The City

A letter untitled

Do you remember that song, the one about the city? I hadn’t listened to it since it came on in the car that day, six years and some ago. Perhaps even longer, even less. I’m here now, in the city, in case you didn’t hear. Ten months have passed and the space between them dissolves in that strange way it always seems to.

The days turned to weeks, that much I know, but only from the changing of the exhibits in the gallery on the corner. Suspended, it seems, occupying that liminal order of transit more often than show, the walls almost always empty. On Thursday, from my place on the sidewalk, the artist slumped over as subject, leaning over a pile or a pad on that cold cement floor. It’s strange, how those weeks then went to months. Now, the boxes are packed of a life small enough to be filed in brown cardboard and pen. There’s no real reason or rhyme to it, at least not one I can find, only that this feels like a goodbye.

There’s a ticket in my mailbox for the third of July. So, the time passes and continues to, but it feels less like it ought to. Raising up and all around, taller than these buildings with arms that stretch long and a grip that holds tight, casting veils all along the path forward. My footsteps get lost in the walks through the park and I consider all the ways I have gone too far. But, there have been times like this before, I’m reminded, a place I’ve been to and have yet to leave.

This room in the city is too small for furniture, so there is a chair beside the bed that acts as a nightstand. On the seat lives a pile of pages which sustain a life of their own, having never left, idle after all these months. They’re nothing exceptional anyways, those words, only stories I would have told you about the people or a conversation overheard that seemed to clarify all the things that still hang too low in my days for any clear vantage to be taken.

The heat has descended upon the city and with it, my restlessness. Some nights, I turn to my side and am confronted by their place there, all the sincerity that fills my body without a place to go. They make me think of the pit at the base of my throat that sprouted three July’s ago. I’m afraid, I’ll admit, for the next one to come.

Do you remember the cherries we used to eat, from the market down the street on the bench before the water, unwashed and by the handful? Sometimes, I wonder if I swallowed one of the pits, unconscious and ravenously. It would give shape to the grip at the base of my throat, my palm, that chokes and never gives. There is a book that has laid open for ten weeks and six more, beside that pile of letters that were never sent. I wrote to you about it, with a note at the top that reads something like, your killer chakras and mine. You would have scoffed, I can even hear it now and smile. I still haven’t managed to say anything plainly, never letting the abstraction melt into candor. Even to myself. Even after all this time.

What I can say is that the city has been kind. There was the false spring and now the slow crawl of summer. The parks smell of sunscreen and the pavement of rain. People talking to themselves or tiny voices in their ears, which no one seems to mind. The dead mouse in front of my door. The backs against the wall. The ways we leave or come at three or dusk and the promise of never being too far alone.

So, this goodbye comes at a reasonable time, with July so near, and it’s strange, still, how frightening they are. Those menial departures that should crumble beneath a pride build atop the devotion of never staying any place too long. One would think that the being from no place would find relief in the code of transplant, thought I suppose I’ve never been an adequate one at that. Eight months and a reason to return, this shouldn’t feel so similar to retreat, only it does.

The time still stretches, but I can say that there has been effort building in my days, which works to root my feet into places beyond the floor. So, my mind collects all of those ways we used to spend the time as I wander through the streets, always ending back at the gallery on the corner.

This city has been gentle in the most adverse of ways, though it’s not so different from home. A song plays from the ice cream truck that stations outside the park. Pools of proud children seep from the swings and slides to clasp a clammy hand on the cones. It’s sweet, really, watching them go by, my feet with them. And, so I land into this posture of confrontation, in the silence of an empty apartment, the empty gallery.

In that ten-week spring, I learned a whole lot, about all sorts of things that I couldn’t possibly get into, not now at least. But, there were encounters with this idea, the existence of patterns unable to be seen. You never believed in those, but it’s simple, really, to believe in things cast in subtly. In one of the letters there’s even a swift attempt at articulating this newfound ground. The fruits haven’t ripened yet, at least not this early in June, for your eyes or mine. Still, those efforts sustain a life in the words of a page you might never see, but will perhaps, one day, find their way back to me. It will be so obvious then, as it always is, the truth only being too quiet for these eyes to catch.

Fridays are sweet here, what with summer leisure and the hours spent serving tea to strangers. By afternoon, my fingers ache from scraping wax off the mirrors of an altar that’s been foraged, in most part, by my mind. It’s interesting, don’t you think, how sincerity is built within the vacancy of all things? The way I supply meaning into that gallery on the corner and can no longer point my feet towards the windows behind the altar. When did difference come, then or now? The first time or midway through the last? Three quarters through? There is a voice in my head that holds the tone of everyone who has ever known me, saturated in contempt at such ways. Even from the strangers outside the door that I can never manage to leave open for too long. Even from you.

Well, the rain hasn’t stopped for fourteen weekends and I suppose it’s the same for the sincerity that holds me in its palm. There’s too much to account for and no place to put it. It’s nothing all that grand, anyways, only the messages I’ve crafted, nestled within these blanched days. By Saturday, I leave for another train.

What I’ve been meaning to say, through all this time, comes through only now, only as I near the goodbye, and it seems rather simple.

I hope you know that you are kind. None of it felt that way, I know, but it exists all around. In the tea I serve and the smile of a stranger, the joy that blooms from the birds in the puddles and the crown of my head towards the altar. From the laugh that is let go and the person sitting still on the bench. From every door held open.

So, your kindness exists, I hope you know, and this sincerity is not a cage, but an offering to throw. I’ll write to you soon, but it’s hard to know whether or not it will meet the hand of the person virtuous enough to sign and send. Until then, I suppose.

Until then.