easter sunday

molly jo's, brooklyn 4.12.2009.

dedication

mike crowley, sudbury mass. november 2008




it is a beautiful fifty-three degrees of warm fahrenheit here in manhattan, a beautiful fifty-three there over my massachusetts love. the clouds look like a new england spring. no spring at all. my mind is back home. our air is the same, except mine has pollution from light and noise (which is really magic when you think about it) and theirs has sea salt you can taste 30 miles inland and the smell of thawing leaves and bad car radio blasting from high schoolers graduating that i've never met (which is really sad when i think about it.)

i love it here. manhattan is a home.

but talking to my roommates last night, one an tough army brat and another who's lived all up and down the west coast, i realized that my word for "home" means something different and impossible.

i've lived in the same bedroom for 18 years. my body's dead skin settles like sedimentary rock in the carpet with the wrinkles i've memorized. i know all of the pictures i saw in the plaster when i was six years old by heart. there's a witch and a prince in the upstairs bathroom wall, a sneezing man in the family room. at three thirty pm in the summer rainbows appear on the wall in the foyer. there are hidden rips on the lower left corner of the blue and brown rug my brother and i used to pretend was full of rivers and islands. there's a plastic swiss-army toy in the left-most drawer that's full of bubble wands instead of knives and corkscrews. i didn't grow for four years and the kitchen wall's pencil marks tell all of our guests. i am always embarrassed and always glad they're there.

to know a place, to have every inch memorized, has only recently revealed itself to me as a gift. stagnancy only gets more and more rare. it was like falling in love too early in life, you know you can't marry, you feel so lucky and so murdered.

so today is dedicated to massachusetts. i only write to you. my life, my past 18 years are a memoir of a place. i'm the lucky secretary to the most beautiful place in the entire world.

sometimes i wonder if i was just born an empty shell, waiting to be filled with a place. that i would have loved wherever i was born so deeply because that was how i was born. but then i realize: no. i feel like a psychologist accepting that i love someone and ignoring necessity and proximity. but it feels so real, this must be how psychologists can manage to have friends.

happy massachusetts day,
happy 53 degree fahrenheit day
happy wednesday
happy memory day
happy hands in old boxes of photographs day
happy moving day
happy missing day


because really my birthday is just the anniversary
of my first time in massachusetts.

love elise

a city where the man in the hat in the shadows still kills

manhattan and brooklyn, march 2009. mutual 3 am




i'm so lucky and scared to live in a city ruled by whatever stories the shadow people want to tell- they could all be paperbacks and police beats every night, no one ever had any time to become nostalgic. the dark is still the same, quiet is the same quiet, i walk the new york trilogy's city of glass streets in new decades fearing and loving the trenchcoats behind me

my jacket this morning was still wet from the rain. i got in the fog, i went to work, i wrote my papers, i sat at my desk, barnaby and quinn and garcia lorca smiling beside me and i am blessed

cornbread, collard greens

tompkins square park, manhattan. 4.17.2009.




i'd forgotten how easy it is to walk when the wind doesn't hurt you. last night the breeze was warm. warm- i went for hours and blocks and miles. i need new city summer sneakers. young soles that aren't scared of these new night walks.

as time passes it's harder to break my time up into swallowable pieces. i can't tell if that will make adulthood faster or slower than the last 7,000 halcyon days. my future years endlessly fall ahead of me like a bad painting with no vanishing point.

it is warm. my legs are brown. i am getting nothing done.

soon but not urgent

manhattan 4.2009. a bou-quet for you lov.


BE my faith versus science, darlin.

elise goes to ohio, or, do You believe in God? Really

a story about ohio with hardly any words at all















































































































































































































































































































































8:17 pm. 3/16/09 rose's roof still. during house meeting. oberlin, OH.


this is a town you're not meant to spend your life in. you start here, and you might end here, but you're supposed to escape sometime in the middle; “the ones who are still here are quietly thought of as...those who failed to take flight-”
it smells like woodsmoke and late summer. turn of the season birds, turn of the season late afternoon light. we've gotten evening back from the clutches of winter and its 4 p.m. darkness. it is eight at night and the sky still has a little fight left in it. birds do. I do. and wow, I do- it must be the quiet. even though this is a new place it's set in a shell of the familiar. it is beautiful and exciting, in a comfortable way. like a dad getting a nice new armchair, secretly for sleep.

I could learn to love myself here, it would be so much easier.

There's a political map in pastel colors in my head and it won't get out. I'm on a pushpin in Ohio. landlocked in the gentle middle. the edges got so roughed up, of the US of A- rockies and appalachians and all that mess and here ohio is like the few good pieces of bread in the middle of the crushed loaf. the sidewalk in front of the tank is a perfect intentional curve. there's nothing for it to avoid like in the northeast. the streets make sense even though this isn't a city. there are rules to the numbers of houses. there's a theatre for three dollars.

it makes me wonder what I did by moving to The Place during those years where it's still alright to make excuses, still alright to live in the places people shouldn't spend their whole lives in. I gave something up and gained something and i'll probably live not quite as long. i'd never sleep here, i'd just walk the streets because my head wouldn't have used up all of its tolerance for noise, and light, and navigation.

what did I do

i'm looking down at a little town that looks like a flat benign hometown. full of kids I would have loved to know in grade school. people are passing by in their cars just bassing. it vibrates out and up to me like jam'n 94.5 FM did to me all those years back, when God did I have to search for people to love. thank God I learned that love has nothing to do with anything I thought it did. I remember all I wanted when I was a freshman and a sweet 14 was a boy with a car to drive me around in, listening to the radio and spending time at the Gulf station and on 495. the loveliness of that situation would have filled in the holes where the loveliness in him should have been, I told myself without knowing I was telling myself. I fell in love with ugly boys thank God. the sparks. the special I found in the sea of hometown doldrums.

here almost fooled me. I would have loved this. everyone dresses in my favorite colors. no one washes their hair. and i'm sure that there's a particularly special population-
but i'm so glad I learned to love the ugly ones, the unsavvy because they have been the only ones i've ever loved.






7:27 pm 4/9/2009. Manhattan, the apartment.

i learned a lot of things in ohio. i learned that i like quiet. that i enjoy cooking food to feed twenty or more. that some people find me handsome. that some find me pretty.

that comfort isn't as hard to come by as i once thought,

that i love my small-town memories for a reason,

that i can write when i'm content too, that i shouldn't panic, that i'm not behind. that i wasn't making it up in my head that new yorkers were kind of mean. that there are some sweet, sweet people on this rock of ours.

i was reminded of a lot of things as well. like how much i miss rose, and how much i miss the smell of dirt, and being outside, alone.

every day, even if i'm sad, i wake up feeling luckier, luckier luckier luckier- my summer life is taking shape, i have a place to live, i have a place to work, and both are beautiful beyond measure. i have a quiet roof, outside, a place to be alone. i have fire escape room for a garden. i have windows with sun, and real, old wooden floors. there are no right angles in the entire apartment. i have a job with no dress code, an incredible salary, free vegan food, no air conditioning, and with a built-in reason to smile at everyone i see.



i think that rose may have packed some ohio in with my dirty clothes. and i suitcased them back to the city and washed them with everything. and now ohio is everywhere, even rubbing off on my tomorrows and next years.

so thank you.