When I arrive home, I am touched by the fullest of nostalgia, vibrant past wings that beat against me and bring back a single expectant moment, at rest on the tip of my tongue, my heart. A single, uniting meal; a conversation underground; the promise of full green peas and a roast tied in speckled, string bows.
When I arrive home, I beg the roads to clear, although Sunday evenings are certainly congested, the city's cough crept around the highway, inevitable choice between a tunnel and a bridge.
I laugh out my love for this city, as animate and inhuman as it remains. Still I am somehow more alive in the pale green streets, where both my past and present are steeped, a changeling hood I can at least call home. It is not only the ghosts that are sweeter, stuck to my insides in true, traceable forms, as the pomegranate yogurt I revel on the roof of my mouth. It is the memory, never struck by the lightning I dared upon its frames, still so startling now that I have to close my eyes. It is the familiar taste of morning, the places of my walls that remain reminiscent of him. It is the red dressing of my room, a million books where I could always hide my head. It is the drawn out drawl of the Brooklyn Bridge, the children I have helped to grow.
I love this city as I should only love people, family, companions. I love this city for the vibrant beat it installs in me, the faster dreams, drugged up on too much noise and little nicety. And no matter where I am now, where I end, it is this beginning that reminds me: the first embraces on park benches, Christmas coffees, balancing of porcelain and a turquoise sea of awnings, headlights, listless, wistful, indulgent desire.
