On a bumpy bus ride, one of a thousand rides home from somewhere I’d rather be. I am not, but not unlike a New Yorker walking through Times Square. It’s so bad that most people would rather run in front of three lanes of cars than stay on 42nd and 7th for any measurable amount of time. Midtown: to wander through crowds of lost tourists who are constantly moving and pushing and side-stepping toward the shiny center so that they can hug a bed bug infested homeless man in an Elmo suit or pay three hundred dollars to see a man in a Superman costume dangle, his torso wrapped in airplane cord. Midtown gets us all down.
And all you want to do is go home or go to get on a train and into a better neighborhood where these people who feel nothing do not go for fear of the danger that this city hasn’t had for a decade.
New York wants you to stay alive. It urges you on, it invites you into cash-only pizza places in Jewish neighborhoods where little boys hold their hats in hand so that they can wear a bike helmet and speed by the emptying Brooklyn street at dusk. It is the systolic and diastolic when your heart is so broken and torn up and in rebellion of your passion that it all feels like more of a joke than it usually does and you have no choice but to laugh like a madman when you are finally alone, but not alone, on the subway. Like a mother who will not forsake her nursing child, so the city is faithful still. And even those theatres overrun with commercial nothingness and corporate sponsors are packed on a Wednesday afternoon, each dying soul hoping to find the gospel for even just a moment, in between advertisements for Coca-Cola and exhausted references to William Shakespeare. He got it right, the rest of us are just pretenders, so they say. So someone says.
So what if everyone dies, so everything. Some people are in the business of preserving life for as long as possible; I’m in the business of enjoying it in the tiny sips it has been doled out to me. If it’s all over tomorrow, thank god because I have run out of activities. And since everything is made up as it is, I prefer to count my currency in mirth. Even in lack of mirth, because a negative number is just that number with a stepladder in front of it. At least I know what the gutter tastes like. At least I know.
I’d have that eternal mirth, and you your pragmatism and realism and so-called clarity, which is fear dressed as ambition for Halloween. And if all of these scribbles mean nothing and are not admirable, then so do those microscopic scribbles that sometimes behave and sometimes do not.
I am failing to see much of a discernable difference between what I do and what you do.
Remember a half smile at the thought of staying. Remember the catch in your throat at not knowing but deciding to know anyway. Remember remembering how good it felt.
But then the canopy gave way and suddenly I am flighty and temporary; live a life in distortion, distraction, sure to fall and never get up again. So, by the beckoning of your bootheels, I took my love and my confusion and my stray dog gypsy life and I wrapped it into a bandana and tried again somewhere else.
Again, and stated clearly for the record: I’d have forged a path in precision and forsaken calamity because I, in no uncertain terms, adore your carefulness and your little drinking problem that you cultivate like a garden so that you can still retain some memorable pith. And stated once again in booming resonance I request only a stay of execution, not a life in any sense of the permanence that it is not.
“Everything is temporary” and a wry grin. And so it is. But that’s my point, you idiot.
In New York, it is too loud to think on love too hard, and yet the thoughts infect the mind, even when sitting on a roof that shakes hands with the empire state building, eating a salad with too many capers. Even when watching a little girl rebel against the adults like I used to do long ago when I believed in something more than the eternal wrongness of my singular self.
Where does all of the love go for bottle blondes with good singing voices and too many tattoos above the waist? And we are off again down rabbit holes of what-ifs and if-onlys and how-coulds, where I think of post-bacs and post-docs and my grade-point-average, which are as meaningless as taking a yoga class or having a drink but someone thought to create a hierarchy, under which I am well suited but ill fitted.
Jabber jabber jabber I’ll talk until I say it right and the key is revealed and I found the crack in your logic but there are a million faults in the wall of china and everyone still wants to climb all over it like its nothing.
In the end, I know that you see the cracks, too, and the plain truth is that it was fun while it lasted but never meant to last because who stays with anyone who is such a hanger on.
And isn’t it just your ego, oh eternal discontent, that made you feel so guided toward a man who just wanted to be nice because the Midwest teaches manners and you just don’t know what that’s like and you think he might stick around because you think you are so special but what do you know about mitochondria that isn’t from A Wrinkle in time? Not so much anymore, like you said, you were smarter in high school when you had unbridled potential and now you are bridled and double bitted and ready to be ridden into intellectual poverty and not a good investment. Try for someone with a trust fund; they can take a gamble like you, if they’ve got the stomach. You’re only twenty-two and have been put out to pasture for idle behavior, so what good are you for but idle amusement.
But then the sun still comes, though it is early to rise and bed thanks to an adjustment of our clocks, so I'll keep my optimism in my back pocket and keep trying to make a straight line out of a spiderweb.
