Road trip

"well it's a big, big city and the lights are all out
but it's much as I can do you know to figure you out"

Bob Dylan and Central Park saved my life, while Upper East Side doormen tipped their hats and wished me good day and I gulped down cup after cup of the worst and best coffee I've ever had. Bob Dylan and Central Park saved my life, how cliché. But...it's true. A walk to Little Italy for San Gennaro, a love affair with Queens that I wasn't ready for. Thoughts of a lost boy obscured by my own dusty path home. But home nonetheless, closer than I've had and further away than....

...This is my New York phase 1. Fresh from Chicago crisis, green and hungry. Walk for miles each day and return back different than I was. Crazy with newness, homesick and silly, in love with in love at my new rented place.

"and it's 4 in the morning, and I'm walking along
beside the ghost of every drinker here who has ever done wrong"

The weather got cooler and the outside got darker. A quick jaunt east to a Brooklyn I'd read about, consciously adhering to its spot in history, a secret personal pride about my place in (though always outside of) it. While I constantly check to see who's checking me. But I'll never admit that. So. Shh. Thanksgiving centered around beef stew and store-bought cinnamon rolls and each bite sees a shift in expectation. Bob Dylan gives way to David Bowie who wrote a song for him and several for me. Little boy lost gets found and little girl trips and falls, and trips, and falls.

...This is my second New York phase which establishes me once and for all as a non-entity and which systematically destroys and makes bloated my self-confidence. I agree to tough it out but only because I'm embarassed by failure. Not because I want to and not because I believe that I'll survive.

"so if you're lonely why'd you say you're not lonely"

A winter that sees me stranded, god damn did the blizzard really need to stick me in Park Slope? Long commutes and boiling subways and for the first time I realize I'm happy to stay home at night. Bad delivery pizza and cheap wine from my plexi-glassed local sadden me but there is none more convenient. Lonesome becomes me and music? I don't remember music, but I remember snow and I remember indoors.

...I don't know much of me in winter. I think that I was tired and I quit a job in Queens (I'm very sorry, darling) and I watched a lot of flamenco and must have celebrated some holidays and somewhere I got myself another year older. That can't be all but? Maybe that's the point.

"and I must confess, my hearts all broke in pieces
and my head's a mess"

Tom Waits, scream me a lullaby while I drink my coffee water (ice melted long ago) at a coffeeshop in this scorching city, oh, has all of the wind died? And, oh, where have all the PC's gone? Away, certainly, from this nutjob town where efficiency trumps all and Trump trumps none. Tom Waits, give way to Elvis (well, hello) singing Christmas songs out of season while the crumbs of my almond croissant scatter themselves across the table, butter pastry defenseless against a ceiling fan with an agenda. An agenda of which I have none after two months of nothing but.

...New York phase well, I forget. A rare second of respite at least. I've recently traveled from East to Midwest, back East again and a four-hour turnaround then to Washington DC, itself a confused jumble of architecture and status symbols different from any I've ever seen. Grateful to be back because, my dears, a surprise: I've fallen in love again.

"well it's a big big city and it's always the same"

Home to heat up leftover Indian food, into my room for a documentary when I smell food and smoke, open my door to two new friends who invite me to sit down, eat, play a game of cards. Then settle onto my (our) couch, look at my (our) table and...our...bookshelves and talk 'til it's light. And into bed to hold a hand and smile to sleep. Is this forever, as my eyes close, forever is awful long. But forever, also, is a thing I've never thought and here I am.

(That was yesterday.)

And then was today, when I danced in the rain.