklyn bridge and veered back north, narrowly avoiding the throngs of classes and tourists making their rounds. Zig-zagged through the outer edges of an unknown neighborhood before reaching Delancey just at dusk. I climbed the Williamsburg bridge slowly, painstakingly, it is like one long slope that never ends, a mountain in miniature, and the sky grew dark. The M train passed, shaking the foundations and offering just a moment's glimpse at the lives of others, like watching them in a fish bowl, or like walking past a warmly lit house in winter. 

There's a small section in the middle of the bridge where the bike lanes and pedestrian lanes meet, a short tunnel for going to the north side and staring out over the Manhattan skyline. I stood there in a trance, there's no telling for how long. A group of graffiti artists pulled up, cracked open cans of beer and discussed the climb. A J train crept by slowly. I stared at the skyline, at my beautiful home twinkling in the near distance, so close I could touch it. So close I could belong. My legs were tired, my feet, my head, my skin. A police car pulled up to talk to the graffiti kids. I wanted to protect them, somehow, but in the end the cop just fined them and laughed like he wanted to join. 

I felt my love for the city spread again into my sad limbs, felt it wet my eyes even though I tried to hold it back. My heart filled with gratitude. 

Carried me back home again. 

No Decorum

The heat broke, at last. I went for an endless run along the river, under all the bridges and past the Wall Street crowds with their evening drinks. Past a hundred Chinese couples out on their late-night walks and quiet contemplation. Past the Pasta factory across the river, until my legs grew accustomed to the dull ache and my heart slowly beat every last thought out of my mind. The days are beautiful and painful all at once; you stumble into bed and wake at sunrise, there's no sense to make. She calls from the hospital, alone and waiting for the surgery to be over. You can't bear to think of that hospital. You still wish you were by her side.

When you come home, late, too late, too disheveled and you can't seem to put yourself together, your bed's been made. You tuck yourself in between crisp, stretched sheets. Sleep soundly without nightmares. Welcome the reprieve.

Jukeboxed

I cried today. There was a moment after an early morning run, when I sat stretching in the shade (because it was already a hundred degrees and unbearable) and it just came over me, unrelenting but unapologetic and in just a minute was over. My senses continue to be wrapped in cotton, everything is dulled and my responses are slow. I try my best to wade through with a machete, desperately holding on to the clearings where light trickles in, but it's not always easy to see the point. 

Imagine it would be easier to fight for life if I did. 

Your Rolling Stones Records

The heat returns, the humidity. Sweat runs in rivulets down throats, along hairlines, it pools in the smalls of backs and darkens cotton threads. The New York City summer nights are wild with life, people peering out from their air conditioned isolation chambers after midnight, moving tables into the streets and catching up like after a religious fast. In a corner apartment in the East Village, a small tornado runs amok.

It is too easy to tear everything apart, to scratch and claw and succumb to the overwhelming darkness; it is too familiar, too comfortable. She curled up on the couch and said it's my safest space and my most encroaching prison at once, and you remember now exactly what she means. The days, the weeks, the life, they catch up with you, they stuff your head with cotton and make you afraid of the light. Your roommate dashes in and out, in breezy summery outfits and freshly painted bronzer, trilling about her various engagements, and you don't know how long you can smile and nod in her direction before it becomes clear that your insides are performing a nuclear meltdown. You search desperately for airline tickets and are at a loss for what to do when you find them, because he said not to run away and you can't imagine the alternative.

You are determined to take the difficult track instead, to stare your demons in the eye and ask them what they want. It's just that there's a heat wave outside, and a roaring fire inside, and you're pretty sure the demons wouldn't mind just a moment's snuggle before they let you send them away.

They are such old friends, after all.

Post Title

His voice comes clear over the line, for once without lag and confusion. He speaks of jobs he's applied to around the world, we speak of the Southern Hemisphere in fall and apartments in the north. You are reminded that this is the life you still crave, that airports are your home no matter the world beyond or the company at your side. They speak of returns, of a city that has changed like the river but maybe there's a way to swim back into the current. Or maybe we take our family to Africa, build something else completely. 

You consider a life moored to just the place you were born, a place with no unknowns and no overwhelmig adventures. You reaffirm your devotion to a different life completely. Decide to work like hell to belong to the world.

Exit Strategy

I wish I had done this more, you think regretfully. I wish I had gone there, if only once. Your bags lie packed in the corner of their guest room, you refuse to pull the blinds because it's the last light night you'll see, and your early alarm already makes the travel jitters tingle in your body. There's a sense of home that lies in hearing voices and movement behind closed doors when you're trying to sleep. 

Your lids are heavy, your breaths already slow. Tomorrow everything will look different. So let it. 

Just be here, now.