ownership

I like days that feel all mine. Tonight I got myself lost in Chinatown and drank a bubble tea and ate a confusing pastry on a bench. I watched the little worlds. The summer sun at dusk does wild, beautiful things to New York. Then I met the Commie for $10 lobsters. We walked the 4 miles over the Manhattan Bridge and back into Brooklyn. Just before we left dry land I watched a woman hanging her laundry on the roof of her building, almost close enough to touch. The Q screamed and huffed over our shoulders. The moon was half-smirking above the city, all lit up, all heat against heat, the humidity lessened by the earlier rain. I have a feeling I will say this until the day I leave: this city is a trip. I cannot believe I live in it.

Harry

What to do on the day after your family puts your 14-year-old dog to sleep:

Wake up, remember. Go buy yourself a bagel with lox. Smile. Think of how much he loved cream cheese. That's not original or anything. Think of how dearly similar we all are, how even the things we love the most are shared. Walk to Prospect Park, alone. Find a tree where the shade is good, where you can watch the light through the leaves. Take your book out, but put it down again. Watch the sky instead. Feel the grass on your bare legs, the way it itches. Harry used to dive face-first into the grass, push his scruffy face through the soil. The first time he saw fresh snow he did the same, and came up with a beard of pure white. This is the gift: the world is enough. And isn't it? This breeze and these trees and the sun on the arches of your feet? Harry wasn't unapologetic in his love. He held back. He wasn't your typical, undiscerning, slobbery love machine of a dog. He had the soul of an ornery old man under all that puppy energy. But one night, after your first semester away at college, he slept beside you on a small couch, let you hold him all night long. In the morning he struggled up and fell ungracefully off that couch and looked at you, all "What? What's the big deal?" And one day you walked him down the cliffs at Lighthouse Park and he leapt over the barnacled rocks like he was weightless, afraid of nothing, lapping at the salted pools, barking at the gulls, while you stood shin-deep in the ocean and tried to call him to you, a command he never followed, because who would? Who would stop running when there is so much life to see?

You were a good pup, my bunny. You loved and were loved. I wish I could have been there at the end.

SVU for the win

This was basically the three months after my break-up. Well, post-denial, post-goodwill, post-pit of grief. Somewhere in those few weeks I lost between January and March.

from here. painfully-apt website. thanks, lucas.

random act of bravery

A sign that New York is getting under my skin: Yesterday I complained to a waiter for the first time. To be fair, the menu advertised a molten chocolate cake with homemade ganache; we received a slice of store-bought German Chocolate Cake. Girlfriend HATES German Chocolate Cake. German Chocolate Cake night back in our dining hall at college was the WORST. Tell me, does it not look like someone threw up all over the cake? It does. It does.

So when the waiter came over and asked if we'd like our sadly-poked slice of cake boxed up, I explained that we were confused about the GULF OF MEXICO-sized gulf between what was on the menu and what appeared on our plate. He had stupid hair, and he looked at me with this brain-dead expression on his face. Then he went away and told our server that I was "very upset." Which made me throw my head into my hands in shame, flush bright red, and affirm that I would never again complain in a restaurant.

These acts of bravery can misfire. We were clear on that, right?

i know the internet is having a collective orgasm over bon iver, but still.

knows what's up

I will watch this once a day until I too believe that I can do anything.

random act of bravery

Oh, that's right:

I MOVED TO MOTHAFUCKING NEW YORK CITY.

first days

Dulcimer days. With a hefty dose of loneliness.

People warned me, before I moved here, of how isolating New York can be. Silly, I thought - there are so many people! Apparently that's the point: stacked one on top of the other, no one takes the time to ask if you mind their elbow in your rib, or if you might like to sing a song, just to pass the time. My space has been reduced to my 13x9 bedroom. It's very green in here. Which is not a bad thing, don't get me wrong, it's just not my colour. So the green file cabinets remind me that this, that all of this, is temporary, and that it isn't, too, that I am not going back to the room with the white curtains, the blue walls, the skylight above the bed.

I pull books off a shelf that isn't mine. Books about Buddha, long books I wish were longer. I circle around new ideas, projects to which I give small puffs of voice, air. I stare longingly at my phone. Ring, ring, please god, ring. There are so many new chairs to sit in! A container of orange juice costs $4.49. My Kashi cereal is $4.79. I walk everywhere. Last night I got veggie lo mein at 11pm and parked myself on the new floor of this new kitchen and forced a new roommate to talk to me. Oh, I am trying so hard. It rains and smells like something new, something just being born. And I miss everything. 

i was in the air

The Low Anthem - Boeing 737 from HearYa.com on Vimeo.

random act of bravery

Once I raced to you across the hot asphalt at a gas station in central Saskatchewan. You watched me coming across the miles of flat, an expanse so extreme you elbowed me awake in glee once we hit Alberta: "Mountains! Mountains!" When I remember it I am running so fast, so hard, for longer than I've ever run before, and you are waiting beside the car, your mouth breaking into a smile, your arms reaching to meet me, and I think: I could run like this forever, if you were there to catch me.

And then the New Hampshire summer, low and heavy against my shoulders, the air like the surface of water just waiting to be broken. I am sitting on your front stoop and I am scared of your mother still, because this was before she gave me your great grandmother's navy silk dress, before she took me out barefoot in her garden to show me the palm-sized caterpillars, before I heard the scratchy recording of her alone on a stage with her guitar and a folk song, before we loved each other. I am sitting on your front stoop and willing every car that drives by to be yours, home from work, your sweat-soaked t-shirt in the back of the car, your 19-year-old body still soft but dark and mine, and I listen to the mosquitos and the storm-hungry cicadas and I wait and wait and wait and I think: I could wait like this forever, if I knew you would one day come back.

Today I called it quits. And it broke my heart, it did, to look at you and see you so far away from me, the distance between us growing. But it stoked something too, something flinty and real, the knowledge that so much of the eight years we spent together was me carving out space for you to fit into, running at you, bringing you closer, willing you to come home - to me, to yourself. You have so much work to do, and that is yours, and I cannot mend you, and I no longer want to. To look you in the eyes and to say it: that was brave. To say goodbye: that was brave.