Out (Part 2)

My cousin died at nearly sixty riding a motorcycle. He couldn't spell in his emails to save his life but for five years I got these notes every few months from whichever new country that he was in. He was a simple man from a small town in North Carolina. He read meters for the gas company but he seized each and every day. He even went out the way a young man might. He was the spark that set fire to where I was. It spread over everything, turning the binds I clung to into instant ash.

This year was the one where the universe got sick and tired of me being scared of what I was destined to do. It started with the bullshit with the magazine job I got hired for and then didn't get. Then it spread to the client projects that fell through before they got finished. The teaching job paid me only half of what I needed and they wouldn't promote me.

I didn't get the grant. I was cold as ice in book publishing. My closest friends were gone and for the first time in my life I knew how to spot a bad relationship a mile away. There was no fruit on the vines left that I could eat without getting sick. And I ain't the type of dude to starve for too long.

I saw the writing on the wall late one night in LA, and like Daniel in the Bible I read it as it appeared to me. Where I'm going ain't my thing. But its where the money is. When I come back I'll have a real kitchen with copper pots and high-end knives. I'll get to try that $75 olive oil at Whole Foods and the fish there won't break me. I'll have a house, maybe even in the same stretch of the Stuy where I used to lay my head.

The Grand Lodge is no longer a one and a half bedroom apartment on the Clinton-Hill border. I will no longer buy my morning juice from Ali and the boys on the corner of Hancock and Nostrand. I will not be in biking range of Rich and Negarra. I will not be able to see my godmother at the store she owns right up the street.

I told my plans to only a select few, most of whom were the people willing to keep the small boxes of things I kept after getting rid of everything else. I watched my furniture leave me a piece at a time. I gave away music. I left six boxes of books on the steps of my local library. My bike is with the Dervish. It took me five feverish days to clear a space I'd lived in for more than seven years. I knew it was coming. But I didn't know why. Now I understand. Now I'm ready.

On the last night my orisha family and my closest crew threw me a surprise party at Mojitos down by the river. As we raised our glasses I was reminded of why I couldn't tell everyone that I was doing this, that I might not have had to heart to detach from the circuitry of the city where I became a man. I left some things unfinished. There were others that I decided I couldn't afford to even start.

So as I loaded up the yellow bug, co-piloted by the 24 year-old kid without whom I never would have escaped town, it was almost like when I left DC for the first time, that surreal realization that the places where I laid my head were now in the rearview mirror.

I am in the wind now, somewhere between there and here, floating on a cushion of memories, plans and fears as I move though time and inner-space. I'm not there yet but I will be. Out.

P.S. Paylor I need your number again.