Betwixt Williamson & Westshore, wait
W an icon of Present’s kin; perhaps an in
experience, the x-height a proper stand
For a tiny little Ampersand. Then & Now;
Now & Forever, and so and so on.
That curly twirl of a typographical trick cures a mortar
between Liquid bricks (someday seemed a prickly
kiss, but as is known not all will writhe & wilt)
stacked to the top of the Spillway wall.
I’ll sprint with wind here, many times have I
laid bare in the summer scorch, some
days I show my face, for worth. That in
accessibility that yelled anonymity
is the now impossibilty, thank GOD: I
need no one to be myself
under a cloud formless as it
Was, Is, and Yet.
Pulled out a seat at Think in the upstairs loft, looking out across the street and into the most beautiful green scaffolding that obscures one of what I guess to be thousands of ongoing construction projects in the city. This morning’s catch is a trippio trimmed to the top of the demitasse lip, served speedily by the summer-gripped ginger girl in the Mets cap.
Think is where I’ve come since my friend Esther told me about it a few years ago. Hidden away on Mercer in the basic center of New York University, I am typically the only one here not to work on a paper due the next morning, or to share heavy-handed opinions about my psychology professor. I’m this odd hybrid of outsider-in(sider-out), and know enough about the city to feel comfortable, and some of its nuance from having tapped to its rhythms for a year; while outside of an understanding of the context as more current than my time living here.
Each time I’ve flown into the city in the past four years, accompanied by the portion of motion sickness I inherited from my mother is an overwhelming shame or desire for reconciliation — to make right what I thought was so wrong, and that in part my purpose in some trips past was that. However, on Wednesday night my plane flew over Citifield near Jamaica, and already I could tell something was utterly different about the hue of this trip as compared to all the cyclically-caustic-carbon-copy colours preceding it.
The appeal of New York is gone for me in so many ways — at least in the ways that relate to my past belief that by moving back here I might be able to fix the failure I considered in leaving. But why did I feel the failure? And why did I let that shit seep into my every thought, trickle down my limbs, and surround every sinew and stem in the obscure corners of my brain?
In the way that the prideful man is at the center of his own universe, the victim too is at the center of his. Made less himself by entitlement, self-preservation, and self-seeking, while misled that it is actually these things which make him more himself. And the deeper one becomes in his entitlement (or misperception of it), the greater the victim he becomes. And through all this, the victim was never a victim at all — though the psychological framework he himself has constructed continually, subconsciously, fortifies it all, and layers and layers build up. And the cycle is terrible, if for the mere fact that none of it is grounded in reality, though for other reasons as well.
In the deep parts of this past fall, something remarkable happened. I began praying again — I began trying to believe that kind of thing was actually effectual, and that it actually had some function in my life. It wasn’t some existential-theological-battle to begin again. I didn’t start for selfless reasons — I started to pray again for therapy. But the activity itself definitely lends itself to a posture of selflessness — of admitting that I myself lack power to fix stuff. I started because it provided me cathartic satisfaction, and I didn’t – at that point – think that it was accomplishing little anything past that.
I’ve sung all the hymns. “My chains are gone,” and the Gospel’s power to do so and such and such and on and on. “But from what,” I’d always thought. Sure, I’d memorized the Answers, but had I ever come into an experience of slavery in need of liberation? From what was my Exodus?
It wasn’t until the fall of 2009, when I started to try to start to try to pray again that I realized how enslaved I was to so many things — of shame, guilt, self-seeking, and the behaviors allowed by all of those, and that also allow for all of those.
On my first night in the city only days ago, I called my dad from the thirty-second floor rooftop, looking out over Lower Manhattan — Wall Street, The East River, & the Brooklyn Bridge. Sipping a Brooklyn Lager, I told my dad about the consummation of these realizations, that I think only could really reach this point with the assistance of another visit, especially since I consider my last trip in August to be the absolute center of that low season.
I told him I was ready to be home, and that I no longer felt like I had to either visit, and, especially, move to New York to truly find the meaning of that word. I no longer have a need to fix anything here — not because anything was repaired, but because my perception of it was.
I want to believe the messy parts of me are being redeemed, and I’m learning that a big part of believing that is, well, believing it.
Throw a flat-bellied stone across the gulch and into the creak, upstream about 100 yards — where I am, a wading figurine of a boy hidden beneath the bur oak silently.
If the waters could quit to rush so quickly to surround my knees in an instant and be gone the same, I might at least have caught a ripple from your skip, like at the lake, at Willow lane, just to the south of Winsted and the winded runners of White Rock.
And If I could save a ripple from your skip, I’d bottle it in the best mason jar my mother could find, and I’d place it on top of our white armoir, and I take the a small, savory sip each night just before sleep, until it’s gone in a week. And when it does I will always return to the gulch, liken it to the lake, beneath the bur oak tree, and that delicious, swallowing cycle.