Everyone’s a Pagan Tonight

Tonight after cleaning up the detritus of Sunday dinner, I saged myself, took a salt bath, and went downstairs to pay my respects to the blood moon eclipse from my stoop. All around me, couples were fighting. Granted, I live in Williamsburg, melodrama central. But even for my neighborhood, it was a bit much. One couple was fighting at the corner, another was fighting in front of a parked car across the street, yet another was fighting right in front of my building. That third couple stopped their yelling for a second to stare at me when I settled in on the stoop, the “Do you mind?” hanging over their head in a cartoon bubble they didn’t utter aloud. (Millennials make for unusually passive-aggressive New Yorkers.)

In return I didn’t say aloud that it probably had been my stoop since they’d been in high school and probably would be after they’d moved on to easier cities and relationships. I just smiled until they moved a few feet away, and then kept smiling at the lunar miracle that was driving their night even if they were too self-absorbed to notice. Eventually the girl rode away on her bike and the boy shuffled off in the other direction. And still I sat, clad in a sexless caftan and the apron I’d forgotten to take off, a little sweaty, a little wrinkly, a lot smiley. I was smiling at where they were, smiling at how much younger and older I felt than I had at their age, smiling at what could come next for all of us. Oh, super moon, it’s your night. We’re just howling in it.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy