Archive | City Matters
Beeswax and Other Urban Myths
Sitting on my stoop, I watch a young woman hurry by.
I call the practice of people-watching “stoop-snooping,” I guess because I’ve done it most while lolling on stoops. My schoolmates recall me watching them from the library stairs, even. (I called that library-stairing.) Watching the world walk by is hands-down one of my favorite activities but since things have opened back up, it’s more charged. I suppose everything has after months of fearing and missing each other in equal parts. Constant life-and-death stakes are not just wearying. They are deteriorating.
Earlier today, my block was abuzz as it has been every day since the café next door re-opened. People drinking espressos, wolfing piadini, cooing over each other’s pets, chattering and clattering over the Italian pop pouring out of the speakers. Now, in what approximates magic hour in these apocalyptic times, the heat is just beginning to abate as the handsome baristas speed off for the night, the last stragglers move into their next NYC dream.
So it’s just the two of us on the street right now–this girl with places to go, and me. She is narrow-framed, long-legged, straight-backed. Wearing no airbuds, wielding no phone. Eyes locked straight ahead, fingers hooked onto the backpack slung over both shoulders, spotless Keds shooting out from neatly creased shorts. She is moving rapidly into her horizon. Continue Reading →
I Do Not Dervish Well (Morning Regrets)
last night
It is an absolutely lovely Sunday morning and I am find myself reflective in a way that would be better suited to a real essay but I have a kitchen to clean and a greenmarket to visit before the best spinach sells out. So I’ll just write this out in a few messy overlong paragraphs, perhaps most fitting for my fugue.
It’s just that never before have I been so aware that human joy and connection is fleeting. More than that: fragile. And never before have I felt so stricken by this fact. This last week has been more social than the 15 months before it, and I have been constantly overstimulated, giddy, and anxious. How to find a center in this whirling dervish of everyone and everything after the cozy claustrophobia of covid incubation tanks. This morning my cuticles are bleeding, my guts are a mess, and I am obsessively running over the dumb things I said and did in every social event I attended–the myriad ways I failed to listen well, hold space for others, breath before opening my big trap. Not to mention the small and big hurts I glossed over in everyone around me, including how they were clocking me (how embarrassing). I of course am an extroverted introvert; I naturally replenish energy reserves alone rather than around others, who drain me even when I adore them (especially then) because I always clock everything they’re thinking and feeling even as I am prattling on a topic of my own (especially then). Worse, it means I am someone who dominates and performs when nervous–so much so that you can tell I actually trust you when I got silent.
this morning