I was up until nearly six am on Saturday. Byron and I had been hanging out with Seda as a sort of farewell because she was off to Boston for a few days. I had taken my bike over as usual, but as Byron had taken the train I decided to walk back with my baby right beside me. As I'm tired (and because I'd done it plenty of times before) I decided to lock my bike inside the courtyard instead of taking it up. Keep in mind that the sun is creeping up. But when I opened my bedroom window to check on my baby, she was missing both wheels and her seat, and frame hanging by the lock alone against the fence. After nearly two years of drama-less biking I was once again the target of that age old tradition in New York: getting checked in.
I'm surprisingly not as pissed about it as I would have been before. She's a thing, and as I appreciate what joy she provides me, the new wheels and seat are an expenditure I can bear the next time I get the money. That doesn't mean it doesn't sting. But hell I put myself in the crosshairs leaving me at risk.
Still, it was an adventurous weekend. My boy Mill, who I've known since my very first weeks of college, who co-founded Cipher, our collegiate poetry collective, with me and who's been a solid friend for more than 13 years. Mill had a son almost a year ago and as the game goes he's been off in the trenches of first-year parenthood. But when the wife and kid are away Daddy gets to play. Our play was sipping on a little something at the crib and getting a full update on what has and hasn't been going on.
Discussion of greener grass on the other sides of marriage and singledom respectively, reports on friends and my dating life (I never remember being as interested in single folks' situations when I was with people). But by midnight, when I'm usually just getting out into the street. He was ready to go home and to sleep. Drinks that would have been a warm-up for him in his earlier life had put him down quickly, while I was barely feeling a buzz.
I am reminded of my father's usual reaction when he looks at photos of himself as a younger man. "Look at that kid," I think, whenever I reflect on the times before I got here. So much has changed but my core has remained the same.
I'm still not good with losing or with waiting, two central components in this life of ours. I try to work on that day-by-day and I've become more inclined to keep fewer and fewer people in the loop about what I'm up to. Furthermore it absolutely amazes me just how many people in my world live in an absolute state of complete denial. Generally speaking, if I did something I owned up to it. I also apologize, which is another act that an increasing number of people I encounter don't know how to do. Some of you out-of-towners might say that it's just New York, but it's not that. Letting sleeping dogs lie has become a widespread philosophy in certain camps.
A little more than a week ago while we were watching Thomas Crown, Seda and I both agreed that in real life so few people who had made a wrong decision with a mate would ever race to a helipad hoping to get one last shot at love. It seems that such things only exist in the minds of writers and those who know the value of having a person mean something to you.
At a brunch yesterday I ran into a cat named Dekka (forgive me if I spelled it wrong), a filmmaker and graphic designer that I have more connections to than some folks in my own family. As I listened to him discuss the prospect of leaving New York for elsewhere, and all the places he'd been, all the experiences he'd had, rising crime rates, lowering cultural zeal, etc. I wonder how long it will be before I'm telling folks that I'm on my way out and meaning it. I know my father probably has a shrine in his basement that he prays to in hopes that I'll be 20 minutes away again. I know my mother wants me to land back in some townhouse on First Street with the nice girl I married and the little granddaughter she's been talking about as of late. As yet another tower crumbles all around me, as I move toward new mountains the climb and a new world to view with ever-changing eyes I have no idea where I'll end up.
The only things I know are what I remember and what I dream. I know to trust the voice inside of my head more than the one that I use to make words. I know that God is real, as are the many entities who work for him. I know that I am a writer above all else, even if I end up as the regional manager at a box company. My key frustration in the last year has been that nothing has felt like it was moving, as if I was in the same shape that what remains of my bike is. Able to steer and brake, but unable to get anywhere. No wheels. No comfortable place to sit, just a lot of ideas without any traction. That's what it felt like. I had to remind myself that the world spins at an alarming rate without us feeling at, that things go on backstage that we are not meant to see, that the reason we weren't to eat from the tree of knowledge was that we didn't have the full capacity to get it. No instruction book to guide us through the epic journey of being the heroines and heroes in our own lives. All I can do is keep walking, keep praying, keep building with the others I encounter who see the board in the same way that I do.
My next port is coming up on the horizon. I battered and splintered, bandaged and somewhat delirious. But I'll get there. Out.
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