In New York, every life transition, birthday, good day, bad day or anything else worth mentioning, is marked with a party. A glass of wine over dinner, an outdoor café with friends, a little bubbly with coworkers, or whatever’s in a can at the nearest dive bar with the people that make a New York afternoon so much better. In just a few days, there will be a party for me – one that says, this party’s over.
If I look hard, I can still find the girl that came here three years ago, the one that looked like me and used my name. She’s still there and sometimes late at night I can hear her breathe. I can still feel her heart flutter at the lights of midtown rising at the feet of the Queensborough bridge one late, cold March night. I can still taste the sweet sweat and the iron blood of a city that births dreams and suffocates them all in the same breath. I can still hear the non-sound that Wall Street made as it fell in the bleary winter days of 2009 just a few streets down from our vanquished yet shiny new glass office building – just a silent settling of dust on the shoulders of the nicest suits in town. I can still remember the bright, grainy days of pitted concrete and perfect blue glass when I wondered if this was real – all of this, was this actually real. And I can still see my barely-made New York friends through an empty, foggy bottle of vodka from the floor of my newly rented apartment the day they told us my brother had cancer. It is those friends, and those lights, and that same non-sound that I must prepare to say goodbye to now.
If there were words that existed that could capture all the people I have met here –those I have loved, those who I have missed, those who I have learned from, adored, admired, frowned at and observed from close range – then I would use those words now. But they escape me. Evade me in disguise when called upon but fill me with the magnetic presence of their many subjects just the same. Because I – I am not the same.
People come to New York to own it – and they lease it instead. They come to meet new people – and meet themselves instead. They come to live their dream – and reinvent their dream to live… or live even beyond their dream instead. They (like me) come here shirking sadness like drugstore robbers on the interstate…and leave with that same uniformed sadness turned outlaw. Sadness dressed up nice and living out loud. Garnished generously with some of the best friends and best moments you’ve ever had in your life.
I’ve had the last of my shots now, the last of my chances to turn back and the last of those once coveted doors close softly. I wanted Africa, now I’ve got it. A one way ticket and one hell of an excel spreadsheet. Like tinfoil onto a fire – throw me in. Send me there by his side and see if I believe myself long enough to remember why I went in the first place. When will I return and as whom? It’s anyone’s guess and my best kept secret from myself.
But one thing is for certain. Like a long-time lover, I could not have lived without you New York. I could not have faced the world without your bawdy, exhilarating touch. Could not have arm-wrestled with my sorry, broken sense of self without your thick-lipped, relentless demands and your late night flirtations with my sanity. Could not have died a slow, senseless death before opening my eyes to some unrecognizable, surprisingly capable human being, bearing my very own name and my old college T-shirts. Could not have known life, jeered at life, done time with life, fell at life’s knees and even saved a life without you…my New York.
So lets you and I drink up the last drop, bring down the house and hold each other close before slinking away into the dark. One more round and one more toast to those who have saved me, most of all from myself. It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.
New York city. No where to run. No where to hide. No where to cry in peace. No space of your own to feel your earlobes fill with blood and your body ask you softly where you’ve come and how you got here. Its just you and…new York city. Here together. And you haven’t forgiven each other. And you haven’t told each other how you feel. Even though you know goodbye is hanging in the wings. Once the curtain falls. Once the light disappears on the west side while you drop your gaze into the lightless East River. Once your eyes grow tired of your own reflection. Once the lights of downtown grow lightless in your heart and render you sightless in their glare. Tonight you’ll lay down next to the lover who’s soon to be long lost – a city that will never speak your name again as if you never haunted its walls. And you will come to realize that it wasn’t your name it called out on those un-lonely nights. It was its own.
The boardwalk grows dark but never cool on a sweltering July night. The hot garbage splayed out under the FDR grows sour fingers on the warm wind. Was it solitude you escaped here for? Was it meditation, contemplation or were you simply visiting fantasy’s gravesite in the dark, moving like an urban ghost along with the sub-80-degrees mid-summer runners. Whatever you came for, you find nothing but the uncanny feeling of being watched constantly by the living. Not even the darkness on the east river can excuse you from an unraveled, uncontemplated appearance – for a moment in your life that you visibly didn’t prepare for. Long Island City lends no skyline and no soundtrack as you hang your elbows over the railing, in hopes that the angle and the darkness will shield you from the prying eyes that pass behind. Shield you from the non-view of your life that you cherish, snub and ignore. And then it comes.
The skirt around your legs opens to let in a hot wind and the curious bugs on its breeze. The moment you came for. All the boats already swallowed by the dusk. The runners steeped in sightless sweat. The water-watchers sweatered in expected silence on the stoop of shore-less swells – under the eyes of an expressionless evening. Nothing escapes us and our unseeing eyes. Like falcons riding the hot summer air, we bear the blood we seek. It is we who haunt the sidewalks that we fear the most. We are the watched, the watchers and the watchless. We are New York City.
People do a lot for their dreams. Depending what it is that a dream requires. Spite, spit or spirit. That’s the stuff. If your dream asks things of you – spine and sacrifice – do you then wonder what you are asking of your dream? To become a self above all selves? To only be real when seen? To walk between the moments like Jesus in between the raindrops? To win the battles you are already winning, just in your sleep? To step into the spotlight looking exactly how you planned to look? And if yours is a real (and I mean really real) kind of dream, what wouldn’t you do for it because you are afraid that it might fail you…then you would be left with no dream at all?
I wanted to be a writer in first grade. I wanted to write stories and draw the pictures too with my crayons that would appear glossy on published pages. A quiet and reverential child, I wanted to see myself on those pages; my eyes looking back in the pictures that I drew for the words that I had written. And then, in a real book, the real me would truly be seen. My existence pored over, line by line, and my little hand an apprentice to a product that would be so much bigger and better than I. The human story told by a little girl where everyone in the story matters – even the ones who don’t talk.
My elementary school had a miniature book binding machine. The librarian would take the stories we wrote and bind them into a little feux-leather books with real bindings, real pages and real pictures we drew. I wrote hoardes of them and waited anxiously to get them back in different colors, warm from the machine. I wrote one story called the mermaid dragon. It took place in China and a half-mermaid-half dragon genie gave a poor shoeless boy a chance at happiness however he defined it. In the end he chose love over riches of course. And the whole storyline was eerily similar if not completely plagiarized from Aladdin. A local children’s writing contest picked it up. I won and I got to read it at our local mall. That day in that big empty suburban mall on an early Sunday morning reading a story that wasn’t completely mine, I felt like I had finally found my place in the world – at the table of humankind and among the ranks of those I admired. I was six.
Now I’m older. I work at a magazine – a good one. And it’s in a very nice big glass office in downtown Manhattan. I work at a desk and I have people who believe in my abilities as a marketer. I know how to engineer an e-blast with authority, experiment with different ways of writing a message to get people to do things and I’m a diligent taxpayer. I work for recognition, socialization and rent. And I realize that this is a very respectable, if not admirable way to live. You don’t always have to earn your keep in the world, you know. And you especially don’t have to do it in the ways that make it into the movies. Some of the most gracious, giving and inspirational public people I’ve met in the big Apple have clean collars, great stories …and very self-serving underbellies that you only discover with lipstick over a drink. Yes, I could very well live like this happily – knowing and not contorting or over-revealing myself, using the time of my life to make friends not feux-leather-bound books and bad habits that come easy and die hard.
Ah but sometimes I do wonder. Those pesky raindrop life-filler moments that I cant seem to walk between. Its right what they say about me. Usually over drinks and usually while spending money I don’t have and usually after some small human interaction has made me want to kiss the world all better with big wet lips and big tears salting my salmon fritters. They are right to ask me what I have done for my dream lately. What publications have I submitted to. How many hours of non-marketing copy have I written this week. What unheard voice am I giving song to today. Not tomorrow. Tomorrows just get thrown away with last night’s trash. And they are right to criticize. Because when I come home and I hang up my clothes (I’ll probably buy more tomorrow) and I go to the freezer for cheap vodka (setting my alarm for work in the morning beforehand)…its then that the nip of that dream brings me hard and fast to my knees with a quick, warm bite right to the heart. And it doesn’t get its teeth from being leather-bound, velvet-roped or reeking of Carrie Bradshaw. It’s the uncalculated, constantly miscarried but somehow trustworthy current that runs through the middle of me when I do just what I am doing now. When the words come and most of the time I hate them but some of the time they light perfectly upon the very moments of my life like afternoon sun on a running gutter brook. Flighty, transient and dirty but ever so worth sitting on the curb to watch. Tiny beads of belief that open the heart like a jewelry box with a crowbar. And the truth is, blogosphere, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I don’t chase this dream because I’m desparately afraid of losing it. Forever. Its the worst excuse I can think of for ignoring a dream and I’m it. Maybe they are right. Maybe someday they will say over cognac and chinese take out, “That girl, she sure had heart, but she don’t got no gumption.” If they say anything at all. Because I sure never did.
