In New York, and in life in general, when it rains, it pours. In the city where anything is possible, everything suddenly becomes impossible (getting a cab, getting delivery, getting your groceries home, getting a life). Thus, its the perfect opportunity to stay up late alone in the dark, let the central heating out through an open window, listen to the cabs slosh down first avenue and feel the minutes of your life go slowly by.
I've been in New York for two years now (and like a true New York patriot, I was far too busy to realize or celebrate our anniversary together). Each day here has been blended like a Kandinsky painting, circular in the patterns of living out loud and then working overtime to quiet down, or at least until the morning sheen of self awareness wears off once more. This morning -- suddenly and unexpectedly -- I became aware of the passing of time.
The hair that I had cut short and sharp well over a year ago and has miraculously seemed to stay that way, suddenly looks like it has grown an inch. My bedroom smells like my T-shirts and residual chamomile tea instead of the peeling paint and borrowed furniture of my early twenties. My apartment, or at least the part of it I preside over, looks a lot like my mother's kitchen and I get the itchy and strangely electric feeling that I imagine she must get also when I clean it maniacally-- allowing a momentary, secretly profound grasp on my own tangible existence and impact on the empirical world perhaps? Words, like marriage and career and income, that have been for most of my life distant orbs of cosmic mass barelling toward me through space that wont reach me until after the sun runs out of nuclear fuel, becomes a red giant and swallows the universe...have overnight become more like very real words that can be found next to my alarm clock at 7am that demand to be both respected and feared.
But most of all this morning I realized that I was afraid to live my life forever as it is now and equally as afraid to make any change at all to it. The very distinct welling of fear that collected in my esophagus when I thought of the countries I would like to trek through, the writing I'd like to do more of, the new city I would like to live in, the inspiring companies I'd like to work, for was enough to make me stop and notice myself, there running on a treadmill called New York City, which was itself rattling in the bed of a pick-up truck on the Interstate which was...my life. And that was the moment when I caught time red-handed walking quietly through my life while I was busy burning dinner in the kitchen. And when it saw me looking back at it, it stopped dead in its tracks. Until I closed the window against the rain and went back to loudly sorting silverware.
