86 and Lex

Will you come stay with me, she crackles over the line, a weeks worth of hospital chair sleeps finally breaking across her temples. I got a room at a hotel up the street. 

You make your way back to the upper east side, this strange anomaly of a neighborhood you forget is on your map of New York City, stop in at the hospital and walk laps around the corridors with him, gossiping about the nurses and digesting possible futures. By the time you reach the hotel room, she sleeps. You tip toe your way to the bed by the window, shimmy into crisp, white sheets and think, so much of what we encounter in life we could’ve never guessed would happen. 

New York lies comfortingly outside the window, lulls you to sleep, lulls you to peace the kind you’ve only ever felt here. The west calls to you, the world calls to you, but only New York can bring you home with a whisper. 

If You Are the Ghost of New York City

When in doubt,
song will untie the knots
in your chest
will remind your lungs

How to breathe.

An entire day whiles away from under your feet. You do not mind. You have run out of New York hustle, have run out of will to keep your calendar full. You sit in the bath tub until the water goes cold instead, stare at a wall and try to feel the blood return to your body. On the screen, a man moves to New Mexico. You think, I lived there once. Now you cannot see the future anymore, and you don't know where you'll live in it. 

There should be poetry to come out of this darkness, should be stories to billow out of the pain in your fingertips, but all you want is silence. 

All you want is someone else to do
the breathing
for you.

When I Cannot Sing My Heart

You make your way to the East Village at noon, when it slows down to its mid-day lull, when it looks like the home you could always return to. You navigate crosswalks without thinking, because it's rhythm sits in your veins despite the long absence. Their apartment like a second home, the children unaffected by your comings and goings because they've never known a day when you didn't belong to their lives. There is a magic to friends as family, you have long known it but never failed to be bowled over to see it in action. These are the support systems that will carry us all to the other end of this nightmare.

Later in the afternoon, you make your way over to the writing bar, tickled to find yourself in its neighborhood on a Monday, how New York gives you little pats of encouragement when it knows you need it. Sink into its colored lights, its soft music, its reminders of what you ever came into this life to do. When we forget the point of it all, that reminder can set us straight and get us to take a step again. 

In this storm, I have lost my words, lost my way, I disintegrate like dust in the hospital corners but at the end of every hurricane, there is a dawn of stillness, there is a blank page where you can turn your turmoil to tales, where your bleeding heart can turn into a hand full of ink. In the darkest cloud, you still remain certain the sunlight of the Word will return to you again.

After all, in all this life, it has never let you down before.

Recovery Room

The nurse leans against a column near the elevators, looks at her and says, do you know what I read in his records? It just says, 'coming out of anesthesia, still has his sense of humor.' No one does that. We laugh, gratefully accepting any breath of levity in a day that has been anything but. The hours while away at their own pace, shaded hospital windows confusing your perception like Las Vegas casinos, the point is to be here without question. 

At last, when the Upper East Side begins to go to bed, we are able to carry her out of the gates, drag her to food. She says I cannot possibly eat and we say of course but order her meals anyway. She cleans the plate. We make jokes of newfound friendships in sterile corridors, because at the end of the day everything else is too heavy to bear. You turn around and upend your own tears onto those around you, and they step up in ways you could only ask for with your most hopeful of hearts. 

When you come back to Bushwick, late Saturday night and the kids all out, your suitcase still in tow and your eyes empty with exhaustion, it's like you're breathing for the first time all day. The apartment is cool, you thank him silently for fixing the radiators, think, people step up in ways you could only ask for with your most hopeful of hearts, think, support ripples across the water until it reaches peace.

Think,

I would never have known to ask for
half of the gifts I've been given.

Amen

Hospital time takes over your calendar, breathes minutes into hours and miles into millimeters, when you say you’re coming to sit in that hospital room whether she asks it or not she cries on the line and walks five blocks west instead of east, lost in more ways than one and upended at the Carlyle before realizing her mistake. When she says I just love him so much, what she means is I don’t want to live without him. You begin to crumble and see your own safety nets arrange themselves around you, that you may be able to pay it forward and wrap your own whole safety net around that small corner hospital room. When you say you’re coming back early she cries again and says please come straight here and sit with me. Says if we both die will you take our savings and the kids? When you talk on the phone you laugh, because what else is there to do, but when you hang up, you fall into a pile on the floor, overcome by your trembling body, surprised at your unusual frailty. 

But when he wraps you up in the quiet upstate night, for a moment you think, maybe it will be alright. For a moment you think, you have pulled yourself together before. Now is not the time to fall into piles, there will be time for that yet. Now is the time to do the things unasked, to appear in the spaces where otherwise grows worry, now is the time to hold your breath until a balloon appears in your chest and carries you all the way through to where the calendar can be made right again. 

Hospital time

She comes home late, well after the kids are asleep, whispers into the hallway they’ve spent a lifetime building, says I left him to sleep, I’ll go back in the morning. The kids asked you to tell scary stories for bedtime, blissfully unaware the new scares that sit in your breath. 

You cry the whole way home on the L train. 

She speaks new secrets into the Negronis you keep pouring each other, you both pause between the weighted truths, say, This is hospital time, say, This is cancer time, think, everything is different now but between you it’s really more of the same, there’ll be new tests in the morning but between you it’s really just more of the same and when you cry the whole way home on the L train you feel nothing but gratitude for a city that will let you wring your chest open in public at 12:34 am, feel nothing but faith in hospitals with secret exits to fairy lights and taxi cabs that show up in the rain, feel nothing but hope in relationships that brave the cold of winter to endure another year, another decade together  

When you cry the whole way home on the L train you feel  nothing

but light.

Ticket

Your hand lingers on the button for just a moment, you look over the travel details again, confirm connections, calculate pennies in your bank account, calculate joy in your heart. Push the button. 

A whole new trip reveals itself into your life, speaks of as yet unseen wonders, of long awaited thrills, you think it had been a minute since you had a ticket in your back pocket but that isn't true at all, it's been a year of tickets in your back pocket, been a year of making up for lost time, and you are not ignorant to the treasure chest that cracked open inside of you as the Darkness walked out. 

The vastness of the world becomes trite when you try to put it into words, becomes small in containment, cannot possibly paint its entire spectrum onto a blank sheet of paper. But you cannot not try. You cannot go through a life without turning it into words, because you do not know how to know it unless it is shaped into serifs, do not know how to bring the world without you unless you can bind it and carry it under your arm. 

January waxes and wanes in that cloudy space behind your eyes, but for the first time in years, it hasn't taken over the blood in your veins, the breath in your lungs. For the first time in years, you feel as though you can trust you'll make it out alive, feel like spring is just another lightness on the horizon, not a frail lifeline on which your every step hangs. 

Feel like you've found that the answer you were looking for
was in your own hand all along.