Brooklyn Diary, Entry 1

April, sunshine, I let my coffee cool.

It wasn’t intentional, but thoughts the color of early spring began to crawl up the brickwork of my mind, and bloom just outside the glass.

I have only now just begun to put into words this past year.

Grandpa died in late September, on a Wednesday morning, and I missed a week of school to be home and sit with him on his last night, and to be with my grandmother as I saw her cry for the first time, and to be with my mother as she, like Atlas, carried the great burden of her family’s world. And, most importantly, I was there with my father as he and I struggled with the reality that all fathers pass away. We are made of dust, and our ashes are caught on the easterly, and are borne back to the waters we were raised from.

Life never seemed so temporary, or so fragile.

I wish my sister could have been there the night he died. But her Love and Spirit were with that old man to the end, and he knew, and I knew the smile on his face was for more than just the relief of a well lived life ending. It was a smile shaped by the pride he had for us.

We need to remember the spirits of our ancestors, for we gained the great gift of life from them, and we owe them lives that are beautiful, lives that are full of meaning.

So I will try to make my life worthy of memory.

I drank a lot that week. Somewhat to drown the struggle in my bones, and somewhat to give me courage for the path ahead. My best friend picked me up at the train station, the night before grandpa passed, and the static between us was heavy. I had wronged him. The wrong ran deep, and it was something built up for years that neither of us wanted to face. It may have been jealousy on my part, or fear on his part, or a poisonous mixture of the two.

And we knew the river was rising.

And we knew we were too close to her cold fingers to escape it again.

So I drank whiskey and cheap beer and prepared for the task at hand. We surrounded ourselves with smoke and I vomited the dark memory out onto the floor of his attic. We pulled the bits out of the bile and wiped them off on our shirts and scrutinized the wrong I had dealt to him.

And he loved me, and I will be forever in his debt.

True friendship is born through forgiveness, and strengthened with gratitude. I learned that from him.

We buried grandpa’s ashes on a cold, blustery, autumn day. We buried him in Newtown, in the cemetery that my mother played in as a little girl. He wasn’t in the box. I could feel him around us, coaxing us to something, whispering greatness in our ears, expecting our very best. There are days I think we invented God to give a voice to the dead that could be distant from our own waking realities. If we listen, those we loved continue to whisper to us our history, so we always remember where we came from, so we never lose track of where we are going. They have the gift of eternity in their hands, and they want to share it with us in the stories and tasks they conquered.

Stop. Listen. That is all we need to do.

It was hard to come back to Brooklyn after that. It was hard to go to school, to know that I had witnessed death, and would be expected to ignore the physical and focus on the theoretical. It was hard to sit in a classroom, and watch the concrete expand and extend itself into every natural space, to watch it cover up and muffle our dead so that their whispers would be silent, and we would be free to live our own, little, temporary, selfish lives, away from the connectedness that makes us so terribly human.

My grandpa wrote something to my sister. He feared we were losing our ability to communicate and relate to one another. Surrounded by the distractions that have come from our advances in biology, and technology, and increased social awareness, he feared we were losing our identities as a community of human beings, losing our ability to build strong relationships and to truly know one another.

Returning to the city, I knew he was right.

Just a note…

…to everyone.

Don’t trust your president. Don’t trust your congress. They don’t represent you. They believe in the Almighty Dollar. You are only a stone on the path toward their greatness. They will pass over you without a glance. You are nothing more than a passing thought…if that.

And it will stay this way.

Unless you change it.

Love Story

                Irving Hawthorne loved Delilah Thorne.

                The first time he kissed her they lay in the back of his pick-up alongside the river. Night had come, and the summer stars yielded a great harvest of whispers from the deep-dreams-place. Peepers and night birds hummed from the tall grasses, their songs without meter, without a key.

                 Her gold hair was silver in the grey light.

                “I am going to kiss you now.”

                He looked at her, waiting for her to tell him no, but she didn’t, so he leaned in and gave up reason for the taste of her lips. A heron barked from the shallows and took wing. In the east, the moon was following the charred path of the sun, beginning its slow ascent across the midnight sky. The waters swirled on, toward the south, toward the sea, black beneath the passage of time. It was August.

                For Delilah it was just another night. Another kiss she would carry with her to her grave. For Irving, though, this was a culmination of patience and honesty, never straying once from his confessed love for her. Sometimes, we are able to wait years for what we want, then only to find out our desires were fleeting, as insubstantial as the mist, which dissipates as the sun warms the earth, and sets things right again. In the air, the stars shivered as the earth turned. The moon rose. Irving held her, and her heat seeped into him, and his into her, and it was like they were one pulse. What need does man have for god when he has love? On this rapidly spinning earth, Irving held onto the only thing that made sense to him.

                They did nothing more than kiss that night. It was his way of showing her that he desired her, not what she could give him. Looking back, remembering the taste of cinnamon on her tongue, and how her hands carelessly explored his body, he knew. He could have had it all that night for nothing more than the cost of gas and a cup of coffee. She began to shiver.

                “Hold on,” he said.

                The dry grass and gravel crunched beneath his boots as he slid off the tailgate, and made his way around the side toward the cab. While he was rummaging behind the seat, she texted a friend, and slipped her phone back into her pocket before Irving was aware. He produced a blanket, and made his way back to the truck bed.

                “Here, it’s thin, but it will do the trick.”

                He sat next to her as she wrapped herself in the blanket, pulling his knees up to his chin and looking up. A meteor flashed across the northern horizon, its light burning beautiful before fizzling out, its life nothing more than one perfect, incandescent moment.

                “Did you see that?”

                She nodded, “I made a wish.”

                “I did too.”

                She looked over at him, her eyes ranging over his body, sizing him up.

                “I learned a long time ago to only wish for things I know will come true.”

                She smiled faintly. Behind them, along the gravel access road, headlights burned through the dark and lit up the truck. Irving jumped and his heart punched the inside of his chest.

                “If it’s the cops, let me talk to them.”

                Delilah held in a laugh as the driver door opened.

                “Hey Dee, you comin?”

                “Hold on a sec Mike.”

                She looked over at Irving, who still hadn’t figured out what was going on.

                “I had a wonderful time tonight, but, I have other places I need to be, you understand.”

                He nodded, he didn’t understand. She leaped from the back of the truck and jogged over to the other car, hugging the driver and slipping into the passenger seat. Irving watched until the taillights were swallowed by the darkness of the access road. Soon, the sound of the engine died, and Irving was left with the hum of the night. He neither got a goodbye kiss, nor his wish. He lay out there until it was dawn, and then, as the sun rose, he waded into the river.

                Irving Hawthorne loved Delilah Thorne, but that night he learned to love the river more.

Natural Fact

It’s hard for me, you know, livin’ in this world and shit. It’s like, everywhere I go there’s somebody without a job, or without a home, and what’s a kid to do? I just got a sit here, and let the rest of the world go to hell around me? We got all this violence and hate at home, and all our news cares about is what’s goin’ on in somebody else’s country, or what some entertainer got in trouble with. They don’t care about what’s goin’ on in the ‘hood, or in the trailer park. They just want to show us some shocking or entertaining television and keep us in the dark where we think we’re fat and happy, but really, we’re all starving for some kind of compassion or somethin’. I go to sleep at night and I hear the homeless groaning, and I hear the gun shots in the dark and I ain’t scared of it, I’m just worried. Cause nobody seems to care anymore. They want to change this system and that system, and they want more jobs, but they ain’t never met any of these guys without jobs, ya know? They got their numbers, but I got names and faces and it’s hard for me to wake up some mornings. Cause I know subway Ronnie’s got a kid to feed. And I know Jonathan is damn good cook, but nobody will let him make them their food. And I know Mikey over on 16^th and 5^th has got to be one of the hardest workin’ men I ever met, but he’s stuck beggin’ for a couple of bucks a day just so he can eat some fast food shit and maybe survive another week. And they got us so entrenched in this hate and mediocrity, that we forget we’re all brothers and sisters. They make us forget that sometimes things are gonna get a little rough, a little dirty, but that’s alright cause there’ll be a brother, or a sister right there to pick us back up, no matter our gender, or our race, or our religion, or our politics. Cause none of that matters. None of it. But everyone keeps acting like this and that policy will change something, or this and that religion will save somebody, and the truth is, until we all start changing our hearts and stop fighting, nothin’ is gonna change. Nothin’. And that’s a natural fact.

Currently…

…I can smell the corn. And the pig roasting on the spit. It’s ninety-nine degrees in the shade, and the ice in my bloody Mary has melted; it’s left a thin layer of un-homogenized water on the top of the tomato juice. In this heat, the celery looks wilted and tired. I fan the air with my hand to keep an adventurous fly from my face. My body the same as that goddam vegetable.

I lean back in the lawn chair, as if to go deeper into the shade, but it doesn’t help. The dust and the Pennsylvania heat are still there. In my hand, a cigarette burns steadily toward my fingers, and I wish I hadn’t lit it. Beneath this fucking sun it seems silly to pull hot smoke into my lungs. But I do it any way, and I stir my drink and chase the smoke with vodka and tomato, pepper and horseradish.

In front of me, the old timers throw horse shoes. Most of them are already drunk, and their throws are lazy. But they’re all running from something. Some hideous past they hide with macho stories of bravado and drinking, guns and women. I’m envious, somewhat, of their hardened exterior, but I’ve heard them scream in their sleep. I’ve watched as the nightmares have clawed at the back of their eyes and forced slurs and curses from ther lips in the quiet night.

That is something I’m not envious of.

I take another swig of the bloody Mary. Its my third, and I already feel a good buzz coming on. The heat persists and the sun continues to rise. Its not yet noon, but it feels like a century has passed since I woke up beneath the hot swirling red of the rising sun. Cicadas dominate the still air, and the smoke from the pig roast wafts over to me and reminds that their are still good things in life.

Beyond the cornfields, beneath the hazy blue summer sky, black smoke billows into the air.

Tonight…

…I met a homeless man named Aziz right outside my apartment. His skin was the color of burnt caramel, and he smelled like the earth after an April rainstorm. Its been cold the past couple nights in Brooklyn, despite the warm days it’s still January, and he’s been in Rikers since October.

He was homeless and sleeping on the subway.

I guess thats a crime.

He told me he used to live in my neighborhood. With an outstretched hand he pointed to a bar he used to by crack from a guy he called Fat Cat. Those were the days, he said, and his eyes tripped away toward nostalgia.

I threw away my youth, he said, I hope you haven’t.

He shivered, and I knew that our conversation wouldn’t last much longer. We both had places to go.

What do you need? I asked.

I need money for a train out to a shelter I’m in on Long Island.

I handed him the money.

I watched him walk away. My ribs were weak against the nervous beating in my chest. My short life has been a search to prove my preconceptions wrong. It has been trial after trial in an attempt to break free from the human condition. But I fear, with each passing day, I’m only proved correct more and more.

We are all broken and lonely.

And whether he used that money for a train ticket or for a quick fix and a numb sleep, it doesn’t matter. For a brief moment I treated him like he was another broken human being, and he treated me the same. I think we get too hung up on the problems, on how wrong things are, and we overlook the simple act of caring for each other. If we all just recognized that we’re all messed up, then perhaps there wouldn’t be peace, but there would be a lot more room for understanding.

A lot more room for love.

But as long as someone needs to be right and someone in turn needs to be wrong, this won’t happen.

God bless you the man said, and I was grateful to him. There is no one else who can.

Life is Short

                And you’re going to wake up tomorrow and you’re going to be 50, and nothing will have changed. Except maybe you’ll have more wrinkles, maybe a full time job and a family. And all those dreams about changing the world will have vanished into the smoke. You will realize you spent your whole life fighting for things, and somewhere between then and now, you will realize you forgot to live.

                So stop fighting.

                Stop pushing political ideology on people.

                Stop pushing your religion on people.

                Stop everything and go. Sell what you can and go. Find someplace just beyond the horizon and run toward it. If you were born with the ability to go and see as much beauty as your heart can hold it would be a crime not to live life as fully as possible.

                And you will meet people, and you will love them and because of that you will change them. You will even save some of them.

                And while you’re out there, get drunk, get arrested, fall in love, fall out of love, find God, lose God, fight in a war, watch a war be fought, and in the end, somehow, find yourself along the way. Because the rest of you is out there. All the stray bits of you that the world has taken, find them, and reconstruct yourself, redefine what it is that makes you so beautifully and wonderfully human.

                It’s a risk, and it’s scary, and you could end up anywhere.

                But isn’t it worth it?