The Get Out of Town Countdown....

No wonder how long you wait for something, it still comes right up on you like a bedecked Christmas party guest you thought for sure wouldn’t show. But you knew it was coming. You planned it with mind-numbing care, you nursed it from a seedling over coffee, you budgeted for all its possible pitfalls, and you gave it all kinds of impertinent names with arm-candy adjectives like “grand”, “eye-opening” and “life-defining”. But even so, even slowly, it has prowled up on your plans as if uninvited, ready to spread its feathers, one at a time, and give you the adventure you asked for.

The day is fast approaching, with a signature New York City snowstorm precariously greasing its tracks. When my flight arrived at a frost-flecked La Guardia, flanked in dirty but determined snow drifts, I surprised myself by feeling nothing but displacement. Otherwise known as anxiety masked in pure confusion and denial. Six months worth of clothing, emergency medication, good luck charms, my own weight in feminine products and quick-dry-just-about-everything made the final cut and were rolled into a big red backpack. In true mammalian self-preservationist fashion, I spent the final days in Colorado obsessively labeling already labeled over-the-counter medication and counting the number of poisonous snake species in each country rather than telling my supportive friends and family how much I honored their presence in my life and how every word they said would hang in my head once I had crossed the border. My parents pasted over any fear or doubt they knew my hawk heart would be looking for and waved me goodbye, casually and quickly, with a “you’ll be fine” hug. My siblings saluted from their parting posts and in their own ways gave me the greatest gift of their unfaltering confidence. My friends turned up at every turn to tip their hat to a trip they knew would bring me back transformed, wholeheartedly willing to accept whatever version of me came back in my place. Meanwhile, I nobly focused most of my last week’s energy mentally bemoaning the small child howling behind me, squawking about hidden foreign conversion fees and fussing over the percentage of germs that competing hand sanitizers claim to eliminate. And all this, I have concluded, is what takes me successfully to the brink. Without it, I might flounder in those last days of comfort and familiarity, until I am flayed out over the things I might (and I will) miss - a rat asleep in a puddle of sweet wine.

Soon, its to the trenches… to the truth or to the trails that will lead us head-on toward the unexpected.

Dear Universe,

Up here on the roof I can't see a damn thing

I'm shivering in the dark and want to go inside

I'm a thin reed in the early winter mountain wind

I am as we all are, so unknowingly

within inches of my life

blind to the mere footfalls from the edge

but taking in a phantom powder moon

over a sweet potato sky,

on its knees singing arias over every second of our lives.

Please Prepare for Take Off

To prepare: One who, or that which, prepares, fits, or makes ready. To make things or oneself ready.

A month and a half on the clock before our plane departs for Africa. Winter has moved in downstairs. Our jobs are drawing up the resignation paperwork. Our things have been bagged, escorted across the country and stuffed away at our parent's houses. Our hearts are heavy as we cut small everyday losses to make room for such an adventure - little goodbyes and big ones, the last rites of our routines, closing the shop doors on years of New York minutes. But we know that the adventure is waiting at the door.

In school when I didn’t know where to start or how to move forward with a paper, a story or a thesis, I was told to take out the dictionary. Start with a word that will define your paper and then define it. Seek and absorb its full definition, that which aims at its essence over the course of its life in the English language or the languages before that. Break up the fibers of a word into its syllables, class, conjugations and historical contexts and soon you will see the nuances of its nervous system – a network of meanings, multiples and interpretations. Once you have understood its energy – one that can never be fully captured due to the elusive and coy, shifting nature of language –you can use it to propel you forward into the pages that follow. Start with the definition of one word and the rest will fall into place. Like footfalls on a long journey after the first… purposeful… step.

Life is very much like language. Seeking to capture, understand and describe that which ultimately cannot be. But how very close we come. And before we can grasp the whole of it by the tail it slips from our fingers… but not before we’ve reveled in the richness of what we’ve learned so far.

And so I’ll start with the word I am seeking that defines this less-than-sacred space I have crossed into: prepare. This is a room of mirrors reflecting illusions that appear to be real and familiar but are already fading into fallen footsteps on a road already travelled. The carpeted rooms of my childhood home, my old bronze maxima in the driveway, the trappings of this comfortable Colorado life bumped up against the steel spires of downtown New York, the rumble of subway cars, the delirious delight of evening cocktails around a crowded bar.

To prepare: To make things or oneself ready. To make ready beforehand for a specific purpose. To put together or make by combining various elements or ingredients. To fit out; equip. To lead up to and soften.

To make things ready. Shots, clothes, passports, VISAs, medications, notifications, communications.

To make oneself ready. Expectations, goodbyes, hellos, compromises, doubts, hopes, I wonder ifs. Agreements with yourself you know you might not be able to keep. Balking at your own courage.

For a specific purpose. To find, understand and share meaning. Teach, learn. Learn, teach. ARRIVE. Arrive into my own life and into that of others. Start something. Anything. Become.

To equip. For a game I don’t yet know how to play. With things that will mean very little next to the new tools that the world is about to demand that I discover.

To soften. The threads of the heart on the alter of the unknown. To allow. To hunt for knowledge and then relinquish it. To negotiate for terms, guarantees and assurances only to end up signing it all away in exchange for adventure. To embrace the pieces of the journey that belong to you…and befriend the pieces that don’t.

Its not much. But it’s a start.

Its my party, and I'll cry if I want to

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.

Water Watchers

There are benches on the east river where you can watch the sun come up. Or, if you’re like me, you can witness the sun going down without watching. Like a canary in a covered cage knows its morning, you’ll suddenly find yourself in the near dark and the East River has lost its sheen without warning. You’re most definitely being eaten by mosquitos. And there’s nothing funny about these moments. You’re crying and you know why, somewhere deep down, but you don’t know what to say about it – if it needs fixing or rethinking or just plain sleeping it off. Everyone notices you crying, even in the half dark, the runners behind you, the sleepy homeless beside you, the cell phone girls wafting around you, they all know you’re crying and they look at you like construction workers do at an unusually short and uncalled-for sparkly skirt on a Tuesday morning. It’s not the choices you had planned on but they are the ones you knew you had to make all along. Because you’re you. And you’d rather be dipped in disillusionment then constantly disappointed by boredom. There are no brakelights when you’re breaking the speed limit, every screeching corner bringing your wheels closer to what you think you’re afraid of.

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.

Band of Brothers: Life without your eyes in

My brother Alec left NYC yesterday in a cab among swirls of rain blowing up the skirts of new York and bringing the spring, and the airports, to a chilly halt. It felt appropriate, after a weekend of walking and climbing and moving together through the colors of my life that look sometimes unfamiliar even to me, that he should leave just as he arrived – among irreverent uncertainty. Once he was gone, I resumed my life just as I had left it, answered my office phone and transplanting excel columns from one worksheet to another.

For most of this weekend I simply spent time with a good old friend of mine. Many times I took time to admire who this human being was, this person who I knew only as my brother, what kind of person he had grown into and the way that he managed to operate acceptably within society while (amazingly) always retaining authenticity in absolutely everything that he did. A few times did I recognize the person that I grew up with and a few times did I truly appreciate him as just one of the independent tree trunks that make up this larger moving organism of our family.

Tuesday evening, I went home late in the pouring rain. I mindlessly stuffed a teetering plastic bag full of clothes (in an effort to start the move from my apartment to the new one for a short five months), and I carried it over in the rain, peering around the side of it to see the sidewalk in front of me. When I got there, I folded everything and put it away into a dark empty closet. I decorated the house with my disheartened self in various places for a little while, before going into the bedroom to put a new blanket on the bed, finding soon after that the sheets were dirty and dusty from the room switch. This, clearly, was simply too much for me to bear. Or it seemed to be so, because five minutes later I was head first in my blanket, drawing my feet up so that no inch of skin would be exposed to the light. The next door neighbors children were racketing, yelling and throwing things against the wall and the new Jakob Dylan album (which I highly recommend) was playing to drown them out. Paralyzed by absolutely nothing at all except my own self, I stared at the inside of the blanket and started staving my oxygen, which I knew would run out shortly. I thought of everybody and their faces the way I remember them back at the house, at rainbow which will soon be sold, at family dinners and on walks, sitting on rocks up at betasso. And I thought of my brother Todd’s big birthday, which I would miss and which I would think of with every step along Park avenue this weekend. And I knew, with rich, colorful Africa beckoning to me with long, tugging fingers that time with my family over the next couple years might slip away underfoot like silt on the riverbanks of our lives.

Then I heard a random line in one of the Jakob Dylan songs, and it said something like “this is the place where you were born.” Before long I was irreparably weepy, and like a homesick child, refused to return to adulthood for at least three hours. In between bouts of tears, well past midnight and after I had removed my contacts, a gripping fear suddenly struck me – that one of the navy blue dresses I had piled on my bag of clothes had fallen off onto the ground in the rain on my way over. I didn’t remember putting it away, hanging it up or seeing it anywhere about our new apartment. It was most assuredly out there, underfoot and in the gutter – and my last memory of it forever would be wearing it this weekend with Alec in New York. Like a good old soldier, Buzz had his shoes and basketball shorts on and was out retracing my steps in the rain in search of it before another tear had time to reach my puffy eyes, rendered helpless without contact lenses. While he was out and I was groping desparately around the room with my hands for my dress without my “eyes in”, a strange thought struck me.

When it comes to family – is it actually your family that you inevitably lose to adulthood or just the way you remember them? Is loss a thing that is often just perceived simply because you forgot to put your wiser, more knowing eyes in?

Buzz returned empty-handed and I went to sleep without my dress and without any of my family around me.

When I woke up in the morning, I put my contacts in – which was a struggle because they were dirty and salty. Then, I walked in a sleepwalk to the closet and retrieved my navy dress from the crushing oblivion of several brighter colored, heavier winter sweaters.
My dress was there the whole time, out of sight and very much not out of mind.

When I got to work that morning, with a renewed sense of love and gratefulness in my heart for this family I had left behind two years ago and have had to fight for ever since against distance and cancer, I called united to change Buzz’ and I’s flights returning back from Colorado during our trip in June so that we could have one more precious day with the people I loved the most in the world. Alas. There were no more tickets available going from Denver to La Guardia on Tuesday, stated very matter of factly. Thwarted. Symbolic action representing the emotional commitment to/and the importance of my family squandered cruelly. Darkness, oblivion, crushing impossibility…LOSS. There was silence on the other line. Then a thought - “Is there anything going into Newark or JFK? (easier airports anyway)” The agent was friendly and the change was amazingly easy, we got the only two seats left.

Its funny what happens when you put your eyes in.

Nothing like waking up and knowing...

Its going to happen. I just know it.

Africa, here we come.