Obituary for a Brooklyn Romance

Brooklyn was cold when we met,
and I was young.
We smoked pot on that Friday night,
(my first time)
and you and I were too high it onto make the L-train,
Manhattan bound.
But I was stoned from the beginning,
loving you and loving the lights,
and in those moments I thought,
“this must be what it feels like to live.”
I was in love!
Fresh, young, and enchanted
as we walked through the movie scenes,
you know,
the ones that shaped our world views,
the ones on which we fashioned ourselves?
That was us in those movies,
or at least two people doing what we did,
eating blueberry pancakes on a Sunday morning
in some Central Park café.
You were the love I’d never felt before,
the ode I had yet to write,
the fresh-picked flowers I’d smelled for the first time.
Thank you,
for walking through a blizzard to bring me pizza.
Thank you,
for questioning my self-defeating notions
about all the things I thought I could never do.
We cried when the intercom at the airport
said that I had to board the plane that would fly
across the country and out of your embrace,
and at that moment,
my heart understood what it felt like
to lose someone it loved.
It mourned the mornings we would wake up,
sleepy-eyed and tangled,
and it mourned hearing you yell at me,
for god-knows-what.
It mourned 6:30 p.m.,
when I would walk across Manhattan
just to walk back home with you from work.
I mourned you.
I loved you extraordinarily.
And in fact, I still wonder
if you love mint chocolate-chip ice cream
as much as you did.

An Escapist(+1) takes New York

 Off to New York City on a whim.

We sat on a Greyhound bus for 32 hours.

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I’m damn good at running away. I’m probably better at it than anything else I’ve ever tried. And, as you can imagine, this can create a lot of problems for me; quitting becomes easier, there’s always such a mess to clean up after one returns to the place they’ve tried to abandon, financial destructiveness, etc. Sometimes, running away is a good idea, however. Sometimes, running away is the best idea I’ve ever had. Not very long ago, I ran away to Dallas.  Here’s what that looked like.

On an August night, I found myself lying in bed at 1 AM unable to sleep, which gives me immense anxiety. I have insomnia. It’s annoying. But on this particular night, it was unbearable, because it was indicative of everything I was experiencing in my train wreck of a life. So, being an escapist like myself, I begin to imagine how great it would be to be somewhere not lying in bed at 1AM unable to sleep. I imagined the beach, or Paris, or the Andes.

What occurred to me, was how depressing it felt to be trapped; shackled by routines, burdened by the abstract expectations that loomed over me, telling me that I should be more normal.