A park bench from dawn til dusk will be covered by the grime and the glamour of us, New York. It feels the weight of our shame and the lightness of our pride; don’t kid yourself into thinking your monologues have no effect. The creaking wood absorbs sound as it emanates it’s own under the force of it’s friend the wind, and it knows all your secrets but rest your head in to the pillow a little more, because it’ll never tell.

First kisses and the end of wishes that started with a coin in a fountain by the stairs. Plastic bags filled with things that cost a dollar and five hundred dollar bags filled with the air of a designer.

An asshole and a business woman (which is not to say that he cannot conduct business and she cannot be an ass) brought together and still together by the shallow fact that they each display an image that the magazines and the models and the windows on fifth ave have taught us is superior. She’s dumb and he’s rich and though it will never be admitted, she only wants to make him knock her up to lock the money down.

Roses in papers held between the sweating palms of a man whose lips, set above a jaw made solid by pugnacity, now soundlessly and selflessly practice an apology so that he might win back the affection of the lines and soft curves that outline the heart of the woman whose warmth he never wants to miss again.

Teenagers chatting while the whiskey bottle’s spilling and the smell of cigarettes and the glow of their light are all signals, to beckon the night. They’re making sense of the world while some surrender to confusion and it might take hours and they might find there’s more than just darkness in an absence of light, and they’re growing together and becoming something different from a child and something closer to a man.

Torn jeans and pleated trousers, frilled skirts and cargo shorts. Broken hearts and soaring daydreams, shackled conversations and cerulean laughter. A dozen planks of wood and a handful of bolts. A couple poles and maybe a wrought iron arm or two. A story teller and a dream collector and a staple of this city which acts, at times, as the frame for the canvas we paint our lives across. One can look at something so simple and see the backdrop for a hundred complex moments of wonder.

I love the hushed stories you tell me in the reprieve between adventures in the endless, limitless labyrinth of possibility, New York.

Porch

I feel my shoulders dig in to the wood panelling of a porch of a home I am renting, temporarily inhabiting in a manner so minimal that I feel more like a gypsy than an inhabitant of this home whose porch I am laying on in the dead of night between summer days. I turn my head so the ground is to the left and the sky, partially covered by the awning of this porch, is to my right and I observe the space between them and feel it is the final frontier, this negative space, because we never take time to explore it and observe it but rather we move through it as if we could be eternally confident that air will remain passable and gravity will remain reliable because our destinations are important and our journies are irrelevant; we need only to assume that these few scientific principles will always hold and then we store that assumption in some rarely accessed part of our brains and we move.

I look at the roof, the slated beige painted wooden panels illuminated by a miniature model of the sun; we call it a porch light. Out of focus is the night sky in the direction towards which my feet point and I blow smoke from my lips that came from a cigarette now resting loosely in my hand, and I feel like the fire in the center of a camp silenly observing the world around me and listening carefully to the tales being told while being sure not to participate so actively that I instigate change, though I am entirely necessary in the moment. Smoke rolls through the air against a deep sky like fog rolling across northern lakes and I am happy to see it go.

I watch tiny bugs crawling around the porch light and I see one here and one there and I compare their size to the surface that is their ground and my roof and I realize they are essentially miles from one another and a little piece of hope that they might find each other creates a space in my heart and I wonder if I’m silly for letting it. And then because I am a human and as a human I am inclined to see animals as simpler exhibits of human existence, something to compare and relate myself to while rarely appreciating their existence as their own, because of all of this I pretend that they are people and the ground/roof is a desert and I wonder, then, if it would be better for them to wander alone or to find each other and wander together. I think then that if they found one another they would cease wandering and try to make a place all their own where they can always be sure to find the other waiting. And I think that is the conundrum of one who wanders and finds joy in doing so; wandering is done best when done alone, but can feel more meaningful when done with a companion. So we are scared to connect because we want to wander, but we’re scared to wander too far and too long because we want to connect.

I consider the possibility of letting this moment drag out for as long as it pleases, ending inevitably at the sandman’s door as I am calm and at peace and exhausted. But little lights flicker around me every so often, serving as reminders that though I feel as if I’ve found a piece of the universe in which I am safe and unreachable, this is but a feeling and not a reality, and sleep will open all the vulnerable moments of possibility that such a reality holds.

I light another cigarette, “the last for tonight” I tell myself, and I close my eyes and marvel at the beauty of Summer and the beauty of being alone and the way in which I, when alone, can be so purely and blissfully in existence. I wonder why it is that I cannot always be this way, why people and places and circumstances sometimes make me forget that I can always be this way and I feel like it maybe wouldn’t be a horrible idea to be just a little bit selfish for the purpose of only placing myself in situations and relationships where I do and will feel this way, normally if not permanently. I wonder if that would work; if being so selfish is okay, and if being so selfish would actually produce the desired result. I choose to let the thought grow alone for a while and instead make a point to always remember that inspiration and wonder are never far; they just sometimes choose to hide in the negative spaces we so rarely choose to explore and observe.

Snowflakes

Because I have lived the entirety of my life in Michigan, Winter and I have become well acquainted; I know to expect her incessant, bone-chilling wind and she knows to expect my rejection. I know that she has some redeeming qualities, while she knows there will be days when I can enter her world without shuddering.

The travel bug and I are familiar with one another as well. He normally takes me to places where the Sun dries up every ounce of moisture within its reach, places where Winter has no authority. Each Fall for the past several years, the idea of living permanently in Arizona or California has spread its roots deeper in to my daydreams, as I dread Winter’s annual visit and search frantically for a cocoon far from her grasp.

I woke up at seven o’clock this morning, my body just a little bit chillier than normal. I opened my shades to let in natural light which, during that painful transfer of power from my subconscious to my conscious, is so much more tolerable than a light bulb. I stood transfixed before the window, staring out in to sky overwhelmed with snowflakes. Not the tiny, indistinguishable-from-rain type of flakes, but the enormous, intricate, breath-taking ones. The kind that whoever it is that creates props for films would spend hours trying to replicate, so that the scene where boy wins back girl in a whirlwind of chance meeting could be perfectly set. I didn’t notice the cold so much anymore, didn’t feel upset that Michigan had held me in its grasp for one more Winter visit. Romantic snowflakes, peaceful snowflakes, swirling about in the kind of wind you can hardly feel but always hear.

Winter sparked wonder in me today.

Day Break

It’s 7:15 am, November 17th, and I am sitting on a porch in Ann Arbor, MI. Winter has yet to bring ts full intensity, but I can feel it approaching as I pull my jacket around me a little closer than I might have a month ago. The day is just beginning, a realization that might have once scared me. But today, as I look at clouds tinged pink ever so slightly as they’re touched by the approaching sun, as I listen closely and find the world’s loudest sounds are made by the birds and the wind, as I feel the calm of morning still whispering it’s lullabye, I silently wish that the world would act at this frequency forever. I know that by noon a mild frenzy will have overcome this moment of tranquility, that by  5:00 it will not stand a chance, but I feel that by witnessing the beauty through which today began, I will find it difficult to see any second of today as anything less than wonderfully inspirational.

Smiles

While walking downtown, meandering towards one of my very favorite coffee spots, I saw two college students bump in to each other; presumably unexpectedly. They briefly exchanged words, smiling all the while. After parting ways, the girl began walking in the same direction as I while the boy began walking towards me, still smiling. He smiled while waiting for the crosswalk light to grant passage, while lightly jogging past a car impatient to complete its right turn, while safely reaching the other side of the street and still while walking past me. And I smiled.

There, I thought, is a genuine smile, representative of genuine joy. True joy displayed for all to see can be contagious. It is beautiful and refreshing and inspiring. A smile, a long-lasting, uninhibited smile, can transform a moment of genuine joy in one life in to a pebble, thrown in to seas of others who can then choose to let its movement ripple through their own lives. We should never be afraid to let our smiles linger when their presence is so beautiful a sight to all who see them.