What if I got it wrong?
And no poem or song..
Could put right what I got wrong
-Coldplay
One more week until I cross the Atlantic, and the city seems so precious to me. I hate last moments, last walks, last looks, gurgled goodbyes. Everything feels alive, however, the Hungarian café awakening a small smile when the warm iced tea touches my lips, the lacquer on my nails peeled to the bone, the streets littered with flowers and fat cigarette butts, striped in white and gold. Our street flags, perhaps, our New York Look.
In the stores, I am surrounded by slippery, small wonders, things looking out at me with all empty eyes. My insides ache for another time, a walk backwards to the place, the path where Megan and Kim and I licked rainbow ices and centered on stoops. Perhaps it was Megan’s presence, her known bright eyes, the threesome suddenly reunited in a more volatile, violent time. The world seemed softer, then, and I hugged her tight to my chest.
At home, I am surrounded by the blankest of memories…my mind wanders forward fawning streams, blue boats afloat and aflutter on rivers raw with youth. My mind wanders backward to the places where the photos once lay, their tape pulled down by my own, desperate fingers, my frequented failure to follow through.
Inside, I am less elevated, I am wholly in the present, so much more than I have been for a long time. I know I have lost and then lost again. I am not becoming at all immune to the familiar ache, the pull at my heart but I am becoming more realistic, and more whole. I am sorry, still, I am not separate inside; however, I am standing tall, taught, learned. There are so many tomorrows to revel in, so many more smiles to be had. There is so much more to the world than this. Over coffee with Amy, dainty plates with Emma, chortled laughter with my parents...I am dancing, delighted, dangling outside of the present remorse.
England falls in my lap at the ideal time, a precious walk to another moment. I tell myself it is an event, a promise, a purse of life’s lips, a gift in time. (not a wrinkle in time in the least, rather an acceptable escape route).
Now I know. I know I am bold, in certain ways, but not in all the ways I had hoped for. I sprung forward, singing my slight tune...I was tickled by it all but the romance shattered and I shunned by the shadows I hid from for far too long. Now I know what my mother has gone through. Now I know I hate only abandon.
Maybe it is the Corona. Maybe it is the moonlight. I am tired, less tense, here tripping into a world I never thought I would know. What if I was wrong? What if I was wrong again? This is a moment of so much to say but all certainty stifled. And I am alright, not dancing, but slightly delighted (at a possible resilience? at my same pink pajamas and ponytail? at the (guilty) relief?). I am perusing my past and my present...and it is through these shy glances that I can recreate my expectations. I promise no more games or grown-up gossip; I promise to go only for the grasp of my gut. That is where the answers lie, really--not in advice or aching, not in the head or the heart. The gut, the belly, my favorite round of life.
