spring sketches
after Hera Lindsay Bird
The first good sunset of the year: late May, because I am standing with you waiting for the N in Sunset Park, aboveground station all ludicrous greenery waterfalling over rusting beams the light gorgeous and liquid brushstroking the now-sacred concrete. Quiet down here. The bustling streets—where we were just before struggling to follow one another, tip-toeing over fishy saline running for the grates—seem altogether to belong to another world. We are finally having a real conversation after months of being in the same rooms and saying very little to one another, the sensation like a storm finally breaking. I want to know you about as desperately as I want to know everyone—which is to say, very. Heart like a weathervane, aching the way a bad knee does before the rainfall.
Am I supposed to want this much? Why didn’t anybody tell me it was going to be like this? We are riding in the train car with the burnt orange seats from the 80’s I thought they were going to phase out, like, last year, and I am saying something about how unbearable it is that nothing lasts forever. Time burns the wick relentlessly: I leave and am left, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, rambling as I slouch towards Atlantic-Barclays to be borne towards your apartment. Here with you in this train meant to already be on its way out—in this city to which everyone arrives thinking it is the eleventh hour and the party is nearly over, all nevertheless hoping to catch the tail end of something once-beautiful—I feel as though I’m getting away with something, stealing time, in this little wound of a moment rupturing the fleshy inertia of life. Outside this lacuna, I have to contend with perpetuity, where everything almost ends and everything almost starts, thinking back on this year of over and over again reaching what I thought was the finish line only to realize the miles to go before I sleep with someone who wants to stick around this time.
Having already walked out on everyone I ever said I loved / Things do not bode well for you. Uncertain of whether I can be trusted to love responsibly or at all; uncertain of what love is or if it is at all, I wake up before seven not really even by choice, long slash of sunlight bleeding red through my eyelids, and then I do it the next morning, and the next. Somewhere amidst these incessant, involuntary currents of life lies the milky pearl of what I love. What I seek without seeking. Any way you slice it, I wake up and grasp for the world, too bright and hurting, teeth clashing against teeth.
The closer I get to the texture of my soul the more I realize none of it makes any goddamn sense: my various petulant impulses, my longing for comfort and irritation upon receiving it, my humility and pride only vaguely emulsified. I like myself; I piss myself off. But at least I no longer try to round to the nearest whole person. I am not whole, meaning, not particularly complete or undivided or unwounded. Things matter to me to an inordinate degree: I am kind of like one of those rush-hour car grid puzzles on easy mode, with really an embarrassing amount of space for the ostensibly tense arrangement of vehicles to shift around, to let new passengers in and let others go, everything always terribly in flux and needing to be in that flux. I want someone to knock down a line of dominoes in me, and then someone else to come in and set them all up again in new and annoying ways. I want to be inconvenienced and inconvenient, to hear the ivory clattering against hardwood.
Having already walked out on everyone I ever said I loved / I have so little left to say to you. Sitting across from you eating dumplings, fretting needlessly about whether you’ve had your fill. To lay in silence with you knowing you by the cadence of your gait and the way you seem to dissolve into the atmosphere in the quiet grey of spring mornings, folded in blankets on the couch. I adore you in your specificity, the way you speak at your most unselfconscious. Through the windows the city drowses and I want for nothing but the next time I can follow you through the crowd, certain I will never lose you no matter what passes between us: one person, two, then a block, then a neighborhood, then a city. My awareness gently wafts through the world until it reaches you, dressing everything in between with the gossamer fabric of affection: I love everybody because I love you. Beyond sight, certain you are there and you will never stop being there, I close my eyes and wait for morning with all the unbearable exhilaration of the saved for the rapture.