That which stands tall, that which frays

I have no exoskeleton. I have no bottom underneath. I remind myself of the helpers. Right on cue, one appears.

The man understands instantly that all is not well. He comes bearing a soothing voice and all manner of assistance. I was not expecting the bouquet but after the first smack of surprise, I realize it is just what I need.

The bouquet is not a professional floral arrangement. It’s Queen Ann’s Lace, those tiny blue flowers I don’t know the name of, dandelions plump and yellow. Best of all are sprigs of lavender. I fill a canning jar with water, snip the bottoms of everything and put the gift on my table, stems splaying at angles, others upright. I breathe in the grassy smells and especially the lavender.

Other helpers come because they are called, I go out to meet others. They arrive in the form of words or provisions. It’s alright, all of it. How many times, have I, in fact, been the helper? Too many times to count? Yes.

For days upon days, the flowers brighten and refuse to fade. Blooms I didn’t notice when the bouquet arrived unfurl and blossom. I know it won’t last forever, this flower show in the midst of it all. It went on longer than I thought it would. That’s important to mention.

Slowly, then quickly the inevitable transpires. Eventually it all ends up in the garbage. The memories carry me a little, until they don’t.

I make a phone call to the man who brought the kind eyes, the bouquet. I can’t expect him to read my mind even if he did do so that one time.

He is scattered, sorry I am not well, but his voice is too brusque for patience. When I mention the bouquet and gather my resources to ask for another, he finds this funny. You can’t depend on flowers! That is not what they are for! The idea of him keeping me supplied with bouquets strikes him as ludicrous. He’s still laughing when I say a hasty goodbye. Someone is at the door, I lie.

I realize that the man has empathy that flits on and off like a faulty wire.

I vent about it to the others. It amuses me. But I am still unwell.

Somebody suggests I learn to sit with anger, learn to tolerate the discomfort. This I cannot do.

It is winter, there are no flowers in the park even if I could justify picking them. The weeds nobody cares about are dead. There is no money for the florist even if I like what they have, which I don’t.

I rifle around for leftovers, anything to be put to use. A rainbow of construction paper, a stash of pipe cleaners, tissue paper, yarn. The YouTube videos are too crafty, too calculated. I am left with myself. I make my own damned bouquet, stick it in a proper vase, then tape some individual flowers, all misfits, to the walls.

He shows up some days or weeks later, everything blends together now. He brings wisdom he thinks I want and some books of advice. He means well.

What’s the matter, he finally asks, brows furrowed. He can’t figure this out. Nothing, I say.

From the archives:
Pegboard
Hospitality
Check Back With Me Later

Music Lover

Two thousand eighteen turned into two thousand nineteen and even a small slice of two thousand twenty. His average concert attendance was probably around once a week.

But averages tell an incomplete story. There were the nights when he zigzagged all over the city, attending three distinct and separate musical performances in one evening. More often than not he could go to as many as four intriguing gigs at any given time, but unable to clone himself, chose the most important, the cheapest, the newest, or the most convenient. If he could be physically present at more than one concert he would. 

Often he extended invitations to other music lovers but having a friend along was not a deal breaker. The truth is, he didn’t care much one way or the other. At least three quarters of the time he went alone. 

He’d go from home, comfortable in his own skin, clad in jeans and a tee shirt bought at another band’s merch table, taking a train to the upper west side or a crazy quilt of transportation to some out of the way neighborhood at the edge of nowhere. He liked stadium shows and tiny intimate venues.

He’d go straight from work, dressed for the office, the oldest guy in the room, people  assuming he was the manager or from the label. 

Eventually he organizes himself differently around after-work performances. He brings jeans, a signature tee shirt and casual socks to work. Concerts outside of the rarified classical or New Music genres can be sticky affairs. He does not relish the idea of spilt beer on his dress shoes or briefcase. In changing from one costume to another, he refuses to be placed in a box. He had the satisfaction of surprising colleagues, who only knew the business side of him.

If good music was playing or had been played, he belonged there. This belonging, giving himself a seat at the table allowed him to stride purposefully to the bar, the front of the stage or backstage to talk to the headliner, the drummer, the raw opening band singer, the accomplished cellist. Knowing that he loved a good musical hang, and would be late coming home I insisted on a cab. He complied.

Rock, folk, hip hop. classical, avant-garde. country. Music impossible to define. Blockbuster acts almost everyone liked, folks no one has heard of but him and half a dozen people. Nose bleed seats at Carnegie Hall. Standing for hours, eyes affixed on the tiny stage. Dancing wildly among strangers at a DJ set. One of the crowd at Madson Square Garden. Folded into a camp chair in leafy Prospect Park. Every one of them is his happy place. He’s not put off by the minuscule smattering of people at a brave, first concert. He is also perfectly fine being cheek by jowl in a  sweaty, overheated mess. 

More often than not a concert will have a second life. He likes nothing better than to tell other people what to listen to and why. He will work his words, his photographs, his intricate impressions into a story. He will remember every musician’s name and every note. He will notice what they do not notice themselves. 

He is not an epidemiologist or a fortune teller. He doesn’t know what a pandemic will be like until he is in one. One day he is squeezed around a table, listening to a vocalist with the voice of an angel, a windswept walk away from home. He thinks nothing of leaning in close to our friends, friends of friends, and friends’ new boyfriends to whisper between songs. The next instant he is locked up. 

Heroes go to work and ride the subway but everyone else is on lockdown. He’s cooped up, but so are the musicians. Everybody regroups. 

He shows up in virtual spaces and is not constrained by the rectangle to which he’s relegated. Singers, guitar players, people making their own instruments. He’s witness to their living rooms and basements, empty stages, the accidents happy and unhappy. 

He casts live concerts, enlarged and hyperreal to the TV. He plays vinyl, old and new on his turntable. He stands before his collection, and transfixed, pulls out a CD and stares. Music accompanies him while working remotely at our dining table, soft and low. His movements are curtailed by four walls but because of screens he travels to other continents, cultures, and time zones. He is witness to musicians reinventing themselves and they see him too.

He is rapt as though this were his chosen path, the only place to be. 

He must miss his former life. There was a time when he breathed the very same air as these musicians. Never once did he behave as though a Zoom concert was second fiddle. Not once did he complain. 

When his turn comes, he’s vaccinated. Afterwards he remains cautious and calmly watchful. The two year old child I lost to cancer was his too. He knows that life is fragile. He is not afforded denial. He makes do without it.

When the CDC says that vaccinated people can do whatever they like, he hangs back. When they change their stance, he is unsurprised. He has an inner compass which tells him what to do. It tells him to be careful.

Like a rare jewels or diamonds in the rough, some live music beckons him and he follows. He attends a concert at dusk in a historic, old cemetery. As the sun sets he walks about, masked and in like company, from one musical station to the next. For one precious evening those living mingle with the dead. 

He briefly digs in his heels about a gathering in a city park to honor a famous dead musician. It is the one time when his patience around the pandemic becomes frayed and britttle. As the guest list expands, then bloats to a number he deems unreasonable he reluctantly stays home. 

He attends an outdoor concert on a brand new island cooled by wind coming off of the water.

A favorite musician plays in an apple orchard and he shows up. Musicians can be afraid too. Musicians gather a community in the freshest, safest, most fruit and tree perfumed air. They do his bidding and he theirs. 

If the weather holds, if the pandemic doesn’t get any worse, if a natural disaster doesn’t threaten the shoreline, he is scheduled to go to a concert soon. He will be listening to live music. He will be listening while seated in a canoe. 

From the archives:
I suffered for their art
Take This Inspiration And Shove It
Lucky

Even The Locusts Wouldn’t

It works its way under my clothes
Traces my spine then spins around front 
Finding every tiny paper cut and scrape
Before pooling dark and syrupy
Where it always meets me
Where it likes to go 

Then, because it can
It finds me at home 
Coming in the back way, down the basement stairs
It works together with the termites who arrived first
It eats through the cellar floor then onto the foundation
Turning all that once stood firm to dust

Finishing there 
It moves to my pretty tended garden
A modest but colorful affair 
It takes its food and fodder 
Then fortified and ready 
It swings itself, catty corner, across the street
Smug and full of itself
To my wretched neighbor’s yard 

From the archives:
Shana Tova
Scissors
Mammalia

Pegboard

First comes the intention.

The place on the wall that will eat up two junk drawers and a broken toolbox. The stuff squirreled away in closets that we keep forgetting we have. The desire to make our home neater, lovelier better. To make ourselves all of these things, too. 

The measuring tape binds us to what can and can never be. We have this much wall space and no more. A hardware store smelling of wood grain and eggshell paint. A slab of hope and ambition in the form of plywood with almost infinite numbers of  tiny holes. A choice not to paint our cut-to-order purchase. A pegboard allowed to be itself.

A level. A drill dusted off and loudly employed. Hardware in five different sizes lined up and waiting. Minimalism will soon become a jumble of sizes, colors, patinas, new, and well-used. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

One by one, we examine what used to live in the dark. Most things go up easily. Like with like, clustered together in more or less sensical fashion. 

One item remains. It won’t hang from a neat loop, it won’t balance between two hooks. It’s too big, unweildly, irregular. It’s not useful. It doesn’t match the array on the pegboard, nor does it belong with anything else. We’d throw it away, but neither one of us can bring ourselves to do it. The reasons are too numerous and complicated to go into now.

Alone on a shelf, unhoused, singleton.
Trash or jewel, not everything fits. 

From the archives:
Five Minutes
Picture Edit
The very second you lost me

Be exacting. Measure. Make that second nature.

Ride the subway from Upper Manhattan to Brooklyn in the morning, then over to Queens in the afternoon. Rush to class on the Upper West Side. Head on home. Board the Metro North to Westchester the next day, ride share to my destination, then reverse the whole thing come evening. Cut quite a figure across the tri-state area for the rest of the week.

Assume that my feet take the brunt of it, but it’s not just them doing the heavy lifting. The bus doesn’t pay any mind to one more. Keep getting on. 

Have shaky standards. Visit with this one and that, combine folks randomly. Never ask who pleases or fills my cup. Wear myself out with volumes of everybody and in-person, no less. 

Seal myself off. Listen to science. Embellish it.

Adapt seamlessly. Surprise myself. Don’t burden the doctors and nurses. Do these things for a long time.

Watch as helpers come with provisions that will one day, at a time and place of my choosing, be my slow ticket out of here. 

Let almost everybody else go first. No destination is benign. 

Make it simple. Say yes to yes places. Maybe means no. 

Never forget what happened while locked up. Eyes that crinkled around the edges, perfectly matching the smile inside the rectangle. Those who asked for help. Those who made old timey phone calls or wrote generous, multisyllabic words in sentences with punctuation. Those who came to find me. Those who left me where I was.

Let the world work harder before getting up from the ground to meet it halfway. Plant the seedlings but when something is dead on the vine, go ahead and compost it. Better yet, put in in the landfill. There’s a time for haste. 

When leaves dazzle in twelve gradients of green. When the answer is either gunshots or fireworks. Garbage strewn about, flies and dank. Fine fresh air with a hint of lilac. A perfectly calibrated air conditioner. 

Have one rule for people. Make ambivalence I can taste and smell a hard no. 

Peripheral vision is a privilege. Use it. Listen to the shift in color. Hope made it all a mystery before. It never was. People tell me what I need to know. 

Whatever it is. Whoever. Allow it to speak. Then rise up and make it mutual. 

From the archives:
Before, now, then wide open
Rending
The sun it did rise again

Hospitality

There’s a hierarchy of vessels in every kitchen. I am not even eyeing the huge soup pots or mixing bowls. That would be selfish.

The pitchers are what I have in mind. They’re lined up, pretty and gleaming on your shelves. But the ladle sticking out of the jug would be just fine. 

All of this discussion of containers is because you’ve concocted something I want. 

What I ask for and what I get are two different things. You come over with an offering balanced in a measuring spoon. It’s hard to imagine a smaller pittance.

I’m allotted a tablespoon of something precious and there are a dozen mason jars holding the rest. You earmark those for yourself and other people. 

I sip and swallow what I am given. I expect a heady sweetness that leaves me bereft and wanting more. What I taste is unbearable bitterness. The honey you added at the end does not disguise what this is or who you are. The sudden clarity burns my throat. I don’t even say thank you. 

If you notice my departure you don’t let on. 

Everything I really need is within my own four walls. I develop tunnel vision and try that on for size. It suits me. I grow extra arms and legs.

I make a lot of something out of nothing. Everything’s arranged in the pantry and empty sections of the cupboards. What can’t be tucked away there graces the countertops and table. 

I’ve built the land of plenty with these sensible hands. A full larder makes zero sense if I never eat anything. I partake with no thought of scarcity. Hoarders be damned, there’s no problem with sharing either. 

With all of that said, with eyes wide open and gratitude coursing through my veins, I still want shallow bowls as big around as dinner plates. 

From the archives:
Tweak
I suffered for their art
Hydration 

The long fade

I’m not talking about a suitcase hurriedly stuffed and thrown in the trunk.

What this really looks like is a glass half-filled and warm, leaving a tepid ring on the side table. There’s the garden I once tended that’s grown wily and coarse. The paint is allowed to peel, leaving a clear sight line to the writing on the wall.

You’re the steward of the overripe fruit and flies. I see you cling to the threadbare, aged beyond needle and thread. Perfectly good you say as you stubbornly save everything I’ve said goodbye to already.

In my own little corner I’ve gathered the brand new moving boxes and crisp shopping bags. I’ll put some of my stuff in there. What doesn’t make the cut will get sun bleached to cyan or die on the vine where I left it. Because my work is slow, the job will be three-quarters done before you even notice. 

From the archives:
Modern Narcissus 
Five Minutes 
Radio Silence 

Zinger

This conversation has taken a turn.
Because you’re working my last nerve, I look at the time.
I say something.
It isn’t diplomatic. True, though.
It lands with a satisfying thud. 
I get up and put some money on the table. 
In one swift move, both literal and symbolic.
I’m leaving you alone with it.

From the archives:

Accelerant 

Five Minutes 

Careful Words

Memoir

You throw open your front door wide in invitation, but soon I’ll come in the side entrance. Everyone knows who is company and who can just go around the back. 

You’re generous with yourself. You show me around. You don’t apologize for the piles of dirty laundry on the floor, or the baskets of clean, unfolded clothes waiting at the base of the staircase. 

Things are lived in but there are moments of exquisiteness. Photographs on the walls, unframed works in progress curling at the edges. The teapot you pour from passed down through generations. There’s a story for each of these things. You tell me the stories.

The soft sciences advise us that self-disclosure creates intimacy. There is something disarming about you. I’m intoxicated by your candor. Your command of language is breathless if a bit audacious. You are a page turner except when you’re not.

Occasionally, you get mired in the details. You look deeply into yourself, your heritage, your process. Even less frequently, you forget that my eyes, ears, self are still here. 

During these times, I look at you full on. You don’t mind my staring the way most people would. You have the kind of wide set eyes and cheekbones which invite words like breeding and society. Your folks have been here longer than mine.

There is no denying this lineage, not in the serviceable overalls you wear for comfort, the handcrafted farm table your husband made himself, a ferile, unladylike manner, age creeping about your eyes. The paint spattered, broken-in loafers you wear around the house cost you a pretty penny thirty years ago.

Because you married above your station, your offspring are even more finely drawn, their countenance begging for the artist, even - especially - luminous while just being messy, insolent children.

You engage me once more, knitting your story together. You connect all back to you spanning land, time, elders. You do this directly but also hold back with intention, allowing me to fill in the blanks. There is absolutely nothing reciprocal going on here. 

Still, I am rapt. I participate by noticing the uncanny, the apples not falling far from the tree, an apt metaphor with an orchard blooming right outside.

My own story, told in drips and drabs for a tiny audience, if you can even call it that, is held in suspension. With you, it’s clear who is who, who is the teller and who is the recipient. This is not a conversation. 

A familiar unease takes up residence in me. You serve up one picture, one report card, one remembrance too many. I soldier on. I finish what I start. 

Unlike some people with a pinnacled purpose, wanting to teach something or help the world, you hold no such elevation. Here is what you’d say, if you talked about it at all. This is about me and mine and nobody else. The applause and prizes serve as buttresses and for the time being, hold you up. 

Our visits have an arc, and like all things, come to an end. It’s been a sprawling, weighty chunk of time. I’ll fill in the hole you leave behind with more of the same, but cut from a different cloth. Somehow, there will be less talent but more grace. One of your brethren will have an expanse of story paired with economy of words, a balm for my own exhausted, not charmed life.

From the archives:
Before, now, then wide open
The Book
Rations

Accelerant

I never actually wanted to build a campfire.

But I’m on a beach with the air getting cold. There’s a rough hewn circle with a few logs. I have a lighter. All the kindling I need is up for grabs, in the woods. 

As if in a dream I build the fire. I’d been resistant to the idea but the ease is almost shocking. Soon I’m sitting in the warm glow, as the night grows darker. It’s a tidy fire, but the heat and smoky, woodsy aromas are real.  

You see me sitting there, tending my little fire. You don’t want to put it out. You don’t walk away either. You don’t join me in my quest to keep my fire contained.

You spend some time fanning the flames. You pour some gasoline on there. It’s scary but also beautiful. I don’t know what you will do next.

All I can really do is watch. I’m frozen. I watch you and I watch myself watch you. 

After all that effort you bring buckets of water over. Things turn grey and acrid. The ground becomes boggy under our feet.

By the time you leave, nothing is left of the glade. It’s scorched earth. In the end, water won, but not before you burned down the trees and blackened everything surrounding them. Thick smoke rises into the sky. Whatever this was, it’s over. 

I’m wearing flannel but feel naked. My hair smells bitter. It will take many shampoos to wash this night away, and even then, there will be a tinge.

Slowly, without Interface from me, the rectangle of earth will replenish itself. Seeds will blow over from trees unscathed by you. Hardy, adaptable plants will sprout here and there. Soon there will be lush overgrowth.

I’ll plant some trees to move it along. Some things will be the same as before, but most of it will be different. The collaboration between myself and regeneration will not be for nought. I don’t have to worry about you doing this again. It’s clear you aren’t coming back, and my belief in that is full and whole.

From the archives:
The Book
Rending
Take This Inspiration And Shove It

Listen
I understand now
What will take you weeks to know
I implement now
What you will stumble and scramble to do
Someday hence
Tripping over everybody else
Grasping at empty
In thin, tired air
Worsted, wishing
You’d listened then

From the archives:
Rending
Take This Inspiration And Shove It
The sun it did rise again 

Mammalia

There’s a tingling in the space between me and not me.
I’m aware of being an animal.

Are you walking these streets?
The hairs on my arms stand up to reach you before the rest of me.

Is it the wind? Or your breath on the back of my neck?
Its useless to ask.
So I question nothing anymore.

Whatever it is.
You are that potent.
One of these things is true.
There is no wrong answer for this.


From the archives:
Testosterone
Time, As Few Of Us Know It
The very second you lost me

Rending

I’m furious.

With it comes an energy.

Do something, it said.

I’m compassionate.  I helped. When I couldn’t help, I tried.

Do something else, it said.

My hands needed to be in on the action.

So this is what I did with that.

From the Archives:
Take This Inspiration And Shove It
The High Cost Of Being Me
Rations

Be still

Here is my steady wish
A horizon line of glassy water
A fine, calm mirror
For the firs and clouds and whatever else awaits you

A heartbeat sweet and slow
A dry brow
An easy smile
The crinkle around the eyes - an extra prayer!
My plans for you, selfless and unfettered

Your table laid with iced confection when hot, warm repast when cold
I hate the thought of anything less
Sunup to sundown need be for you
Ready, accommodating, alert
Shoes to hold not bind

Lay the weary to rest, let the bed rise to meet you
It’s an object, inanimate, and the one thing you don’t have to help


From the archives:
Hydration
Picture Edit
To mend

Send

I want to reach out. I don’t have enough to say. Rather, I have a lot to say, but none of it is appropriate.

Soon, there are snippets of true things that are also okay to share. I wait to have more. I want there to be a small collection. It also needs to neaten up. Right now everything is shapeless.

Over days and weeks sifting takes place. Inappropriate content remains in my head. Normal stuff gets edited down to boring vs. interesting. It helps when new things happen outside of myself and my own making. It gives me some new material to work with.

More and more transpires that can go in the yes pile.

Things work their way into a clear narrative. The actual writing flows like water.

I hit send. If only I could see what happens next. The email coming into the inbox. The reading. Unfortunately all of it is in the cloud.

I rest in the well-worn space of suspended animation. Life pauses for a moment then resumes. One thing is certain. There’s nothing else to do but wait.


From the archives:
Take This Inspiration And Shove It
If You Care
The very second you lost me

Take This Inspiration And Shove It

Somebody said people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.

And my response is this.

Fuck the reason. Fuck the season. Yes to the lifetime.

If I care about you, I really want you to stay. If I love you, I demand it.

The reason and season, do not inspire quietude, deep thought, peace, or introspection. They do not evoke acceptance. When I hear about them I’m stinking mad.

If you like it, I’m happy for you. And also, fuck you!

The entity responsible for the reason and the season is an asshole.

I’m saturated with carrying people in my heart, eliciting memories, making memories because you know that time is limited, and you know that you’re doing that. I’ve found enough meaning in loss to last a lifetime, and now I’m done.

Making the best of it? No can do.

Stop dying! Stop retiring! Stop leaving!

People come into your life for a lifetime. How about that? Is that too much to ask?


From the archives:
I answered my own question
All of the roads, they did lead here
The High Cost Of Being Me

Hydration

It’s a heat wave. I’ve done this before. I’m pretty good at it.

This is not something to be messed with. I exchange texts with my husband. I ask him to remember to pack water for his commute home. He agrees. Now I’ll worry less. Worry is what I do. I’m good at that too.

I’m already drinking water because that is how I roll.

I think about people in my social circle and wonder about how they are faring. My mind rests on one person in particular.

I think about texting him. It would be succinct. It would simply say drink water.

I don’t send the text. I reign it in. It’s a long story.

I send the drink water message telepathically. Was this a kind of prayer? Who knows?

I use what I have because worry is creeping around the edges of things. I still worry about him. This is freaking annoying. But I know better than to argue with it.

I can hear you now. He’s not a child. He can be trusted to take care of himself. This is not always true. Sometimes very smart people fail to drink water.

Anne Lamott, a favorite writer of mine wrote something that initially came as a bit of a shock. She said, “Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.”

Lately her words have settled in more. The words and I are not exactly on a first name basis yet. You could say I’m slowly becoming acquainted with them. Which is fine.

But for this particular situation, Anne Lamott’s exact words do not quite fit. So I went ahead and adapted them.

Tell your stories. If people wanted you to stop worrying about them, then they shouldn’t have told you about the time they went sightseeing alone in a foreign country, fainted at the entrance of the hotel, created a hubbub, refused an ambulance, requested a bottle of water, drank it and realized they really should have hydrated sooner.


From the archives:
Yes, Please
Chicken Scratch
Check Back With Me Later

Lucky

Its 1981. I’ve just been dropped off at college. I’d been insufferable at my high school for half the year because I couldn’t wait to get there.

Now that I’ve clearly arrived at my first-choice college and only viable option for myself, I’m starting to get uneasy. I don’t know anybody here, but then I remember that nobody knows anybody here.

There’s only one way through the uneasy feeling. I plan to go up and down the hall of the dorm. I’ll knock on everybody’s door and introduce myself. I am not going make any friends sitting in my room, especially since the college may been conducting a bizarre sociology experiment by making the three of us individuals roommates.

I knock on everyone’s door and visit the guys’ suite at the end of the hall, methodically saying hi. I am met with a friendly reception from all involved.

The room across the hall holds a family of dark-haired people. I don’t know it at the time but I’m saying hello to my future husband and in-laws.

I’ve been on campus for under three hours.

But before I can marry that guy I’ll make my way bravely to a keg party the welcome committee thoughtfully set up on the lawn. I’ll finally take a whole bunch of art classes all day, every day. I’ll vow to never take any mathematics again, and keep my word.

I’ll use the door-to-door skills honed during orientation to collect one dollar from everybody in the dorms for the parties we’d throw on Friday nights. I’ll briefly sing show tunes, skipping arm in arm across campus with one male friend and one female friend.

My future husband eventually transfers to the college. That last part is really serendipitous. One thing leads to another.

Nothing is ever a straight line. There are some notable twists and turns on the way to the altar, or in our case, a whitewashed, light-filled loft in the photo district.

For some people life unfolds slowly and incrementally. For others, it moves fast and you see your future all at once, although you almost never recognize it at the time.


From the archives:
The Water Table
Time, As Few Of Us Know It
So Long

Go ahead and say it

I could ask you to be more careful. I could ask you to choose lovelier words. Take a pause. More poetry, less logic. See me in three dimensions. See me, period.

I'm not going to do that.

Say what you want.

You said some words. I wanted to brush them off, but unfortunately they stuck, like lint.

Here's what happened next.

Every color on the street looked brighter. The skies opened up and I captured what I could, me as photographer, me as artist, leaving the rest for next time. There will be a next time.

The sadder I got about what you said, and I did get sadder and sadder, the better the palette, the bare, brave branches, the hero plants in the cracked sidewalk. This went on for a while.

I rode the subway and nobody's talking to me and we sat together in convivial silence, the strangers and me. It was glorious.

I borrowed the words of Henry David Thoreau to help my child, via text and I will save that exchange forever.

Then I employed my own imperfect, true words, crafting them this way and that, writing prose and poetry, waking up in the middle of the night to get it down, then deleting it and writing something better in the morning.

There was quite the prolific 24 hours that followed. It might not be over yet. I didn't plan it that way, but that's what happened.

It's as though something inside me needed to prove you wrong.

But alas, something else happened. You were right after all. I wish it were different, but wishing doesn't make it so.

And really, what does it mean that there were crystalline moments inside this brain of mine? It means when something bad happens I make good art. That's it.

Say what you want. Most of what you say is kind. Nobody listens better than you. Is there room for improvement? I don't know. I don't need you to be a saint.

When you say something that sounds like air being let out of a balloon or falls with a thud, know this.

It's okay. It will work out. After a time, I'll want to talk with you again. If you hadn't said what you did, I would have never written this. It wouldn't exist without you and your crappy words.


From the archives:
Yes, Please
Radio Silence
The other than 

The sun it did rise again

Like when you make new friends but keep the old and the cream always rising to the top, things have their way of sorting themselves out.

But at two o’clock in the morning, when one door closes and another one hasn’t opened yet, you’re thinking that when one door closes it stays closed and another one closes and another one closes.

What if what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger but kills you just not all at once but a little at a time? And then once you’re good and awake you realize that what doesn’t kill you does makes you stronger and it will still kill you a little bit at a time because that is what life is and we all have an expiration date.

And then you manage to fall asleep but damned if you can remember the transition or what worked and what didn’t. The alarm goes off the next day and you’re tired from time spent awake last night but you have rested and slept some of the time and there’s some magic in that. And wouldn’t you know the very start of some burgeoning sorting is evident and you know that sleep, a little or a lot, is a sweet elixir. What life has taught you, namely to take  what you get even if it’s one step forward, two steps back is doing its thing and lifting you, if not to seize the day, at least to meet it where it is.


From the archives:
These Books Carry Me
Chicken Scratch
No Trophies