One Year In New York
Elementary school is where they should first teach you the meaning of three day weekends. How the older you get time will begin to spin in different directions, how life should matter before there is any cost of breathing. Both of our hands had half picked calluses as they found each other walking down the street. The sun bore on our shoulders as we passed benches sanded by other people, who, hopefully, we called lovers. At seven years old, I never thought of how touch could mean so much. We weren’t supposed to tell someone the answers. Keep everything to ourselves, let their red marks accumulate on the page. Red graffiti condemning those who live near it. You see something enough it becomes background. Trains, birds, shouts, pain.
That weekend our air conditioning refused to work. Windows allowed air along with creatures unbeknown to where they were. It makes you wonder what summer means to other things. If time is a construct, does cycle exist without existence? Will the spinning ever stop? Did our hands ever touch?
His arm hit the duvet sending dust and fibers in every direction. It’s funny how love can feel so strange – stuck being stories of brittle fingernails and solving problems. The trouble with those is they always end at love. Not all parts are pretty, love isn’t a destination, merely a byproduct of living. You rarely hear the story of two drunken kids trying to figure it out. There were lights behind the DJ booth, but they may as well have been stars. A blurry gas of something that is all but a memory. A smoky room with drowsy eyes and lazy fingers.
I often wondered if the love found in taxi cabs counted, carried short distances further into the night. From the outside, it would have looked like two lovers wrapped up in each other’s arms. But really, it was just to stop the spinning. I guess that could still be a synonym for love. We rotate, the starts do not. The gas inside us builds into the supernova of touch. Maybe that’s human nature, to hold something until the spinning quits. A stable soul when everything manages to crumble into dust. What’s to say it wasn’t enlightenment the first time we locked eyes? Are those moments real, or just fragments of time to always feel we are building up to something.
Lovers spinning slow inside of a cab, wheels toward another set of unrelenting and intangible light. We sat there, breathing, gazing out the window. One year in New York, we were glowing. 
