Closer all the time

gifts

Hi, thanks so much for being here. This will be the last essay of 2023. I appreciate all of your support this year, and hope you continue to be here into 2024. xoxo.

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I wake up and I’m dumbstruck with revelation. It’s simple. I’m just lucky. 

In twenty-four hours, I will leave New York for the holidays. There’s so much to do before the trip, but I let myself be languorous for longer than usual.

I bike to East Williamsburg to see friends I missed all weekend because I was tired, hungover, or wanting to hide out. I nibbled a piece of toast to ease my roiling stomach while they tell me stories about the night I missed. 

After I give each friend a hug and a promise to see them soon, I have lunch with two poet friends. I find it incredible that I get to be friends with two poets who are in love with each other. Of course, they let me wax poetic about my life. They don’t judge me. One of them says, you treat New York like it’s Paris. I say New York is better than Paris.

I walk with them through Williamsburg in the rain. I can’t believe how lucky I was to witness my poet friends’ love story from the very beginning. I tell them this. And that we’re so lucky to be writers. To get to have this gift, which is just a way of seeing the world. That we get to think all day.

Hurrying through Lorimer, I pass a new friend in the tunnel as I head towards the G. New York is better than Paris. It constantly brings us all back together.

Briefly I regret trying to talk to strangers at parties the night before about my theories. I asked a stranger what really moved him. He didn’t know what I meant. When I rephrased my question, he said crypto.

What I don’t regret from the night before: sitting cross-legged on the floor with my best friend talking about the characters in my novel like they were real. Listening to her wisdom and wit. Agreeing to follow each other into this night and every night we can.

In bed now, I lie on my stomach and listen to a playlist I made to try to sum up my year. I compile lists in my journal. Everything I set out to do that I did, everyone I kissed, every concert I went to, every party I hosted. I realize how impossible it is to make lists about everything I’ve experienced in twelve months. 

The rain continues. I love Sundays. I can architect an entire day around my desires. Nothing is urgent. I realized this year how good it can be to just rest.

In the kitchen, I eat peanut butter with a spoon directly from the jar. I’m so hungry all the time. I attend to my hunger. I behave like a child because I’ve never been younger than I am now. In a year, I’ve learned to let myself do what my younger self would have punished herself for. This year my therapist asked me when I started to crave punishment. I couldn’t answer.

I’m lucky. I can’t count the ways because I would spill over. I have everything I wanted. There are moments when I don’t even think I’ve had to work that hard. It’s just happened. Some cosmic lottery that’s rigged so I keep winning.

That I even get to write this. Dumb luck.

I can’t stop listening to a song with the lyrics: I’ve been thinking about our storyline / how the past becomes the present if it’s always on your mind. Over the last year, I’ve fallen out of love with the past. I’ve begun to believe in a different theory of time. That is, it’s only the present that exists.

The lights are all off in my apartment. I’ve brushed my hair. My bags are packed. I won’t be back until the morning. I kiss my cats, lock the door, and slip out into the night.

I walk through Bed-Stuy to say one last goodbye for now. The Christmas lights on Jefferson and Marcus Garvey are ridiculously garish. I realize I’m hurrying. Slower now. I seem to be always rushing. Not because I feel rushed, but because I feel compelled. It’s comforting to know this—that I’ve been moved once, I’ll be moved again.

My neighborhood is the best one in Brooklyn. I’m sorry if you disagree. It simply is. My neighborhood solidified my rhythms. Home now. Running east. Picking up groceries at the coop. Walking down Tompkins to the train. The canopies of trees that cradle my street. The kids on their walks home from school. Every sweetness I’ll miss like I’d miss a lover even though it will only be about a week apart.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back in the house I grew up in. I’ll walk the ten acres that I wandered as a kid making up stories that I’d never write down. I played pretend every day. I grew older, then I began to record in earnest. So much I’d forget. In a few days, I’ll sit down and write this. Trying and failing to write something else. I hope this is enough.   

Tomorrow, I’ll land in North Carolina and remember there’s such a thing as an uninterrupted sky.

It’s been a year and a half since I moved to New York. I realized that something I love so much about living here is that things feel possible in a way that hasn't for me anywhere else. I can rebuild what was broken by chance alone. 

It’s all a fluke, in a good way. There’s not really another way to explain it.

All night the wind blows magnificently. We wake a few times surprised that the other is there. That I’ll wake in the morning and have to hurry to the airport is a small tragedy. I’d rather sleep in, catch a later flight. Little fantasies that are just that. There’s only so much time we can steal before we separate. Still I steal and steal and steal.

There’s so much to do, but I believe someone when they tell me we have plenty of time.

In September, when I landed in New York after a trip out west, I knew a chapter of my life had ended. I felt propelled forward, that everything I thought I wanted was just confused priorities. What I wanted was to be free. Whatever that meant. As we inched down Bushwick Avenue, I knew the choice had been mine all along. 

All my lessons I wear like a necklace. A delicate gold chain that my fingers don’t need to untangle. I never feel trapped, only free. No matter what, I told a friend, we’ve made a beautiful life out of so much rubble.

I understand now what a gift it is to be robust and sturdy. What a gift to be in another’s world that previously I was only orbiting. What a gift to bring others into mine. What a gift to show them, despite our intense bonds, that I’m a home unto myself.

There’s a chance we keep making the same mistake again and again. At least for a while. This is a gift. I wouldn’t change any of my mistakes. I don’t have regrets, only lessons. Memories that propel me down the avenue. They’re not ties binding me to the past, but a long spool of ribbon that I hold with one hand as I continue to move forward. I’m only as free as I let myself be.  

It’s a gift to be adored. To be held in the way you need to be held. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be moved again and again. It is a gift to know that no one and everyone can save you.

I just want to tell you this. I’ve been so naive, but it’s been my greatest gift.