New York City
6.28.2008
I've made it to New York City and I sit here at Lisa's 50's diner kitchen table overlooking her firescape. The apartment is quiet this morning as she catches a few more zzz's before we head out for more adventures. All week I have written in a small green notebook with graph paper. Somehow the little cubes fill in like small graphs and my journaling is suddenly measurable. Forty cubes filled yesterday, eighty-nine cubes today. I wish I had a golden number: this many cubes until you find exactly what you have been questioning. I wants something to shout "this is it!"-- this is writing, love, eating, body image, support, twenty-seven-ness, marriage, sound control, the plot, etc. This is YOU and you are above and beyond okay.
Upon arrival last Wednesday, I got the opportunity to loiter around the New York Public Library. The weather was nothing short of heavenly with sky blue sky and a very sweet breeze bending it's way through the cafe tables & hostas. I wrote for about three hours-- and also observed. I love the tourist- the uninhibited tourist with a camera slung around his neck and and a desire to look upward and around. I wish we all would forever capture this desire to explore, to look around so hard that we want to actually take a picture of what our own eye sees. To look up in even our most routine, mundane mornings.
Lisa lives in Brooklyn and I have never felt so child-less. Neither has Lisa- the strollers & hip mommies are everywhere. And they all have fabulous arm muscles because they carry these massive strollers up and down the subway stairs. I've seen this one woman show and it is incredible. This is not the time in my life for breeding. I am not ready to mix turpentine & babies. I feel perhaps I am almost moving backward. The classic Scooby Doo scene plays in my mind: the team tip-toeing backward down a hallway thinking the monster is in front of them until Scooby steps back onto a foot and it isn't Shaggy. It's the monster.
What I love about Lisa is the way she joins a team effort one hundred percent. We are on a quest to have the least New York City experience. What I mean is, forget touring the Empire State Building or even toiling in Central Park (as much as I do adore Central Park). Instead, we have made my trip to New York campy and exploratory. We canoed a Brooklyn canal whilst enjoying the way the setting sun made little rainbows in the oil slicks that our paddle broke up with every row. We had never felt more alone than we felt in a canal among stacks of old bathtubs, scrap metal, & retired cranes towering above us. We also went horseback riding in Prospect Park and the socio-economical juxtaposition/ bizzare-ness of riding a horse through so many types of parties, gatherings, and religious ceremonies is something I can only explain in person. Or pictures. Pictures to come.
We have one more full day together and I am preparing to sit outside on her apartment firescape to write for a tad. Ninety little squares or twenty little squares: I'm not sure how many I will need to fill in today to make everything right. I do know that a journal that was super sleek before I left for New York now looks like an actual journal with pages bent & smudged. I guess that's part of the battle, right? Living can be muddy.
Slow Show by The National
"I wanna hurry home to you/ put on a dumb, slow show for you/ and crack you up/ you know I dreamed about your for twenty nine years before I saw you/ I missed you for twenty-nine years"