There was a last time I sat in the backseat of my grandmother’s car, Indiana whipping by to the tune of Patsy Cline as performed by, a final time she jogged up to scoop me into the long hug hello, I missed you, you always give the best hugs.
I take an expat’s path through the neighborhoods of Queens, lock eyes with a cat from the window of a Woodhaven apartment, green eyes unblinking, proud face wizened and watchful, I murmur you’ll never know it, but we shared a city once, he looks away, bored.
I want you to know that deli was a noodle shop, I really need you to believe my grandma used to pour her own ceramics, cursed in capital letters scooping the leaves and muck from the gutters, I’m desperate for you to tell me that you know I belonged here, once, and time didn’t rinse the stories away, you know?
Stories spill out from my lips, I think, so my eyes won’t flood, in this way, I found the power to resurrect, everything used to be something else, and it was really something.
Fresh page, I carve a path in the shape of a bow, footsteps in concrete rhythm, this I do to make home of a new town, familiarity with barbers and baristas, routine a song that regulates,
the way home, a man stomps toward me, furious, flailing and spitting, cigarette with a glowing tip jabbed toward me, raise my chest, meet his eyes, a dare, and he goes, thundering onward, my god, I marvel, I am not cut out for violences,
under light’s last minutes, same day, same sidewalk, I spot a weary lantern fly, chilly, and I crush it, stomach lurches as I feel it die beneath my sole, was it frightened, I ponder, remorse a violet stain pressing into my chest, a berry crushed into napkin, did it imagine I would be the last thing to see it alive,
I am, suddenly, a student of public transit, flashing numbers, loose schedules, sidewalk congregations huddled and irritable, and I ride beside a woman with a severe expression, the harshness of her eyes melting, mellow, at her lit-up phone, humans,
and what are my poems in Pittsburgh? what hue is my heart in a new light? what is constant in the story, chapter to chapter? I should know by now, but squint at my shorthand, sighing, grinning, and watch the ink seep into parchment, another lovely bruise to review.
Funny the way my hands pack up the first box, sharp contrast to the last, what was measured, delicate, now haphazard, throw a picnic of takeout wings on the stone-faced tile, watch a show on the phone, the small screen, the slice of life in the crumpled up page, crammed between chapters.
Coffee at a Pennsylvania strip mall, wander the parking lot universe, U-Haul waiting at the distant edge, white, metallic bug, buzzing, and the cat sleeps inside its maw, uprooted alongside everything, grab a hat, away we go.
My legs tremble from the hundred flights, at 3 AM my eyes leak saltwater, so much change, so much loss in pursuit of gentler living, we steady each other in the wake, walk a new city with familiar company.
Unexpected break of the sky, sidewalk runner, bathed in sunshine gold and cold, heavy thrums, what do I call this feeling, all the emotions watercolor, makeshift smile running in rivulets down my cheeks, fresh skin and open air, the humility of beginning, the sacredness of ending.
Along cardboard perforations, my palms crack and fold, packing up another life, throat catching as I sing along, the vinyl chorus, what to keep, or to leave behind, characters breathing color in yesterday’s pages, our very own constants, how I ache for everything I’ve ever set down.
You whisper time is a thief, I swallow a sob at the frailty of my grandmother’s hands, insist time is no thief, but a giver, I was born with nothing, and it gave, it gave, and it gives.
Outside, the train barrels by, remember how boldly I cursed it? Now I will miss its cacophonous entrances, sunlight ricocheting into the walls of this place, here I’ve cried, loved, hoped, healed, thank you, I whisper in the unwrapping, it’s really so lovely.
I’ll remember us here, young and wanting, brave and reckless, fresh-faced and, thankfully, so quick to heal from the breaking of skin, jean jacket love, Band-aid tequila, teeming always with life, always, bundled with care in the box marked forever.
The week I moved to New York, my U-Haul rental fell through. From my parents’ home in Indiana, I stared down my belongings and tried to figure out how to cut my essentials by half.
A bin of clothes, a box of mementos, a drawer of cutlery. Bit by bit, I stripped my proverbial wagon to the barest of possessions. After all, I reassured myself, I can always begin again.
I watched my Dad drive away from my building on W 27 Street, drew in a big breath, let it free. I walked back to an apartment of boxes, staring at me in the quiet. What will you make of this – this sprawling world, this concrete chaos, this blank and waiting page?
I didn’t know it, then, but I would fill it all with stories of us.
–
There’s a lot of lore about what makes a New Yorker. Most often, I hear fellow transplants regard ten years to be the tenure that earns this moniker. At a dinner party once, a woman told me New York chew you up and spits you out three times. If you stay past the third, she said, then you’re a New Yorker.
(The same woman asked me “what happens when you bring a girl home” about me living in a residence hall and turned bright red when I told her I was gay, but that’s neither here nor there.)
New York City is temporal. You can spot this quality in every corner. Trains roll in, spill a medley of folks onto the sidewalk, and clatter onward. A restaurant, having made its home for years on some city corner, shutters abruptly; a month later, it’s a 24-hour deli. To make life here is to know a community constantly coming and going, with friends and lovers fluttering in and out of the chapters like petals on the breeze.
When I think of a New Yorker, I will think of you. You, the friend who helped me spread glitter on my chest while we listened to Amy Winehouse. You, the lover who showed me the park in summer and made me cry on the train. You, the kickball teammate who greeted me each week with a kiss on the cheek. You, the neighbor whose dog refused to go back inside without watching the construction men. You, the beautiful strangers who belted Celine Dion with me on those hundred dance floor nights. You, the friend who scribbled poems with me in the aftermath of our broken hearts. You, the ones who took this gray place and injected it with a brilliant, technicolor heartbeat.
Maybe I met the New Yorker criteria in these wild mosaic years, and maybe I didn’t. I hope, when the people I remember in this chapter think of New York, they remember me just as vividly.
–
In the earliest days of my life in New York, I had very little time to pause. After work, I was running to stores to pick up essentials. On a walk home from The Container Store in Chelsea, I learned I would need to recalibrate how much I should really buy to carry home. I returned home, beleaguered and drenched in sweat, only to hop in the shower and meet a friend for beers.
When quiet found me, though, I wondered: Who would I meet in this place, and would I really be able to say I carved out a home here?
Outside my window, I see some of the leaves beginning to yellow. Annually, September brings the impossible conclusion to summer, ushering us to begin letting go and making room. As I stare, I feel time beckoning me ahead, and the logistics of a move rap sharply at my door.
Still, I can’t help but stop and think of each of you, of the moments we’ve shared and how – amidst the constant, inevitable change we called home – you each truly felt like forever.
When I go, I won’t wring my hands so heavily over the essentials I can pack into the moving truck. Clothing has a way of ceding to our yesterdays, and I’ve never been without a glass to fill my water. You, o New Yorkers, I will hoard with stubborn greed. I will hold you and our stories close for the rest of my days.
I’m still figuring out how to tell this story, a way to pinpoint the cocktail of grief and relief on my tongue as I say it, but the facts always come out the same: After seven years, at the end of August, I’m packing up and I’m leaving New York City.
New York was the sunset of my twenties and the rise of my thirties. I’ve danced here, loved here, grieved here, belly-laughed. I’ve run thousands of miles, learned to find rest amidst the cacophony, exhaled with a feeling of home as the Manhattan skyline appeared through airplane windows. Broken heart, twisted ankle, shimmering sequin, dancefloor kiss.
Every time I go to write, the stories run into each other like watercolors. I’m making sense of the poem before the ink knows to bleed into parchment. I’m going, the time is right, I go to move, I’m dragging my feet.
I could stay forever, but I’m leaving New York.
–
I’ve started taking inventory of the stories I need to take with me. My proverbial desk is crowded with lore.
I scribble notes about the night, at Fire Island, when I woke up to pee and found a famous drag queen, out of drag, wandering our living room. I made her a snack, diced up strawberries and powdered sugar, and we talked about life in those liminal minutes. I want to remember her face lighting up, almost mischievous, as the first strawberry washed over her.
By a bullet, I mark the night I almost got punched by a bouncer at The Ritz. Over his shoulder, he had hoisted a woman from the dancefloor, and when I tilted my head at this sight, she mouthed ‘help me.’ Answering the call, a friend and I intervened, only to learn she had been found using drugs on the dancefloor, was absolutely refusing to go, and then we had barreled in. We lost ourselves in laughter on the sidewalk afterwards.
I write about my first date in the city, a French guy named Peter who kissed me after I read him a poem at the Chelsea Pier, and the way we serendipitously got tickets to a Taylor Swift concert that night. How, on my first Friday in the city, Taylor Swift performed a surprise acoustic rendition of Welcome to New York.
The night, if you can believe it, a man fell from the roof of the birthday party. Pandemic summer, and a cherished few gathered quietly on a rooftop in the eerie quiet of midtown Manhattan. A man in our party left to use the restroom, stepped off of the rooftop believing he would find solid ground. A strange sound, the startling discovery peering over, the breath of relief that, somehow, he was alive.
The time I ruined my Uber score eating Popeye’s in the backseat, even after repeat requests to stop. The blonde woman, a stranger, sharing the ride with me and laughing until tears came as I repeatedly promised I wasn’t eating and crunched the next bite.
I could keep going. I could go on and on and on. The stories I’ve gathered here, the beautiful faces populating them, the wild blur of color and feeling, I can’t bear to let a single page go.
I’ll leave my couch, sagging in relief, on the sidewalk as I go. I’ll drop books off into neighborhood libraries, donate clothing in bags, leave so much behind without thinking, but the stories? Those I will hoard and hold close.
My cup runneth over.
–
How do you know when it’s time to leave the party?
Over beer and popcorn, I confessed to a beloved New York friend that the reason I fell in love with him was the way, each night we found joy together, he believed so unflinchingly that the night could keep going. All those nights ended, sure, but he always pressed me to stay longer, dance harder, and push the next page away.
A few years ago, I started to feel my New York story closing. There was no true catalyst event, no unbearable grief or unsolvable quandary. The color within me changed, I discovered, and I started to feel at odds with the rhythms of the life I carved out here.
On trips, I’ve found myself exhaling. Oh my God, I realized many times, I am so at ease here. I started to fantasize about an apartment, somewhere gentler. About sidewalks that hadn’t claimed so much of my skin. When I’ve returned, I’ve grasped at the city’s bricks with a strange sense of knowing. It’s been time to go, and I’ve signed the lease for another year.
There’s nothing more human, after all, than to yearn for forever. I recall consoling my niece when we ran out of bread for the ducks, realizing she hadn’t yet learned to tolerate the brutality of time and its constant conclusions.
Over the past months, I’ve weighed the question: How do you know when it’s time to leave the party? Go too soon, and you might miss the night’s magic moment; stay too late, and the story could sour.
My lease was up at the end of May. By April, I wandered the neighborhood in tears, watching the train barrel by and feeling wholly unready to leave behind its rattling. I called my landlord and asked if I might stay the summer.
I’m leaving New York. I’ve gathered stories, kissed goodbye to the party, and the ending, it turns out, is being convinced to stay for another song.
The sun spills its oranges into the avenues, rum and honey gathering at our feet, and we are drunk of it, this young wanting, wild, our mouths flowers spreading open to join in another chorus.
When is it time to leave the party, my lips go to ask but my throat catches, pocketknife in the palms of a curious child, I am too old to pretend I don’t know how balloons eventually sag toward the floor, too young not to want my forevers.
Thai iced tea on our breath as you kiss me, we cut class and pose on concrete blocks, romance is rest and revelry, and I stop in the street, struck by the sun’s reach across all this city, take my hand and whisper, wet eyes, let’s go home.
Lights up on an apartment half-emptied, cardboard boxes littering the space in uneven clusters, strips of packing tape and the urgent squeak of a permanent marker, trying desperately to control the chaos– that is, packing up a life.
Center stage, a light bulb dangles just out reach, pours golden light over a slapdash stack of whatever was left to be taken away.
You enter the picture, step with rehearsed precision, crane your arm to unscrew the light, and I approach, hands tentative, then firm, I grasp your abdomen, watch you methodically twist, twist, twist, and I say – and the audience hears it, but you don’t hear it – I’d sooner die than let you fall from here.
Skip ahead a few scenes, and I watch with wide eyes as your words paint the darkness of rooms you’ve known, and I ask – this time, you hear it – can I join you there?
And I do, again and again – volunteer to install an A/C unit so you don’t do it alone, take a train on your birthday, dinners and darkrooms, shouting matches, blurry walks on boardwalk beaches, the rum punch blur of a frenzied love.
Cut ahead to a scene, two men on a trapeze, your movements sure and mine flailing, and I release, and I reach, and you pull your arms up, watch me fall without blinking, all the bones crack bleakly, a single overhead light fades into black.
And I shout, stamp my feet, sob, press my palms to my eyes until my wrists are saltwater rivers – only silence – so I sit there, shaky breaths, my final scene, here in the dark room I asked for, until I rise to exit, and
Hey, mister, you say – I hear it – and I take the stage door, the steel latch echoing briefly into both our worlds.
I hope the thought of me still draws blood. // What does that say about me?
They are twin thoughts, arriving at my doorstep in quick succession. The first twin, mischievous, revels a bit in the ruin. How funny, it marvels, Taylor Swift suddenly finding a way to be absolutely everywhere. My eyes scan the bar when we wander in and, for a second, twist in disappointment not to find you on some barstool. In the months immediately after our unraveling, what-if conversations played through my mind in a panic. I spent all that time getting ready, only to discover you’d stood me up.
The second twin sours the air and softens the heart. The truth is, I know my joy would buckle the moment I saw your sadness. It’s the very reason I had to claw free, start over, and let you fade into some old story. Heartbreak leaves behind war wounds, and we become like old people, swearing a snow is coming because our ankle acts up. I look in the mirror and confess I’m not cruel enough to win that kind of war, and then I wonder why I want to.
Does it make me a monster that I hope you’ve realized you lost something precious? When I think back to those days, I remember weathering your bruises for the small sake of keeping you company. I know that you know I saw you under the light, trembling. I made you safe in a way no one else ever has, and I hope it haunts you.
It’s a grotesque admission, perhaps, a monster wading out of the shadows. But what is more human, really? What feels more honest to this experience than wishing we could find a way to stay behind when we go?
Ours is a story collecting dust on some sun-soaked windowsill. Cracking its pages is an eerie reminder of the passage of days and the pileup of debris. To draw blood now would be to strike a person far removed from the man who left these marks. We are strangers whose past selves are trapped in amber in one another’s junk drawer.
When we broke, water flooded the room, and our lungs burned for air. The rooms have dried, those rotting floorboards ripped up and replaced, and that faucet goes untouched. Still, in the silence of a stray moment every thirtieth day, there falls a solitary drip. Funny the way the sound echoes throughout the house.
The older I get, the deeper I fall in awe of memory. Why, as I walk to grab oranges at the market, do I think of my grandma singing ‘Knock Three Times’? On a run, I remember a boy who did coke and then kissed me, remarking with delighted eyes that my lips tasted like coke. I chuckle, and I marvel at having met him only once, years ago. Is it strange to remember this silly intimacy? What, if anything, does he remember of me?
I hoard stories. I relive them with every re-telling, examining the edges and finding new meaning. I play the same video games over and over, immersing in those worlds. Songs attach themselves to chapters of my life. I healed from my first breakup listening to Blank Space on YouTube over and over, running circles around Worthen Arena in Muncie, Indiana, the parking lot stale with snow.
An old lover told me I was the biggest devotee to lore he’d ever met. I remember feeling suddenly naked. He was right. I delight in the lore of everything. I am, in ways, always crafting my own.
What will I think of these days, once they’re gone? Who will I ache to see again? What stories will I tell, over and over, and who will populate them?
michael king 