maybe someday

meditating on life, as per!

John Baldessari

I pour a glass of water and try on my skin for size. Loose in some places, tighter in others. This is okay. No, this is better than okay. This is good. Growing pains are good, even when they test your patience. There’s a man on the subway wearing a coat with broken buttons, open just enough for the wind to suffuse his rotting. Once spring’s reckless gospel comes around, he’ll relapse—spiritually, emotionally, absurdly. He and I will chase saxophone echoes seven blocks out of our way like some lovesick fools in a French New Wave Film. Subtitles will likely appear under our feet: Unwell parties, both in search for something beautiful and impossible. I’m smiling, though it’s antagonistic for a cynic. I can’t help it. This city transforms me into a deeply hopeful person against my will. A cushion for ego, a tether to reason. I cross paths with strangers who consider my aura “tender,” and suddenly I want whatever I’m offered—false starts, open loops, delusions with no moral compass. I have stood on the outskirts of Heaven, and now that I’m back inside I like what I see. Everything is exactly as I left it. It looks good, it feels better. A kiss of death is a kiss of life, or however it goes. Yet, I am still mystified by something I can’t quite place. I seem to crave a softness that threatens the woman who’s always running on chaotic instinct. This city rewards the impulsive, the unwell, the half-feral romantics who text like poets and ghost like cowards. It doesn’t just tolerate longing, it gentrifies it—sells it back to us in $9 lavender lattes and subway poetry that feels unnervingly personal. All I know how to worship are larger-than-life feelings and poorly timed urges. But these days, there is a gentleness in my chest—like a flower blooming in a wasteland—I am softening in the most humiliating places. The deli aisle. The Q train. The bathroom at 12 Chairs. The fifth floor at the Whitney Museum. Anywhere below 14th street. A tulip opens itself to me and suddenly I declare love is Real. A bodega cat curls against my ankle and I want to lay with it forever. I cried in Duane Reade the other day because a little girl in pigtails offered me a broken lollipop and I couldn’t recall the last time I was touched by such innocence. For a moment, I wondered if she were not an oracle but a former version of myself in glitter Sketchers. Maybe she saw herself in me—the ache, the absurdity, the involuntary art of being undone by small, stupid beauty. How many lives have I lived? What have my hands touched? There are so many things I don’t know by name, only by face. Sometimes I want to be them again. When the city offers tiny revelations, I think, maybe I could be more than a ghost to my own past. I am never not wondering. Maybe someday I’ll know why.