mantras of the moment in Philadelphia’s airport

There is an underlying listlessness
surrounding the frustration
hiding between the pockets of
freedom to be.

About a year ago, I decided to move to St. Louis. About a year ago, a certain man hit me up so there were 72 hours straight of practical wedding plans made over texts and DMs with a man I had had a couple a’ conversations with. About a year ago, I became determined to move to St. Louis until a certain man had too much else going on to continue the love-at-fitst-sight brand of crazy we were on. About a year ago, I became too nervous to move to St. Louis. Too tangled to remember my desire to move had sprung before the text message saying my name and his name and he had got a phone so lock the number.

There is an underlying listlessness
surrounding the frustration
hiding between the pockets of
freedom to be.

About a year ago, I settled on mimicking my sister’s life in place of my own. Move to the city I hated the couple dozen times I visited my sister in that city. Take on the taking care of young people that aren’t mine. Follow what I was convinced I could convince my heart was right. Smoke too much weed and fail to weed out my weakness.

There is an underlying listlessness
surrounding the frustration
hiding between the pockets of
freedom to be.

I am a master of relentlessly staying in not-quite-reciprocated-yet-unrejected love. I am a master of intellectualization past the point of sanity. I am a master of refusing regret and creating new narratives. I am a master of internalizing a self-frustration out of fear of grafting resentment onto another. I am a master of proving my strength until I collapse.

There is an underlying listlessness
surrounding the frustration
hiding between the pockets of
freedom to be.

I haven’t figured out bending without breaking. I haven’t learned to predict my mood. I haven’t let go of enough identity. I haven’t accepted enough of my truth. I hadn’t relaxed the marrow of my bones in 10 months solid.

There is an underlying listlessness
surrounding the frustration
hiding between the pockets of
freedom to be.

I miss humidity. I miss the smell of salt that catches your nose at random. I miss the Ocean. I miss the boardwalk. I miss strangers blessing strangers after a sneeze. I miss the proper levels of efficiency blended into the polite amount of niceties. I miss traffic and pedestrian patterns that disrupt each other so minimally the gps can accurately predict walking time. I miss hoodies at night in the summer. I miss hearing languages I can’t recognize let alone understand. I miss wind and rain and fog and smog and weather in general.

There is an underlying listlessness
surrounding the frustration
hiding between the pockets of
freedom to be.

I found a freedom in Phoenix.
To stop proving myself.
To forsake categorization.
To sing again.
To write again.
To love again.
(nearly unrequited and not quite rejected)

But there is a frustration. And I am obviously still lost. I can’t do another summer in the desert.

countdown

In 10 days I will be
buying piraguas and mangos next to Tompkins
smoking on a fire escape in Harlem
dreading hot wind propelled by express trains
singing karaoke until 4 am
jogging in plain view of Jersey
sifting through mama, chiquita, blanquita one block from my old block like old times
watching the water at Coney Island
riding that horse ride at Coney Island
weaving through young people strolling with or without an expert agility
cursing cabs cutting in crosswalks where I’m walking
chilling in community gardens
sitting on a stoop
dodging skate boards and Citi Bikes
adjusting to that stench of trash in August in Manhattan
providing directions to Hew-stun Street
breathing a pollution I’ve probably forgotten
buying produce in Union Square
buying mangos in Union Square
connecting with loved ones
carrying a prize obnoxiously large back from Coney Island
deciding what’s essential atop the concrete I once thought held me
discovering others inside Nuyorican
buying piraguas and mangos
dreaming on park benches with a pen and a pad
admiring graffiti, both sanctioned and political
praying in the church I was blessed to convert in
living life lovely
loving life-living
falling asleep in a building lined against the FDR near Houston
falling past my homesickness
and
collapsing into home.

summer in the City

There’s something fulfilling about knowing people are excited to see me. I miss community. I miss my friends. I miss the folks I didn’t realize were my friends, like folks I only saw during tattoo sessions. I have to say what’s up to so many people I know from buying cat food or cigarettes or chips or cupcakes or dinner. (Of course, which corner stores and independent bookstores and restaurants are still standing 10 months after my departure remains to be seen.)

I’m going to Coney Island to straight chill on the boardwalk with Jazz while I figure out which quote about the City my tattoo artist will add to my body. I’m going to do some laps on the track by the East River and then take off running while smelling fish. I’m going to stop in the Catholic Worker’s Houses and hear more stories from the man who knew Dorothy Day when he was 16. And I’m gonna sit in the community gardens that I always meant to help at and never did. I’m going to discover what it feels like to walk past whatever is where Mary Help of Christians stood in all her glory for 96 years. (It’s still a giant lot of nothing, bet.) If I head straight to Central Park from the airport I might be able to see the last performance of this year’s Shakespeare in the Park. Regardless, I should see something at The Public Theater or La Mama or somewhere equally important. I should probably read something at Nuyorican or maybe at whatever Bowery Poetry club became when it reopened and I hadn’t been back to check it out. I’m going to see movies at Sunshine and the 14th Street Regal–in the balcony only, and at 42nd street where I can be as loud as I want. I’m going to fall in love with something or someone or the City all over again.

I am excited to drink cold, clean tap water that doesn’t have a taste and take a shower with decent water pressure. I am excited to buy single servings of seltzer water that isn’t pierre at any corner store or drug store I please. I am excited to find new graffiti and see what, if anything, is being drawn on the floor with chalk in Tompkins and Washington Square and outside the homes of children. I am excited to watch street performers and pray that campaign to stop young people from dancing in the subway hasn’t obliterated show time. I am excited to miss a train or bus and only wait 10 minutes for the next. I am excited to run into someone I know while walking down Eldridge or Rivington or both. I am excited for peanut chews and smoothie shops and boxes of used books set out on stoops and mangos on a stick and piraguas in a cup and someone selling something on that stretch of Avenue A just south of where Mary Help of Christians stood in all her glory for 96 years and children playing in fountains and children playing in sprinklers and children playing in fire hydrants and children playing in the City and the ready availability of spicy sweet chili doritios. I am I’m excited to fall in love with something or someone or the City all over again.

I will probably be dressed like a tourist. My wardrobe has changed quite a bit since, turns out, leggings cling uncomfortably to skin in 115 degree heat. I will probably walk too slowly. Turns out, it’s hard to speed walk in 115 degree heat. I may even talk a bit funny since my sister and I bring the Cleveland accent out of each other–much of which had been lost to my tongue in my decade on the Lower. I doubt I’ll have heard some songs taken for granted as quintessential summer since some music gets out here late. But if I look out of place, seem out of place, and sound out of place, I won’t be out of place. My-east-coast-bestie bought me a ticket home. And I’m about to cram one summer in the City into one week. Look out, maybe I’ll even get a second driving lesson.

new york, new york

nostalgic consolidation.

a kinda wonderland and neverland smeared together across concrete.

strugglesurrendertears

As the story goes, the elder brother climbed back up the stadium bleachers alone. And the father began a desperate running search. The first born daughter, the oldest of the 4 from that mother-father pairing, offered little reassurance. No one will know she is lost. No one will know to help her. She won’t let anyone see her cry. To be certain, she was right. When the father’s heart stopped skipping beats and his breath began to steady it’s because he saw her dry-eyed. She was unhurried in pace, searching the faces above her. Her own face rested stoically loyal to her stubborn condition. Then comes the father’s favorite part, for it represents a trust in him rarely acknowledged by his now-grown-then-newish-child. He scooped up his little girl; she cried.

I was too young to remember the crowd, which must have seemed endless and deceptive. The noise, that undoubtedly caused delusion. Too many seats, much too big for my presumed smallness. Not even the drive to Columbus and back again, despite the struggle I allegedly had with being still and a toddler simultaneously. I was not too young to fear my own vulnerability, though I was far too young to know that so much fear so soon is unusual. Much too young to remember lost, but I sometimes imagine the energy strung between the nape of my neck and the top of my lungs manifested during it.

This dangerous combinations of pride and fear stops being cute after a while. This arrogance inherent in my refusal to let others do for me gets to be exhausting. I don’t know where it came from, and if I believed in regrets, I would probably blame myself for letting it come. But regrets is for folks with more time to dwell. It exists because some people just don’t really care to keep becoming. I won’t blame the child I was for beginning a struggle I haven’t surrendered.

I feel a struggle, more over this past week than I ever have before.  In the Phoenix dry heat suffocating proper emotion under ashy skin. In my homesickness for the East River and friendship. In the insomnia I hope is a passing symptom of nicotine withdrawal but know is rooted in my inability to intellectualize my way out while absent proper city stimuli.

Even in public here, I am not alone. Not the way I am on the F train towards Coney Island or on the Coney Island boardwalk or passing the graffiti wall on Houston and Bowery. And as a result, I’ve found no time to cry. And after 7 months away from home, away from the water of even my own tears, I finally believe Phoenix has an offering. It is here that I begin a journey of letting others see me, do for me, know me, love me.

It is here I hope to open up.

the element of emotion

Growing up, Lake Erie always was. When I couldn’t see it. When I didn’t think about it. When it was too cold for swimming and too hot for lake-effect snow. When towards the Lake or away from the Lake weren’t part of the directions to some place or another–then the Lake swayed steady at the top.

I knew the Lake with small hands stained an orange crumble of Planters Cheez Balls mixed into dirt. I knew it by my mother’s carrying on with other grown folks while I built castles. I knew it by punctures in my bare feet and goosebumps when the wind blew. I knew it with the unknowing that a place ever existed without this expanse of water at its top. 

When half-grown myself, the Lake became music festivals and unchaperoned young people climbing into dirty waves on too hot afternoons. Terrified of dead fish and pollution, I stayed smiling on the the broken pebbles we called sand; poured myself into a book or an idea. It was the summer following high school when a stranger saved my friend from drowning. She had jumped from the top of the rock tower at the wrong time of tide.

At eighteen, I moved from the Lake to two Rivers and an Ocean. And when if it was too cold to sit near it or too hot to jog near it, the water still engulfed me. For a decade, the East River marked my edge. On days that it didn’t, the Coney Island Boardwalk took its place at the bottom. Sometimes, after church, I would live forever in the Hudson breeze, smelling salt.  

***

My currently landlocked condition feels fatal. I know it isn’t. I know it can’t be. Millions of people are born, grow, live or exist, and die never escaping from some desert or another. Most haven’t the desire to escape or a notion they are trapped. And perhaps they’re not. Perhaps they never knew a lake or an ocean and two rivers. And perhaps their emotions and energies blossomed precisely still without them. But last month already held too hot afternoons, and that Lake is no longer at the top. 

this is not any of my water or past water, but it’s somebody’s. me and my niece borrowing it here last summer