emma-poole

[emma-poole]

Keith is from Oakland, California. He’s an Aquarius. What do you do? we ask. I do everything! He smiles. I’m a performer. I sing, dance, act. Keith turned 63 on February 4th. He was born in 1957, the same year as my mother.

It is 11am on June 2nd, 2020. Mass protests take place in the streets. People across the world post black screens on their social media handles in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, come to e known as #blackouttuesday. The movement isn’t new but the hashtag is. No one quite knows if posting it is helpful or harmful, but everyone is talking about it. It was prompted by the murder of George Floyd nine days prior, a black man murdered in Minneapolis in broad daylight by a white police officer. The officer knelt on Floyd’s neck until he suffocated. The whole world watched.  

On the northeast corner of 14th street and University Place, my friend Zaza, a photographer, and I, walk by a homeless man holding a cardboard sign. Written in black sharpie, the sign reads:

Please, people are

we going to come

Together or destroy

our selfs we have

Enough dead already

Stop.

We make conversation with him, ask about his words. He wears black adidas sneakers and blue jeans, a surgical mask tucked beneath a black baseball cap. His eyes sparkle when he talks, clearly a man with a lot to say. Keith is black. Zaza and I are white. As we converse with him, an older black man passes by on the sidewalk. Your president did this! He exclaims. Not my president, we both think. But we understand.

If you could share a message about what is happening right now in our country, is there anything you’d want to say to people?

He tilts his head, considering.

I’d say to protest hard. Protest big. Sit down at the table, try to talk it out. Don’t let the system keep repeating itself.

*

We walk from Times Square to Chinatown, pausing along the way to speak to construction workers and passerbys. It’s quiet on the streets, filled mostly with city workers and other New Yorkers come to witness the change that has seemingly occurred overnight, a city more reminiscent of an apocalyptic movie set than the bustling one we know and love.

Remnants of the Coronavirus pandemic light up bus station screens, reminding people to wash their hands and stay six feet apart. Almost every storefront in the fifty block radius is boarded, about to be boarded, or already smashed. Bits of glass decorate the pavement, scattered amongst soiled masks, coat hangers, and a giant bag of M&Ms with all its contents mashed, pouring onto the street like a sad rainbow.

Is this real life? We keep asking each other. But it is, of course.

An older white man watches me take notes. Hey! You writing this down? Tell them this is the liberals’ fault!

I scribble in my journal, accepting his wish. Minutes later, a young black couple walks by us, pushing their baby in a stroller. The mother is crying, devastated at the looting. They’re ruining it for us, she weeps. I turn around to see a colorful sign posted on a closed storefront-

“No bigotry, hatred, or prejudice allowed in this city at any time.”

I laugh because I don’t know what else to do.

*

We pass by an advertisement for luxury watches. The door next to it is smashed, glass spider-webbing out into a thousand tiny cracks. An old advertisement poster lies on the ground beneath it, as if taken down in a rush and tossed hurriedly aside. Church steps are bound in caution tape, a wooden board covered with someone’s discarded tee-shirt, soiled and stained. That’s blood, a construction worker reveals. Be careful.

In front of the Sephora on 18th and 5th, men in orange vests warn us to be aware when walking around. There are extremists out right now, breaking into stores and harming anyone who gets in their way. They express sympathy over the riots, concern at the violence. One man talks of his young nephew, how he’d planned on taking him to the Lego store this summer because it is his favorite. The Lego store is completely boarded up, one of the many businesses vandalized over the last few nights.

Peering into the shattered entryway of Sephora, I think of all the makeup sitting unopened in drawers and displays, how people used to crowd the lipstick and perfume section, sampling the product then putting it back. How we now fear getting too close to each other, airborne germs the new enemy. How there are people who haven’t hugged a human body in three months.

I try to imagine the scenes that led to these events but can only feel the stark, affronting energy of its aftermath.

*

We walk further South, approaching Soho. It is nearing 2pm, the sun becoming hotter each hour. There is an organized march in Foley Square. Hundreds of young people gather in the street, chanting. A girl hands me a large mesh bag of clementines to hand off to the protestors. For when they get hungry! We need to make sure they are full and nourished. We need them to be out all night! I take the clementines, not entirely sure what I will do with them.

I am impressed at the organization of the protestors. People are handing out water bottles, ziplock bags of hand sanitizer and snacks. A pickup truck is parked on the side of the street, its bed packed with giant pizza boxes. Slices of pizza are eaten amidst echoes of No Justice, No Peace! The crowd is diverse; black, brown, and white bodies hold up handwritten signs- WTF Is Going On? White Silence= Black Death. Get Your Knees Off Black Necks. Someone hands out a bouquet of long-stemmed roses. Queers for Justice, the sign on his back reads.

I find a group of people to hand off the clementines to. They take them graciously. On our way out of the park, we pass a large box of oranges and goldfish perched on a bench for anyone to take.

Witnessing the march, I am struck with new energy. It reminds me of the black and white pictures from the 1960s I studied in high school, during the Civil Rights Movement. A steady drumbeat, slowly rising. It is potent, magnetic, powerful. On the verge of something bigger than itself.

New York suddenly feels like New York again.

[emma-poole]

Maryanne.

You’re in my prayers every morning, she tells me on the sidewalk, casually slipping my 65 pound pitbull, Robin, a treat from her fanny pack. She tells me this every time we cross paths, which, if I am lucky, is a weekly occurrence. Maryanne should really have an ‘outfit of the day’ column in the New York Times. She is easily spotted a block away, not only by my dog’s nose, but in her perfectly coordinated clothing choices; bright red rain boots, wide-brimmed red hat, cherry earrings, and the color red lipstick that reminds me of my grandmother, who resembled Marilyn Monroe, smelled like old perfume, and never left the house without it.

Sometimes I wish I could shrink Maryanne to barbie-doll size and carry her around in my pocket. Maryanne never shames Robin for her plump figure. Her very spirit elicits joy- on evening walks in the neighborhood, when my mind jumps fifty years into the future, I think, when I grow older, I’d like to be like Maryanne.

Tell me about your outfits, I say one day, on the corner of Pinehurst and 184th. She recounts her days as a nurse in World War II, how although she loved her work, she was required to wear white every day. Now, I can wear whatever I want! She looks up at me with watery blue eyes lined in brown pencil, tiny, delicate hands roped in purple vein and beautiful. I have the overwhelming desire to scoop her into a hug.

Maryanne is a widow. She saves animals around the neighborhood and always carries treats in her purse. We commiserate about the state of the world, how humans don’t deserve dogs, and sometimes, my dating life. I often imagine her as the girl she used to be, fixed up in nursing whites, young and in love. And yet, how grateful I am to experience her in this phase of her life, just barely five feet tall, aged only by a number but towering in presence and charm.

I would like to think the universe created Maryanne as a reminder of the magic that exists here on earth. There is something about her aura- otherworldly, fairy-esque, that makes my breath catch in my throat each time I see her. As if the trees she passes suddenly begin to sway. And the light the sky emits at once becomes softer.

24 Hour Deli.

I don’t care about cohesion. Aesthetic is a non-issue. I want my salads big and overflowing, a picasso of flavor, texture, and crunch. Some (most) days I request a side of blue cheese dressing to use as dip for the potato chips I will inevitably buy no matter how many times I tell myself you don’t need them. I leave the store, plastic bag in hand, excitement stirring at the enjoyment to come- quiet room, a cornucopia of television options, peace to consume my masterpiece as if I am animal who has been deprived of food for months.

The 24 Hour Deli— I don’t know why I call it that- it’s actually called the Gourmet Deli, is approximately a one-minute walk from my apartment. Its marquee, bright, blocky and red, thrives with activity at all hours of the day. The 24 Hour Deli recently got a makeover. It now has more than five fancy gelato flavors and the miniature containers of cabot sour cream I like to destroy in one sitting. On the outside of the door, there is a clear no pets allowed sign. Yet magically, each time I walk into the deli with Robin, who suffers from separation anxiety, the cashier says nothing. Robin is no more than a sweet-demeanored curvy burrito, but being a pitbull, people tend to act strange at the sight of her.

The staff at the deli understand us. They let Robin sniff the endless line of Little Debbie snack cakes, and even sometimes offer their hand for a lick. Robin is overjoyed anytime she is allowed to enter an establishment, and this small gesture does not go unnoticed. The man who makes my salads sees me. He doesn’t laugh when he tosses in the eighteenth vegetable choice, rather tilts his head to one side and softly, almost lovingly, asks what else miss? I am always in awe watching him mix the ingredients together and making the whole ordeal fit perfectly under the flat plastic lid.

The 24 Hour Deli, like most local New York City bodegas, is more than just a deli. It is a meeting spot for conversation, gossip and respite from the street. It contains everything from beef jerky to pregnancy tests, the latter which I have sheepishly purchased among familiar faces that gave me kind smiles and a paper bag to carry it out in. It is run by a family whose hospitality has held me for the seven years I’ve lived in this gem of a neighborhood, quirky but inviting, not without its rough history and continued adoration of pungent marijuana and backwoods blunt wrappers, the latter which I have had my fair share of romantic neighborhood partners purchase before heading to my room on balmy summer evenings, knowing they’d be promised candlelight and a soft body.

Perhaps I will go to the deli soon to buy fresh flowers for my bathroom. They are not the best quality, but I like the way they look perched in my windowsill, trying mightily to stay alive.

The ladies at the Nail salon.

I have a paper card in my wallet that keeps track of the number of times I get my nails done. It is a rewards card, promising half off after I have completed six sessions. Over the last seven years, I am probably on my tenth card. The ladies at Diamond Nails know me by name. They compliment my hair, smile when they see me walking Robin, and massage my shoulders generously. They are motherly and kind, always assuring me of my nail polish color choice and warmly welcoming me into their establishment for however long I choose to stay.

I often get my nails done on days I feel sad. The budding of a new relationship gone awry, boredom at the state of things, the staggering injustice of healthcare in this country. Maybe I will get a manicure! Suddenly I am walking out the door, a quick left, the smell of acetone.

The ladies are drinking coffee. I smell takeout in the back room. I grab a handful of People magazines, propping myself in the oversized cushy chair and its complementary foot basin that will transform my toes into appealing seashells. Two women walk in- one is disabled and blind; her aid walks beside her. I take in this odd pair and am immediately brought back to my childhood, accompanying my dad to the house for the deaf he briefly worked at. My memories are mini movie reels- Sheri, a redhead, walking on the treadmill, calling my father Toli instead of Tony, over and over. My six-year old eyes, wide and observant, taught not to judge but understand. The blind woman chooses hot pink for her nails. The ladies tell her it is a lovely choice.

One day, while waiting for my nails to dry, my scalp tingles as hands weave in and out of my hair loops. I think perhaps I am receiving an extended shoulder massage, and close my eyes. The fingers move swiftly, repeating patterns and directions. I realize my hair is being braided, unsure as to why or if I should interject. I decide to let it happen. When she is finished, she proudly holds up a mirror so I can see the back. Beautiful! I reply. I laugh on my way out the door- amused that I came in for a manicure and left with a french braid. One month later, it happens again. I accept that it’s a package deal, and look forward to the next time.

I don’t know the lives of the ladies beyond the four walls of the salon, but I would like to imagine that they are filled with loving families, and warm homes that nurture them after a long day’s work. Their work is so giving, and far underappreciated. Having one’s nails done, similarly to getting a haircut or sitting at a bar nursing a cocktail, is never just about the monetary exchange. It is therapy. And the ladies, with their strong hands and tender demeanors, are my therapists.

Do yourself a favor and go to Diamond Nails. Make sure to tip generously.

An Ode to Morning Coffee.

If I collected all of the money I spend each day on neighborhood coffee, I’d have a jar amassing thousands of dollars by now. This is both depressing and impressive; on one hand, I’ve procured an awfully expensive habit. On the other, I honor my commitment to ritual. It all began when I adopted Robin. Robin wakes up each morning around eight am. It takes me approximately thirty minutes to make the bed, shower, get dressed, throw together some hair and makeup, and toss my keys in the mini purse I carry, along with plenty of poop bags and of course, coffee money.

Hudson Heights is lucky to have a rich coffee culture. There are multiple cups of coffee on each street corner, from the rudimentary but delicious cafe Bustelo at the bodega (low on ambiance, strong on flavor) to the cozy hole-in-the-wall, beloved Cafe Bunni. Nestled on the corner of 187 and Pinehurst, Bunni is a locally owned Ethiopian dream, serving everything from feta scones to frothy oat milk lattes. Tactically, it is the place I choose most often, mostly because Robin can rest her loins on the bench outside while watching my every move once I am in line to order.

Aesthetically pleasing bags of coffee beans line the cafe walls. Baked goods are displayed at the register, flirting with their puffed edges and swollen buttery insides. A long, communal wooden table is the main source of seating in this intimate space, as well as a window-seat bench. Robin, my oversized croissant, is perfectly visible on the other side of the glass. The whites of her eyes loom above seated coffee drinkers.

Cafe Bunni is approximately two hundred steps from the apartment of the first guy I dated when I moved to this neighborhood. He lives with his mother and drives an obnoxiously yellow pick-up truck. He asked me out while I was carrying laundry home. I should have known better. I was twenty-five and easily wooed by street flattery. He was twenty-one and desperate for attention. Bunni is a wonderful place to duck into when you spot ex boyfriends you’d rather not interact with. It is large enough to blend you into other bodies, and small enough that the whole event is not a big to-do. On many a summer morning, my eyes still waking to the day’s light, I have sought out anonymity in a paper coffee cup.

Perhaps my favorite fixture of Bunni is the way it inhabits the neighborhood. Between these walls, customers feel the understated, off-beat energy of the Hudson Heights residents. It is a tiny artist’s colony smack in the middle of a spa and a chinese restaurant. A place for those of us with less traditional jobs to post up, writing our dreams down in journals, people watching to feel less alone. We can sit there for hours, seen and supported by the comings and goings of both the patrons who fill the space and the baristas who are its undercurrent.

It’s difficult for me to pass Bunni without purchasing something. Sometimes I buy iced coffee just to have a cup in my hand while walking down the sidewalk. Other days, I never make it in, choosing to sit on the bench outside while watching the bustle of foot traffic go by. I once met a lady there who collects and sells crystals. She seemed a bit lonely, and happy to talk to anyone who’d listen. I complimented her necklace. We shared stories of moving to this neighborhood, coffees in hand, until Robin licked my ankle, alerting me it was time to go home.

Fort Tryon Park.

Imagine a maze. Giant and sprawling with lush greenery, gothic stone arches and secret roundabouts. Large enough to get lost in, small enough to find your way out.

Things I have done in Fort Tryon Park:

Cry. Clean up poop. Sing. Pick grass from the lawn while staring at the Hudson River. Smell flowers. Unintentionally photobomb a photoshoot. Meditate. Light sage. Sunbathe. Witness a quinceanera. Smoke weed. Talk to strangers. Watch a man masturbate behind a tree. Breathe deeply. Drink coffee. Pet dogs. Think about my life. Sit. Wait. Walk.

When I describe Fort Tryon Park to, say, a downtown person, I feel suddenly blessed, as though I am the keeper of a privileged secret that only a part of this city knows. Fort Tryon doesn’t belong to me, but it feels like it does. It is where my neighborhood ends, and Narnia begins.

On a good day, the park is about a fifteen minute walk North from my apartment. Each time we visit, I coerce my dog into posing for pictures. In the Fall, our earth-toned scarves blend in with the foliage; blankets of copper leaves illuminate a walking path, boots deliciously crunching with each step. In the summer, walks last up to two hours, trudging slowly from humidity and necessary water breaks. The park is both home, and home away from home. It receives me however I choose to show up. Nothing makes me feel more like a local than giving a visitor directions to the park, or its love child, the Cloisters. A simple head nod or wave in the right direction sends them on their way. I have paid forward Hudson Height’s most prized possession. My good deed for the day is done.

Years back, during one of my first visits to the park, I met a beautiful young woman roaming the grass with her giant snow angel, Zoe, and miniature tan taco, Zeta. Zaza, the owner of the eccentric dog duo and I became fast friends. We continued to meet for iced coffee and park walks. We watched my dog kill a gopher, and cried with hands held firmly as we heard it take its last breath. Meeting this Z trio changed my life; in the coming years, I would no longer feel like a mere resident of the neighborhood, but a fixture, with beautiful, lifelong friendships and last minute dinner dates to Refried Beans for oversized burritos and chips and salsa.

I am convinced the juju that permeates Fort Tryon is emboldened by the people who inhabit it each day. Much like the park itself, we span an array of colors and history, stories that give us character and scars to prove that although our lives haven’t been easy, we show up each day to smell fresh air and tilt our heads back to the sun. Thank you, Fort Tryon, for being my heartbeat at the tip of Manhattan.

The Lookout on Chittenden.

You know in the movies, when the grieving family member goes into the hospital chapel to pray by themselves? The lookout on Chittenden Avenue is Hudson Heights’ very own outdoor church, where on any given day, individuals can be spotted looking out the river’s horizon, asking for guidance from whatever higher power they believe in.

At least that is what I do. Usually at sunset, and most always, with Robin. Picking her up requires a deep squat and a tight grip around the underbelly. However, once I have it, we perch like bobbing lily pads in the ocean, peering out at New Jersey, waiting for a gust of wind or the smell of someone’s fried chicken to waft toward us.

The lookout is the kind of friend who doesn’t require every day interaction, but will always show up when you need them. Tucked away beneath a small hill, its presence is found rather than known, adding to its charm. Sometimes I imagine the narrative of the people who perch there alongside me- who is breaking up with who, who misses their mother, who also talks to the sky. Do they seek refuge here the way I do? At times not knowing what is being sought out but pulled to arrive anyway?

Or the residential voyeurs of the block, who put up fliers warning against drugs and littering, Chittenden’s silent army. My heart goes out to them. They know the real estate they live upon is neighborhood currency; they are only trying to preserve it.

I recall a visit to the lookout after a particularly painful heartbreak. The setting sun was so beautiful, it hurt. I couldn’t fathom how the world continued on as mine closed in on me. I knew in that moment that I would be ok, as I have always known, deep in my bones, that my small world spins within something much greater than me. It’s the staggering irony of life, that beauty can be found anywhere, even in the midst of agonizing pain. Nature has always known better than us. Embrace change, she whispers, and you will experience awe each day. It’s hard to walk yourself home with a broken heart. But then the sun sets. The skyline sparkles beneath a black sky. I smell the changing of seasons as the breeze hits the trees, releasing a single leaf on the ground beneath me.

Charles.

Charles has short white hair, olive skin, and piercing blue eyes. He is long-limbed and svelte, appearing almost fragile. Charles wears neutral colors and has long, elegant hands. He likes to eat dinner solo at the neighborhood restaurants, and always says hello to my dog.

I wonder often about Charles’s backstory. I have never asked, though I am confident if I did, he would share freely. There is a sadness in his demeanor that makes me want to reach my hands inside his chest and untwist the hurt. It is always the sad people who are kind, I’ve noticed. I have no idea if Charles is sad or not. Maybe melancholy is a better word. Or maybe it’s the way the deep lines around his eyes make him look like an etched painting, and the tiny blue half moons beneath them reflect longing, or wisdom.

I must have passed Charles at least ten times on the street before asking him his name. Now, I can’t stop using it. Hi Charles, I smile, walking down the giant stairs on 181st. He is on a bench with coffee, reading a newspaper. How’s it going, Charles? At 181 Cabrini, a spread of charcuterie and cheeses half eaten at his table. Robin sits down on his large feet. He pats her head. Oh, hi Charles! At the park, outside the laundromat, on my way to work.

I wonder how long he has lived here, what he does all day, if he has some large sum of money he lives on that pays for all his dinners out. I wonder if he is happy dining alone, savors it ritualistically, as I do my morning cup of coffee or the heady aroma of fresh cut flowers. Or if he longs for a partner, relying on the immersion of himself in the neighborhood as a way to feel more connected and less alone.

Of course, I could ask him. I think he would probably be flattered to know I’m thinking this much about the intricacies of his life. And yet. The mystique of not knowing somehow compels me. I have always imagined the inner lives of strangers; and though I am a truth seeker in nearly all aspects of my life, I am not sure I need to know the answers to the stories my brain creates. It’s like...foreplay. Or the titillating anticipation of an event nearly being better than the event itself. The hot sting of desire felt on the lips before the kiss. Must we spill over all our secrets? Or is the pleasure of them contained in the withholding?

The last time I saw Charles, he was sitting alongside a homeless man with pock-marked skin and gentle eyes. Another familiar face. They appeared to be friends. I smiled at the man, and said hello to Charles. Perhaps I will work up the courage someday to ask what brought him to this city. For now, I am grateful he is here, embedded into the scenery I call home.

Bennett Park.

Fun Fact- you’re standing on the highest natural point of elevation in New York City, I tell my soon-to-be boyfriend at the time. He is spending the weekend with me. It is our first time meeting each other in person. Ha.

I have probably spent more time in Bennett Park than any other place in Hudson Heights. When I first moved to the area, it was an all day stomping ground for the boys who perched on stoops and asked if I was from the heights. I’d walk Robin at midnight, letting her run laps in the grass while they rolled fresh blunts and skateboarded badly. I didn’t often take part, but I loved the camaraderie of these gatherings, how the park always felt like it belonged to someone, and in turn, that I belonged to it.

Bennett Park turns into a carnival on weekends; kids appear from every direction, dogs take refuge under shaded trees, the ice cream truck’s melody echoes in our brains- da da da da da da dum dum dum DUM dum dum. Orthodox Jewish women sit in clusters on the grass, dressed in long skirts and soft hats. I wonder if they know I am one of them, that despite my tattoos and nontraditional dress, I, too, can chant Hebrew prayers in my sleep, and recognize Saturday as their Sabbath. That I see a part of them in a part of me, though I will always wonder if they are happy, or have dreams bigger than motherhood, or spend moments in solitude wondering of a different life. The air smells of weed and cut grass. Children squeal on the swings. Someone plays hip hop out of a loud speaker while a parent bandaids a scraped knee. We coexist in our separate corners, together.

That boyfriend never visited my neighborhood again, though he did love the park and my attempt at impressing him with trivia. We made out on the grass under a moonlit sky, the boys of years past watching in the background, their silhouettes only vaguely familiar now. I was in love with the idea of him more than the individual I never truly had the chance to get to know, except through distance, and time zones, and continents. The agony of physical separate-ness gnawed at me; I fell asleep for an entire year existing on memories of a savored few nights together and future projections of what our life could be.

And so Bennett Park became my steadfast companion to get through each day. Every morning, with a cup of coffee and Robin at my feet, I walked aimlessly around its perimeter, noticing what was familiar- Bench. Tree. Water fountain. Rock. Lending Library. The grass where Robin likes to roll.

Ritualistic habits, I have learned, are a form of meditation. You can mend a broken heart by entering the same place each day while watching your perception of it slowly change. One day, almost magically, the flowers appear more potent, the sun, brighter, and your breath, which has been lodged somewhere between grief and hope, escapes into a singular, joyous exhale.

[emma-poole]

I’ve been eating at diners by myself lately, thinking about the state of my life while stuffing back forkfuls of lasagna and boats of french fries. Something about the oversized display of baked goods comforts me, how there seems to be a dessert for every preference, the lingering smell of confectioners sugar and syrupy fruit. All the old men at the counter are on their phones. They are propped on their elbows, sipping lukewarm mugs of coffee, gazing up only to look at what I’ve ordered. I come here to be alone in the company of others, to hear my thank you answered by sweetheart and eat weird combinations of food without anyone commenting on my choices. I love the excess of a diner menu; giant, spiral-bound, breakfast all day, sides of blue cheese dressing pre-prepared in tiny plastic cups, overflowing salads. Everything is familiar, and promised. Diners are a good place to visit when you need certainty.

•

I spent a lot of time on the M train this Fall. It’s a pleasant ride, specifically between Essex and Marcy, when Manhattan becomes Brooklyn, and out of a dark tunnel a hopeful sky appears. I took a lot of ubers after midnight, falling asleep as the East River zoomed by, jolted from having to leave a warm bed and body. I always apologized for keeping them waiting when I entered the car, stealing as much time as I could before saying goodbye to you. No problem, they’d whisper politely. They assumed I was you, and I didn’t correct them.

As with other inevitable truths, relationships have a way of marking their territory, creating significance in what was formerly an arbitrary place, route, expression, or menu item. I rode the M train to get to you. And now, all that is you exists in the ephemera of my memory.

//

I’m sipping drip coffee at Bluestone Lane on the Upper West side. The aesthetic here is dreamy; blue tile accented in lush succulents, (they may be fake?) sleek, modern lines, and menus that look like they were hand-dipped in cerulean watercolor. I have a corner bar seat. Among barista grade cartons of milk, mason jars full of coffee beans are embellished with tiny rainbow flags. Tap water is served in glass bottles. Everything is casual but intentional. Is this a Bluestone Lane review? Am I Frank Bruni?

The woman adjacent to me orders the same thing I do- soft scramble, toast, coffee. She adds bacon, which I debate but decide against at the last minute. She must smell my nostalgia because minutes later, she offers me a piece of hers just as I am finishing my plate.  So that your last bite is perfect, she smiles. I graciously accept. The kindness of strangers! Wow. So smokey. Now I know. I thank her. She speaks to the employees with the easy candor of a regular. Her black turtleneck and black-rimmed glasses make her both blend in and stand out against the cafe’s crisp interior. Our interaction with each other, brief but intimate, is one of many New York moments I have lodged in a cozy nook of my brain. Memories pour in: the handsome older gentleman at the bar in midtown with the brightest blue eyes who opened up about his child sexual abuse. A drummer I met on a park bench in my early twenties, who I spent an entire magical day with, then briefly dated. Winter, an older woman on the subway squealing in delight at the flowers poking out of my grocery bag. I haven’t seen pussywillows in so long! They feel like Spring. Something magical happens when you’re not looking.

Each year during this time - the inbetween season when fall begins its slow hatch into winter, when days become darker and rotted pumpkins emerge on sidewalk corners blending in with the foliage, my inclination to reflect takes over. Somehow, this perfect coffee, in its mini glass carafe and tiny pitcher of cream- why are miniature things so satisfying?- stirs the overwhelming desire to consider: where I have been, where I am going, what has changed. I cup my hands around the warm mug, lower my face to the toasty aroma, and inhale.

Speaking of warm beverages, I’ve begun seeing someone who enjoys handing me homemade ones, usually of the tea variety, in small, tempered glassware. The gesture is hospitable and cozy, though he swears this is a year-round activity, not solely reserved for winter or freezing apartments. I like watching him putter around his kitchen, clanging spoons on saucepans and wiping grease with the dish towel he uses to wipe everything. He has a bidet, which delights me every time, and floor plants, half-gallon jugs of fancy Dr. Bronner’s soap perched at the top of his closet. I like the way he inhabits his home, even when there are clothes in every corner and old dishes in the sink. He apologizes for the mess each time I come over, slightly more dramatic in his delivery than necessary. He has a penchant for theatrics. In a couple of days, it will be clean again. He will wipe down countertops and burn scented oil that reminds me of the first night I spent there, on a warm summer evening just days before my 30th birthday. We drank hot tea on a hot night, and I made fun of him for living in Brooklyn and liking tea so much.

Still, months later, when he sets the glass in front of me, the sip feels like remembrance; warm, hopeful, familiar.

//

The shape of your face, you say, it’s beautiful. Compliments from you are rare. I ask you to repeat yourself.

•

The shape of your face is angular like the flat rooftops of Brooklyn, or a piece of sea glass poking out of sand. I see my ancestry in your olive skin, the way your oy is guttural.

•

They stare at me, the Hasidic men in your neighborhood. They don’t know I am one of them, kind of. I imagine reaching out and weaving my fingers through their tangly beards. I imagine they feel like a cross between steel wool and moss.

•

Moss is soft, like your beard. Surprising at first, but smooth to the touch. I resist the urge to pull all the white hairs out of your chin. I like them there, the way you have to look closely to see the salt speckle. I cup my hand around your jaw and kiss your adam’s apple.

•

When you go down on me, I close my eyes and focus on my breath. Your head bobs with the arch of my hips, but you are a buoy, steady. Sometimes we communicate best without words. I feel you when you’re not there in the slick when I walk. It’s the same slick that makes your mouth glow when you come up for air.

•

At times, this feels like a stubborn knot. Or a blocked windpipe; something that needs opening but only constricts more when fiddled with. Somewhere I am positive a loose thread exists.

•

In certain meditation visualizations, the image of a thread loosening is used to elicit the feeling of release. An uncoiling, so to speak.

•

Meditation exists to ease the ripples of the mind. It widens the gap between thought and action. Find something tangible to focus on, they say.

•

And so-

•

Right now I am breathing. The rain is a muted orchestra outside my window. I don’t know, but it’s ok. The skyline looks coziest when viewed from the inside of an apartment, under a marshmallow duvet, against flannel sheets. I still want my name in your mouth.

//

To try to describe my time with you feels like an injustice.

How could they possibly know the fragrant smell of your skin after sex?

How you snuck your hands in my armpits the first night we met, inhaling deeply, causing me to shriek, giggling but delighted that we shared the same perversion. How your eyes changed right after, possessed by something greater than your intellect. Your smell, you said, looking right at me, really turns me on.

To be wanted by you was a victory, and that was the problem.

•

I’ll be careful not to undermine our time together by emphasizing sex, because it was much more than that. But try to understand- it was the simplest way you let go. As a lover, you were all there; generous, passionate, present. As a partner, you kept yourself at a distance by picking and choosing the moments you allowed me in.

But-

You are the first man I have dated who completely embodies his femininity. This is not lost on me. I miss the way you coil your body around mine, how you let yourself be held, and weep openly for your mother. I miss you tenderly shampooing my hair in the shower, running your hands along my entire soapy body, kissing the hollow of my collarbone and throat. How you examined my flesh with the curiosity of a scientist and the awe of an artist seeing a masterpiece appear before his eyes. I miss your gross, your mess, your hunger. I dreamt of you last night and woke up thinking how bizarre it is that you know someone intimately and then you don’t. And now it seems I am writing to you, or for you, and that feels wrong, because this time and these realizations are mine and I am only just now reclaiming a world in which your essence doesn’t saturate every part.

•

There is a brief but intense period of time when the consequence of my decision will gnaw at me; sleep taunts, my mind reels. I used to think that the constant presence of another person on your mind alluded to some sort of fate; if I can’t stop thinking of them, they must be thinking of me. Now I realize, like anything, knowing someone becomes a habit, and habits must be unlearned.

For months, my fingers grew skilled at texting you nonsense throughout the day. I started seeing your name on building signs, subway ads, dreams. My body warmed to the thought of you. This is meant to be, I’d meditate on like a mantra.

And still-

I couldn’t figure out why my heart twisted in anxiety each time I thought about us. Why, when I imagined you as the father of my children, something we had talked about, the image felt fuzzy and always slightly out of reach. Why, years down the road, visualizing myself married to you, I had the overwhelming sensation that it would feel lonely.

You, so generous of spirit and warm in nature. Who brings people together and makes giant pots of tea. Who has so much to give beneath the fear that permeates your every move. It was very difficult to walk away from a world that you had opened to me. I often wonder how differently things would look if I hadn’t, though I no longer wish I made the other choice.

//

I’ve been meditating again. Not well, but it’s ok. Mostly, I think. Of you, of my choices, of this precious, challenging life. 

Right now I am breathing. The rain is a muted orchestra outside my window. I know a little more than I did, and that feels like grace.

[emma-poole]

A long time ago, after a shift at the restaurant I worked at, I’d head to an Irish pub around the corner, hoping that the boy I liked would be there, too. He’d have a few drinks, becoming gradually redder in the face, which meant more prone to pulling me in a corner to whisper all the things he’d like to do to me. He was my co-worker, and everyone in the establishment knew we were sleeping together. He was also in a relationship- obviously unhappy- running on little sleep, a steady cocaine habit, and a complete emotional mess. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to open my heart, as one does in their early twenties. He was from upstate, New York; he also grew up around woods and bonfires, loved all things small town, and someday wanted a family. He was charming and hilarious, someone you’d imagine coaching high school baseball, equally as close to his players as he was their parents.

The establishment was the worst place I have ever worked, and where I made the most money. Pre-shift meant mentally gearing up for emotional chaos, the Hunger Games of waiting tables. By the end of the night, mysterious sauces had edged their way beneath my clothing. Teriyaki on rib cage. Spicy peanut in the hollow between my cleavage. I once sold weed to a table of four middle-aged women on vacation, who wanted to keep partying after dinner. They giggled when I slipped the tiny bag into their check presenter, having hunted down my colleague who always had at least two forms of drugs on him. It was disgusting and exhilarating, the amount of money we walked out with each night. For a year and a half, I always had at least $200 in cash in my wallet. I took a trip to China, and bought all of my friends the very expensive birthday dinner they took me out to, much to my own amusement. My apartment was tiny, cheap, and falling apart, but New York City was only just beginning to show me its whimsical and mercurial nature, both enveloping me in its magical arms and spitting me out like trash the next moment.

I spent many of those afternoons sitting in coffee shops wondering if the boy I was falling in love with and I would ever, actually, be together. The kind of partnership that involves mutual friends and accompanying each other home for holidays. Texts exchanged throughout the day, just because. He had recently told me he never felt for anyone the way he felt about me. That I brought something out in him that was both safe and intoxicating. You make me want to be a better person, he’d atone. I knew this was the type of thing that is safe to say for someone who doesn’t keep promises, who can romanticize words to excuse poor actions. Still, I lived for these tender interludes. They held me over in the maddening hours, when I’d go days without hearing from him. Back in my bed, I’d kiss his rumpled blonde hair and ruddy skin, think how lucky I was to feel that he was mine, even though mine is possession and possession is born from ego, something I am still learning to discern. We had sex in my tiny bedroom, mostly in the evening but sometimes during daylight, and I’d watch him beneath me, wearing only a white hanes tee-shirt, smelling like oak and musk, looking sad and beautiful, buckling beneath my hips as our rhythm increased, and I knew then that sex, however complicated the circumstances around it may be, could for a moment, make things simple. That two bodies, deduced to their most primal desires, could melt away the logical mind by a matter of accepted force and surrender, and that I wanted that power, and craved it, despite how awful it may make me feel the next morning, or many mornings, thereafter.

I finally quit that job, which meant I slowly began to quit him. We met for drinks a few months later, at a smaller Irish pub in Columbus Circle, the type of place you walk by every day without giving notice to. He had switched paths, at last leaving the service industry and beginning entry level at an advertising firm. Advertising? I asked, really? But it made sense. He had a way of making anything sound appealing, jumping in to reassure you the moment you felt yourself waver. I bet you look hot wearing a button up to work. I felt him harden beneath my hand. His weakness empowered me. I needed to feel that I still had him, that all of the sleepless nights and mental agony meant something. We left the bar to head to Central Park. The sun was going down, lighting all of the trees and its human inhabitants in hazy magic. We still had a few hours before the night crew poured in from the streets like ants, turning the park into a playground for offbeat activity. We laid down on a rock. He slid his hands beneath my jeans and fingered me, burrowing his face into my neck, becoming more aroused the less I cared that someone might notice. I never saw him again after that night. He lives in California now, with his wife. Today I work just two blocks from the restaurant that is no longer there. Sometimes I miss the ridiculous hawaiian rompers we had to wear after the lights went down. Transporting giant cocktails served in watermelons. Sex in basement storage rooms, no clothing removed, efficient enough to get back upstairs in time to drop your table’s entree, still pulsing underneath your apron. Never knowing but always anticipating the next time. They decorated the whole place with orchids. I can’t smell one without remembering.

*

It’s interesting when you sit down to write about your current life and end up dropping into a nine-year old memory. The mind is a vortex of temptation and confusion. It can make you nostalgic for a person you haven’t thought about in years, type his name into facebook and end up on his mother’s timeline, filled with posts about the Women’s March and the local theatre she visited last week. It makes you wonder about the choices you’ve made, how your apartment is much bigger now, but that sometimes you’re convinced you’ll never find the feeling you’re seeking, or the life you imagine you could be living. Like you walk by the same storefronts and street corners and nothing has changed except that you are older and time no longer seems like something you can waste.

A student shows up in class who I met on the subway. He asked me out by complimenting my eyelashes. I told him I wasn’t in a place to start dating, mostly because I wasn’t interested in him, but that I teach yoga and he should come by the studio sometime. Still, I am surprised when he does. I go to the local pet store to buy food for Robin. Along with my purchase, the cashier hands me an original portrait he painted of my face. I recognize the image from a picture I’ve posted on instagram. I am taken aback and flattered. He is talented, and shy. I keep the image propped up against the floor length mirror in my room, until it begins to crease in the middle. Now I keep it in a folder tucked away inside my closet. You should be more careful, a friend playfully warns. It’s fine, I repy. This stuff has been happening to me my whole life. Months later, a bizarre string of occurrences on the internet has me wondering if perhaps they are right, that I am too giving with information, too much of an open portal for dark energies looking for light to cling to.

I recall a spiritual teacher once advising to be careful of whom I allow into my life, and body. Their aura stays in us longer than we think.

*

I travel to Canada with my mother. The air is clean. We stay at a family’s home on a farm collective, rising early each morning to cast our hands into soil. I spend hours in the sun with the ladybugs and bumblebees, eat green beans directly from the vine. There is a 16-year old boy staying with the family, a distant cousin from Germany. He speaks little english but understands everything. He comes out to lunch with my mother and me, joins us on a long bike ride in the sand dunes. I catch him watching me while we pull weeds out of the earth, wonder if he knows I am nearly double his age. He sneaks me a piece of lettuce he has procured, laughs as I chew it gratefully. He has braces and teenage skin, but I recognize the man he will be- golden, steady, strong. A workman’s hands, calloused but kind. I wonder if they have ever touched a woman. At 16, I had already experienced my fair share of desirous hands, though it would be a full year until I lost my virginity, to another golden boy, blue-eyed, my first love. I hope to myself that he finds a girl one day who will love his soft demeanor, and eat vegetables directly from his gentle hands. I feel motherly toward him, while concurrently aware of his gaze.

Fall is around the corner. The night air is cool, like an exhale it seems the whole city has been waiting for. I no longer walk through tunnels and avenues waiting for people from my past to reappear, though at times I imagine all of the lives I could have lived, the thousands of directions it could have traveled. Cheryl Strayed says, I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

I close my eyes and smile at the elusive sailboat. You’re free to go, I whisper.

[emma-poole]

Everyone at the ashram is glowing. They walk around in loose white linen, barefoot and perfectly postured. I study the upper back of a woman with grey hair set in a whimsical low bun. She looks younger than she is. I envy her bird-like frame, the way her fragile bones look like they’d crumple if squeezed with force any greater than a loose fist cupping the halo of a white dandelion.

I sweat heavily the first day. My body isn’t used to the tropical heat and I packed poorly after panicking at the relatively modest dress code guidelines. Everyone else seemed to pack perfectly. I lust after their deeply tanned skin and tranquil demeanor. Buy linen clothing, I type into the notes section of my phone.

Meals are eaten communally at large picnic tables dispersed under an overhead pavillion. The food is vibrant and colorful; swallowing each root vegetable and aromatic spoonful of curry, I quietly ponder how each person ended up here. I want another helping of food, but having just arrived that day, refrain, not wanting to seem over eager. With each bite, I watch people place their trays down on tables already populated by others eating. Do you mind if I sit here? They ask. I am at adult summer camp, surrounded by people who actually drink green juice and meditate every day.

Evening Satsang is at 8pm. My mind is busy. I learn this when I sit down to meditate and become intensely distracted at the pesky mosquito bites on my ankles. I count the number of times they hijack my concentration. Exes faces pop into my head; first kisses, first I love yous, firsts. I stop counting the number of times my thoughts veer off and sit with the unease, unable to keep track of which self talks. My torso sweats beneath the scarf draped over my bare shoulders. I can’t imagine I am any more enlightened while sweating profusely, so I shrug it down until it is barely covering what it is supposed to cover. Droplets trickle from my neck to collarbone, little deaths. I imagine jumping into a cold pool, icy spring… anything to placate this hot itch.

Intrusive thoughts are like all the extra clothing I stuffed into my suitcase but will never actually wear, familiar but generally useless.

I procure a deep tan and mild caffeine withdrawal. On the last day of my stay, I walk half a mile down the sandy beach to Atlantis, well-equipped with oversized lawn chairs, manicured grass, and of course, Starbucks. The scene is vastly different from the linen-clad bunch I’ve been rubbing elbows with. The guests here look a bit more bloated and sunburnt, likely due to their consumption of sugary cocktails and diluted SPF. I am thankful to be staying on simpler turf, though I can’t deny the delicious sigh of an air-conditioned lobby, the way my tongue instinctively swirls the iced-coffee around its cold, satiated mouth.

One of the teacher trainees catches my eye. I know he is there studying because of his yellow t-shirt, the uniform they all wear. He has caramel skin, dreadlocks, and a calm, watchful way about him. I pretend not to notice the sinew of his biceps when he plays solo basketball on the main lawn, or the way I feel he notices me, too. On the second night of Satsang, he sits behind me, although I am very sure this is coincidence and not some silent communication he’s relaying. We are gathered in a large-ish pavillion, chanting and meditating together. I cannot concentrate, naturally, knowing he is there, sweating beneath his clothing, wondering what led him to come here and the boy he used to be. From the outside, he could easily blend in with the clusters of Dominican men that gather in front of my local bodega on hot summer nights, drinking beer and playing music too loud. In New York, he would not be a fixture. But here, amidst the lush greenery and sandy beaches, where an overall quietude permeates the grounds, he is mysterious and unreachable. I fall asleep wondering if I’ll run into him at breakfast.

I meet a recovering heroin addict who spent the first couple weeks at the Ashram getting clean. He has piercing blue eyes and a Canadian accent. Contrary to mystery man, he also has no issue walking right up to me. Holding my hand for longer than is polite, he compliments my dimples. I don’t mind. Flirting is his love language. My mother met him the previous night and upon learning she is a therapist, he shared his story. I learn that most people who come here have a story to tell. He tells my mom and me we are beautiful. I imagine he tells most people this, but especially the ones willing to receive it. We are not above being admired. For tonight, we are his sweethearts, his darlings. And for tonight, we allow it.

A tiny fishing boat zooms us back to the dock we arrived at four days earlier. I tilt my head back to the salty breeze. It is time to go home.

*

Months pass. I am in my room getting ready for the day when my mother calls me. Someone she knows has committed suicide. Two weeks before this, a boy in my neighborhood jumps 25 stories off the roof of his building to his death. I recall his distant face, a thin figure perched on the staircase that overlooks 181st street, chain-smoking for hours. Sometimes we made eye contact when he came in to pick up his to-go order at the local Italian restaurant I work at on the occasional Sunday evening, or on morning walks with Robin. But I won’t pretend to know him. I have no idea the demons he lived with.

I think of my life, its continuum of questions and to-do lists and bills and grief and joy and love and breath and-

Is this what the living do when suddenly faced with our mortality?—scroll back through the grainy lense of memory and attempt to find meaning in each moment we spent alive until the point of another’s death?

My mind returns to the sandy beaches, ciruline water, and food that seems to heal your cells just by looking at it. I am between two worlds, missing the white linen fairies, and knowing that the majority of people who are hurting are not walking amongst lush green jungle and eating food made with love and prayed over. Most of the world can’t sit with themselves for longer than a few seconds before turning a cheek to the staggering noise of a busy mind. Most angry people are just in pain. I am grateful for the work I do, and humbled by its power. I vow to do better.

*

I kiss boys. Boys who taste like Brooklyn IPAs, who are still getting over someone else. Feminine boys with higher voices whose fingers cup my face, feather-like and tender. Old school boys with Boston accents, who kiss me roughly after a few drinks and lay their palms on my hips, as if my hip bones are handlebars and my body is already theirs. And I let them because I, too, treat their bodies like they are already mine. I am hungry for this ache, to be desired and desirable, touched hard in soft places, mouth left slightly ajar for the next fix.

I spend three hours dancing under strobe lights in a crowd full of people with a boy I barely know, who reminds me of a past version of myself, and because of this our newness feels intimate, like we’ve done it all before, and I know when he puts his tongue in my mouth that we will never have this night again, and that it’s supposed to be this way, because I have changed, and I no longer chase things that hurt me. I let him fantasize about the things he wants to do to me. I whisper what I would like to do to him. And then we kiss goodnight and I go home by myself, amused and giddy off the buzz of a night that felt like the New York of my early twenties, when weeks were counted based on whom I was seeing, and evenings blended into mornings, each night undoubtedly beginning with the bubbly anticipation of what story could possibly be told.

*

It is July, my birthday month. In 24 days, I will turn 30. This October marks the beginning of my ninth year in New York, which I suppose gives me some agency in claiming this city of magic and mishaps as my own. I imagine this is how anyone feels who has lived here for an extended period of time, possessive, to a degree, of their own experience.

One month ago, I sat in a room with 8 strangers while having energy work performed on me. I am not sure what happened that day, or that I will ever know precisely, but my heart, unbeknownst to me in the moment, cracked open. In an attempt to better explain an elusive feeling-

On this day, during the very last month of my 29th year, life moves before me through a clearer lens. Certain things that used to bother me hold less weight; I am open in heart, grounded in body, and calmer in mind. And yet. It is difficult to relay calm, as melancholy is my most beloved writing partner.

Many Fourth of July’s ago, I sipped tequila out of a red solo cup on the rooftop of an apartment building in Brooklyn. I can close my eyes and paint the scene- yellow tank top, turquoise earrings, mugging at the camera despite feeling entirely broken-hearted over a person who would never love me the way I wanted him to. It was the type of toxic infatuation that would show up in my writing for years.

Sometimes I miss 22-year old me, with her impulsive tendencies and slightly less jaded lens on life. But I wouldn’t want to be her again. Mostly, I am grateful to the self she has led me to—content and deeply curious about what is to come, at last wearing white linen pants.

[emma-poole]

Sometimes I stand in front of the fridge with the door open just staring at all of the colorful produce I’ve amassed. Pearly red peppers. Rainbow carrots that when sliced in circles resemble the ancestral rings of a yellow and purple tree. Aged cheese lined in blue marble, encrusted with pepper. You’re so fucking in love with food, my roommate jokes. He’s not wrong.

My salads are masterpieces. I can chop a tomato and make it flirt with a tendriled cucumber. My stark granite countertop turns into an impressive dinner table in minutes. A proper balance of flavors and textures is essential, as are flowers, candles, and a woodsy incense blown out moments before guests arrive.

Perhaps this is my mother in me. I know how to make things beautiful.

Each morning, I paint my face. Watch my eyelashes transform from soft whisps to black lace. My skin, supple but uneven, smooths beneath the foundation. I lather my hair in soap, wash my body, and brush my teeth. Sometimes I even buff my feet with the volcanic rock the saleswoman convinced me to buy at the holiday markets this winter. She told me I had beautiful skin while looking directly in my eyes. $50 later I walked away with a jar of salt scrub allegedly from the Dead Sea. I liked the way my skin felt after she massaged it into my hand for two minutes, as if butter had just melted on its surface.

I dress, listen to a podcast, make the bed. Tidy up the balls of dust that magically collect under my dresser and door frame no matter how many times I sweep. Robin stares at me quizzically while I move through each task, her eyes widening only when she smells the coconut oil I apply to my arms and shoulders, her cue that a taste is about to be offered. I kiss her between her eyes and linger an extra moment in the toasty scent of her fur. She makes sense.

*

It’s like walking through muck. Being covered in a thick veil of gauze that makes even the brightest pictures appear to have residue. Students ask me how I’m doing after class. I want to tell them that waking up is a task. Despite my routine, on some days I have no idea where I gather the energy to stand in front of a room and guide people. A brief respite-hazelnut iced coffee at the cafe around the corner, with its tired baristas and buttery croissants. The tiny rituals I complete each morning keep my nervous system functioning. I look down at my phone. I like having someone to text in the mornings and the silence feels like a taunt. I turn it over.

Walking to class, I wonder again how I am supposed to teach my students to lean into joy and spark creativity when I cannot even place a feeling. It’s strange, this inability to accurately self-prescribe the change that is needed, though it’s clear one must happen soon. My brain is foggy, thick, lethargic. It tells stories I don’t know if I can trust. All day, I grapple with the reality of the world in my head verse the one I live in. I show up to teach. Words come out of my mouth from a force bigger than me. My students’ bodies are willow trees- arms extended, fingertips stretched toward the heavens in unison. They are breathtaking, in sync. Sometimes I want to weep. So I breathe.

Spring shows up outside the living room window, in the rays of light on my dying plants. Hang on, I whisper to their wilted leaves. After nine years of failing to become a plant whisperer, I’ve taken to relying on affirmations. The weather can’t make up its mind. We keep the windows open overnight and in the morning, they are light green corpses. I don’t have the energy to wipe the dust off their underbellies.

*

I meet someone. He makes me laugh. He has watery brown eyes that crinkle when he’s amused and a mischievous smile. I enjoy running my fingers through his thick beard, watching him react to something ridiculous I say. Our first date, he picks me up outside and presses my body against the cement wall of the restaurant. I wrap my legs around his waist instinctively. He tastes like the dirty martinis we clinked our glasses to. I let my tongue discover his mouth, and he responds rhythmically in mine. My heart buzzes. We kiss for minutes and I don't think about you once.

I see you in pictures, in my dreams. You look thin, like you need a home cooked meal. I can’t believe a year has passed, how many nights I spent waiting for this month to come. You are far away in mind and body. The farthest you’ve ever been to me. I try to imagine fitting into you the way I once did. Watching you across the table, drinking glass after glass of red wine, your beautiful blue eyes staring back at me. Our love is foreign now, like an old piece of clothing that doesn’t quite fit the way it used to. I cling to it in moments; the whimsical beginning, too easy it didn’t feel real. How I couldn’t breathe the first time we kissed because I was so overwhelmed by the presence of you.

The passing of time… is astonishing. I stopped breathing for six months wondering if the anxiety in my chest would ever subside. Distance hijacked our ability to see clearly. I hated you. More so, I hated who I was becoming. You still seem lost, like you’re constantly in search of something you fear you may never find. I am having a hard time recognizing the person I see in pictures. I look for him, but an empty shell stares back.

I hope you know that I felt you everyday for a year. That I forgive you. And I still feel you in a way I am finding it hard to put into words. An old song on the radio, perhaps. Familiar. Distant. Heartachingly reminiscent of a different time. I love you. I release you.

*

The guy who makes me laugh kisses me like I’m his last meal. We lay in bed for hours, pressing our faces together until our lips meet. The hair on his chest smells like cinnamon sprinkled in the woods and is surprisingly soft. I burrow my face in it. I feel like were little animals, I whisper. We are animals, he grins back at me. I pull the singing bowl off my window sill, teach him how to run the small wooden instrument around the perimeter of it. He sits cross-legged in front of me, smiling at his wobbly effort.

There are little things. Slight misalignments that make me wonder if we’re compatible. But then he rests his head on my calf, neck, hip. Touches my body curiously but also as if it belongs to him. He makes me feel more present than I have in a long time. I should know by now not to cling to the certainty of anything that seems too effortless. Lessons show up as people. Moments. Blissful evenings koalaing yourself to another body. But on this night I lean into it. He is an exhale. The bubbly effervescence that begins as a soft hum in the belly and explodes into a laugh. I lift my face to him. He whispers something dirty in my ear and I let him bend me over the bed. We kiss 17 more times before he leaves.

*

I’ve had a recurring dream my whole life that I can fly. Waking up from such a dream is startling- a fleeting moment of melancholia. In the dream, I am surrounded by open field, somewhere vast enough to catch a running start. I pick up speed until I soar off the ground. I am 45 degrees through the air, looking down at the world below me. The green of the trees starts to blend in with the grey of the pavement until earth is an intricate map of blotted colors, like one of those paintings where you let the droplet just fall off the brush in blobs. Look what I can do! I confide in only my closest friends. They laugh and laugh until I soar above them, no longer the punchline of my own joke but a creature born of something elsewhere. When the guy who plays my singing bowl begins showing up in my dreams, I wake up dizzy.

The dizzy spells appear first in yoga class. I stand up from a forward bend to foggy vision. It takes seconds too long for my eyes to focus. My doctor switches my birth control to the generic brand. I blame the vertigo on this, swallow the daily pill because I cannot risk getting pregnant a second time. I don’t know that I’d be able to say no again and I am still not ready to be a mom. Someday, my intuition reminds. I vow to start nurturing myself the way I have nurtured partners who sought a mother in me.

*

On nights I want the thrill, I pinch a small bud of weed between my fingers and inhale its mossy aroma. Smoke the dime I’ve had in my bowl for a month and watch the tendrils curl from my mouth. I light the candles. Cook myself a beautiful meal. Blast baby making music from the speakers. And then I lie down and touch myself tenderly, with a precision that comes only from years of practice. My body is a firework, alive, exploding.

Days pass. The passing of time becomes a relief. Sludge remains but its hold on me starts to loosen; my brain feels clearer. I find simple ways to heighten my senses, which is really a fancy way of saying I am working everyday day to embody presence.

I tilt my face to the early morning sun and let its warmth spread across my cheeks. Suck the juice of a lemon directly from its flesh. Put a hand over my heart and feel it remember again.

[emma-poole]

I dream of Robin before I meet her. The shelter in Long Island tells me there are three dogs particularly in need of homes. We have one. Not the youngest...or the most photogenic in her picture, but she has a special demeanor and needs someone who will give her a loving environment. She’s been sitting in the shelter for two years and no one wants her because she is a middle-aged Pitbull. I twist her name around in my mouth. R o b i n. It is not a name I would ever choose for a dog.

I am 25 years old, newly out of a string of unfulfilling relationships, nostalgic for a dog-filled childhood. A yoga colleague has put me in touch with a local rescue. I sign on as a foster. As a child, I rolled around with my dogs in the backyard, muddying my knees and hands to crouch in the grass and watch the bugs from their level. A home video captures me at 3 years old, screaming to my mom from across the yard that I would like to see where Stella pooped. Stella is our dog. I browse the shelter’s website. Scrolling through each cute, tragic face, my cursor comes to a halt. Robin. Age 4. She is chocolate brown with big, honey eyes. Sitting on on her hind-legs, pink belly exposed, her head is fixed in the classic pitbull tilt, furrowed brow, discerning. I smile. Contrary to their disclaimer, she is absolutely photogenic.

King is a giant pitbull puppy with big ears and a loppy gait. He wags his tail as he approaches, jumps in my lap, nuzzling his enormous head on my thighs. Eponine arrives next. Eponine! I immediately feel connected to her because of the name- I played Eponine in Les Miserables my sophomore year of highschool. She is older, a bit more reserved. Her eyes reflect the weariness of a hard life. I am told she does not interact well with other dogs. I stroke her malt and white fur, tell her she is beautiful and that I wish I could adopt them all. She softens beneath my touch. I kiss her forehead and mentally curse the humans that landed her here.

Robin is brought out last. She is both sheepish and energetic, seemingly overwhelmed with being out of her pen. I take her for a supervised walk around the perimeter of the shelter. She is one of our best walkers, they boast. I feel like I’m walking a bullet. Her little dumpling body tugs at the leash, happy to lead me anywhere but here, away from a closed cage, free amidst the cloying winter air. She stops to sniff every shred of garbage, gingerly peeing when she lands at a piece deemed worthy. Squatting down, her saggy nipples just barely brush the pavement beneath her, a result of over-breeding and improper after-birth procedure. They tell me she was found roaming the streets post-partum. I think of the babies she doesn’t know, how many puppies she must have birthed and where they are now. We give her a bath. She looks mortified and slightly degraded, but keeps her body perfectly still. Her courage makes my heart ache.

They give me a pound of kibble in a large sandwich bag, a new collar, and a bright red coat with fur accents. Robin sits in the backseat of Linda’s jeep the entire drive home from Long Island to my apartment in Washington Heights. Linda runs the shelter, and has offered to drive me to and from the visitation. She is British, zany, and a hero in my eyes, devoting her life to the cause. We pull up to the curb. Paperwork has been filled out. Background checks made. Payment handed over. It is January 31st, 2015. I am about to have the hardest year of my life. Thankfully, the universe swoops in and sends me Robin.

And so it goes that the longest and most intimate relationship I have ever shared with a living creature is not a human one. And I have an abundance of beautiful, magic humans in my life.

It is January 31st, 2019. Four years have passed since that fateful day. She sits at the edge of my bed as I write this, curled up in a brown half-moon, licking her paws and occasionally her vagina. She acts oblivious to me until I adjust my foot, disrupting her head position. I wink. She blinks. We have a rhythm. I can no longer imagine life without her

*

You know all my secrets. The weird things I do at night when we are alone in the room. Every conversation I have with myself. You hear me pray- to God, to the universe, to any ominous presence that will listen. I wonder how many times you’ve heard me play out a hypothetical conversation with past boyfriends, or their new loves, or the news anchor who exists solely in mind and asks, head perched, so Emma. Tell us what sparked the idea for your latest book? I speak to you in Australian and British accents, reminding you how gorgeous you are for the 23rd time in one hour. You think nothing of it, and even if you do, you don’t blink. Instead, you tilt your quizzical head, lift your snout, and and lick my eyebrow.

I try not to inhale every time I pick your poop up off the sidewalk. The amount of shit that comes out of your body could make a grown man pass out. And yet, no matter how many measures I take , I catch your lingering scent, at once proud of and disgusted by the aroma you are capable of producing. Your tail goes completely straight during the process, like a magic wand warning passersby to keep their distance. You hold eye contact each time. I’ve been told this is because you feel vulnerable and are making sure I have your back, if anything were to happen. I love you enough to get poop on my finger one out of the five times I clean yours up, although it is unfathomable to me that after four years I still haven’t mastered a method that prevents this at all costs. Still, we carry on. Across the street, a dog owner kneels down for the scoop. Solidarity. Dont fuck with me, it implies. I’m holding a steaming bag of shit.

The first time you see me have sex, you leap up in defense, assuming I am being hurt. What must you think of this tangled show. Of masturbation. The sounds I make when I come. I think you’d probably prefer not to see me in the act, as it crosses a vague line between us, despite the fact that you stare at me every time I pee, change my tampon, and parade around the bedroom naked.

You hate the vacuum. Are triggered by skateboarders, cyclists, and really any quick moving inanimate object. Trainers presume that you were abused, kicked, which is why you sometimes try to eat people’s feet. You are both incredibly affectionate and aloof in chosen moments, often elsewhere in your own far off world, until you hear the sound of a bag of chips crinkling in the kitchen. You get annoyed when I spend too much time on my phone, preferring candlelight to the blue glow of the screen. You’d rather  I not take your picture, although you tolerate it long enough to satisfy me. I have never seen eyes widen as much as yours when I open a can of tuna, cook bacon, or grill chicken. To this day, you keep your entire body still when taking a bath, stoic but tolerant, holding out for the treat you are inevitably promised after. The second you leave the bathroom, you run at full speed around the apartment, rubbing your back on each exposed brick that lines our hallway. You are a piece of furniture, a fixture of our shared space. I feel you even when you’re not in the room, which is rare, as this apartment is your palace, the first place you called home. You are worth every dog hair on my bed, each crumb of dirt caked onto the bed sheet, and the million strands of fur I pick off my leggings at the start of every subway ride.

Sometimes I catch you looking in the mirror watching me watch you looking. You study the faces I make when I change clothes 7 times only to put on the original outfit I took off. On the days I work early, you doze back to sleep as I get ready, waiting for the moment I crack open the coconut oil to moisturize my skin. You love coconut oil. Despite it being one of the reasons you are probably fat, after my arms and legs are glistening from its sheen, I swirl my finger in the container and let you have your moment, licking your lips long after there is anything left to taste.

Warfare breaks out each time I leave the house, as though you have been robbed of your dignity. I wish I could tell you that I’ll be back and you’d believe it wholeheartedly, knowing I am always coming home to you, that you are the best part of my day. I wish you knew how much I talk about you to my students, to strangers, to anyone willing to listen. I once stopped seeing a guy with the softest lips I have ever kissed because he found it perpetually odd that we sleep in bed together.

It’s true. You are my most steadfast sleeping companion. You like to plop your 60 pound bum directly on top of my pillow, dead-weight, until I nudge you enough that you roll over, carefully side-eyeing me to sleep. When you want to be completely submerged beneath the covers, you shuffle your paws in an effort to move the blanket aside, using your mouth as a third hand, pushing everything into a messy heap until you’ve achieve your desired outcome. I warm my feet under your belly at night. In the morning, we wake up head to head, your muzzle on the pillow next to mine, eyes peaceful slits, breath toasty. I am convinced our breathing syncs up in our sleep, that when you have a bad dream, the weight of our bodies next to each other comforts you out of it. When I watch you tremble, paws twitching, I place my palm gently on your belly, and you relax. Recently, after waking from a bad nightmare, sheets soaked and my heart pounding, your body is the first surface my hand reaches out for.

I talk about your death often, mostly as a coping mechanism for my brain. I imagine having your ashes molded into a ring I could wear, joke about getting you taxidermied, a stuffed Robin head for the rest of time, casually perched on my living room wall. Oh that old thing? She was my first dog! Can you imagine people’s reactions? They already think I’m more obsessed with you than the average person. My cousin once expressed genuine concern that I will never love someone as much as I love you. I laughed, amused at the notion. But is it really possible for humans to love each other as unselfishly as you love me? We are always wanting something in return. Ownership. Possession. Validating to be validated. All you have ever asked of me is to show up.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, you bark suddenly, awakened by a footstep in the hallway or the sound of the moon howling out the window. I watch your moving lump struggle to break free under the covers, tiny limbs flailing in every direction, driven by new urgency. You leap off the bed, ears perked, alert. You are my nightwatch. In the blackness of the room, my eyes trace your outline guarding the door. I know, with more certainty than I know anything else in this world, that if that door were to open and you sensed danger, you would lay your brave, beating heart in front of mine, and armor my body with your own. I have never trusted anyone with my life as much as I trust you. Your unabashed instinct to protect makes me want to wrap my whole body around you, and whisper, over and over again, I don’t think you will ever realize how much more I need you than you need me. You are my biggest teacher, my most stubborn shadow, my earth angel.

*

Robby lou. My sweet peach. Potato puff pumpkin head. For all of the time I spend wondering about the complexities of the universe- why we are here, how we began, and where we continue onto, I live in gratitude that for a brief period of my little life, you chose me.

Someday you will not be here. And I will. That seems like the biggest injustice of them all. Because why would I ever want to live in a world without you? Perhaps, though, that is also the lesson: to celebrate, rather than cling to, the time we are given.

You are the biggest gift in my life, you beautiful weirdo. Thank you for keeping me in the moment, accepting me without judgment, and bringing me back to myself again and again.

Robin Noodle. My Sun and my moon. My north star. Goodnight, sleeping beauty, I whisper. See you on the other side.

[emma-poole]

Girl

In fifth grade, I imagined blowjobs similar to the way one eats corn on the cob- a mouth and two hands, head moving deliberately side to side, over and over again. I had no idea what a blowjob really meant, except that the mention of it to my girlfriends on the playground elicited widened eyes, nervous laughter, and the sweet satisfaction of having gained insight into a scandalous topic, all of which my ten-year old self delighted in providing.

I do not know why I was so concerned with felatio while still wearing training bras and old navy tech vests, yet even as a small child, sex fascinated me. A deep curiosity of the human form lived within me, and still does. Bodies, in particular naked ones, could stop me in my tracks; a mini statue, mouth-breathing. My mother’s breasts, the way my older girl cousins began filling out their clothing, the tightening of a calf muscle while kicking a soccer ball. Once noticed, I could not unsee all the human art around me. I wanted to talk about it, perhaps to see if others felt the same way. Which is why many of my most vivid memories take place on the playground of Hillside elementary, perched on a tall red jungle gym we referred to as the rocket, sharing information.

My mom had moved my older sister, three dogs, and me to Niskayuna that Fall, a small suburban town in upstate, New York, sprawling with manicured lawns, golf courses, and school spirit pasted on car bumper stickers. We didn’t have a lot of money, but the school district was good and my mother did everything in her power to make our opportunities limitless, often working three jobs while somehow managing to get lunches packed and a homemade dinner on the table every night. Grades were important, as was making the bed each morning and being kind, especially to the underdogs.

We lived in the attic apartment of my grandmother’s house for the first few months upon returning so my mother could get settled. This meant my sister and I could go lay in the waterbed- a queen sized fixture that took up most of the back bedroom of the house- at any time. I will always associate waterbeds with my Nana, as well as an entire home that still looked like it belonged in the 1970s. She never got around to changing the mustard-colored floral wallpaper in the kitchen, or the pea-green almost shag rug in the living room. She had an entire picture-frame wall dedicated to the many awkward stages of her family. Her home was her last prized possession, a mausoleum of sorts, to years passed and the people who lived in her memories. It was an altar to her beloveds.

As is usually the case with the new girl in town, I was a novelty. Tanned from the Florida sun, I stood up in front of my class, instructed by the teacher, and announced shyly, I am Emma Poole from Sarasota, Florida. I moved here with my mom and sister a few weeks ago. I wondered if the transition to New York would be as seamless as it was from Massachusetts to Florida, where I had joined a gymnastics team and befriended a girl named Shelby, whose backyard felt more like a mini amusement park, with twinkle lights and a giant heated pool, hot tub, waterslide and balcony. We used to take turns jumping off the waterfall balcony into the pool, our skinny legs not yet marked by the judgmental veil of teenage girlhood. Things had shifted a bit this time around; I was older. More aware of myself and the curious gazes of my classmates. I was aware of my body, albeit flat-chested and two years away from developing, and the way it reacted to the boy whose eyes squinted when he smiled, an unsettling but surprisingly pleasurable flush that crept from my chest to my neck only to land like blush applied in a hurry on the apple of each of my cheeks. Like a pen oozing ink onto paper. Messy, beautiful.

Two months into the school year, I had a solid group of three girlfriends who showed me the ropes around town and more importantly, around the school hallways and cafeteria. Initially, they had been jealous of my fresh new girl-ness, making jokes that they’d “adopted” me as a ploy to gain traction together. We wore pigtails and plaid button up shirts, gossiped over which boy was approaching who during recess, traded lunchables and ten-year old advice. We were as naive as we were wise. This was before the age of cell phones and social media. No instagram filters or facebook updates or internet body shaming. We still had to call each other’s houses and ask our friend’s parents to please put Kristen on the phone, and later, sneak into basements to giggle together over softcore paperview porn. One of the highlights of my fifth grade life was when Adam Pardi’s older brother, Nick, ( a highschooler!) called my nana’s house asking if I would prefer to go out with Adam or Dan, two boys I’d developed crushes on within the first few weeks of school. Why choose just one?

I chose Dan. My answer came in the form of a crumpled up note, minimal but straightforward, that said Dan. We- my friends and I- agreed that the boys could open the note the next day after school only once they were at least halfway down the road and we could watch their reaction. Adam lived around the corner from me in a section of town called Old Niskayuna. We watched the cluster of boys walk away and voraciously open the note. I hoped Dan was happy with my choice.

By the time I reached seventh grade, I had switched to an aggressively padded black bra and pencil thin eyebrows. I had acne, braces, and the early S curve of hips. My first makeout took place in the back of the Grand Union parking lot, along with six other girls who all kissed the same boy, and some more thereafter. Although I would not have sex until my senior year of highschool, or give a blowjob until sophomore year, people, mostly girls, associated me with the “fast” crowd. Somehow, even in my most awkward phase- which is not to be self-deprecating- I shaved my sideburns and baby hair- I still possessed confidence. I had come to know the male gaze well. I wanted it and fed off of it, while at the same time knowing when to stand up for myself and bark back if necessary. I had the uncanny ability to make fun of the boy I liked most, playing hard to get through feigned apathy and an I’m acting like I don’t give a shit even though I analyze every interaction we have attitude. Just as fifth-grade me possessed a preemptive all-knowingness about oral sex (but how?), thirteen-year old me was beginning to feel the many contradictions of living female in a male-dominated world.

I grew out of my stuttering habit by eighth grade, a speech impediment I still do not fully understand the origins of. I choked on words. S’s were hard, as were Ts and Ds. I practiced my student council speeches at home in my room, increasingly frustrated when a word lodged in my throat, stuck like gum in a windpipe swallowed unexpectedly. My brain worked faster than my mouth, which also grew in middle school. I wore a palette expander that caused a cute gap between my two front teeth, in order to widen my jaw. I did not think the gap was cute at the time, but warned all my friends that it would happen so as to be one step ahead of my own risked integrity. Like when you have a pimple you call attention to before anyone else can. Or tell all your friends you are extremely aware that your new boyfriend is substantially shorter than you would like, even though it’s clear they care far less about it than you do.

The first time a boy went down on me, he removed his glasses, set them aside on the nightstand, and kept his head between my legs for precisely thirty minutes. What is now a dream scenario felt confusing at fifteen- bless his poor tongue for keeping me company all that time, but lack of experience on both of our parts resulted in a mostly numb vagina and my brain spinning on how he wasn’t completely exhausted from having his head at that angle for so long. I loved his commitment, admired his determination. What a blissful and strange site to look down my belly and see his whole face perched on my most intimate parts! The power. The thrill. I still love that sight.

It would take many more years and partners to learn to verbalize what I wanted and how I wanted it. Some would get it the first time. Others, too stuck in their own mind or ego, are probably still walking around giving bad head.

I’m pretty sure I faked an orgasm in order to save both of us. He lifted his mouth, wet and swollen, smiling at his achievement. Putting his glasses back on, he slung his arm around me and we proceeded downstairs, back to the rest of our friends, most of whom were doing the same act minutes before. On facebook the other day, his face popped up. He is a lovely individual, and always has been. Looking at him now, my 29-year old heart felt a ping of compassion for the boy who gave me one of my firsts. For the small but calculated act of removing his eye glasses in order to commit to giving me pleasure.

I am not sure why I sat down to write about adulthood and instead had a reunion with ten-year old me. I suppose I feel protective of her, the little human who has always felt half-woman, half-girl, who watched her older sister develop breasts and in reaction, stuffed balled up tissue into her one piece bathing suit so she could have them too. Now, twenty years later, I marvel at my small but round boobs, thank them for having been there all this time. They are my hand pillows, a resting place for Robin’s head, and a reliable indicator to my arousal state when the right pair of lips transforms them from their cozy resting position into a suddenly alert alarm system, awake and ready.

I think of all the places this body has been. The other bodies she has allowed in, some beautiful, some far undeserving of her holiness. The way that bodies are both attached to and separate of the individual wearing them. How I clutch the soft skin that clings to my hips and both love and loathe it, our relationship a dialogue I am still learning. At times, I have fallen in love with the body, or its parts, more than the person it belonged to. His hands. The way they handled me. How our bodies always coexisted better than our minds. Or recently, someone I dated for four days, who turned out to be more arrogant than I’d thought, didn’t believe in seasoning his food, and ate meals consisting of a single sweet potato and lonely bell pepper, but whose mouth I could have lived inside- he had a tongue that made mine tingle, lips soft yet steadfast, deliberate in their intention. I fall asleep at night not missing him but his lips, both thankful to have had them and nostalgic for their suck.

I got my period for the first time while sitting down to pee in my nana’s bathroom. I was twelve, and I’d been waiting for it. So when I pulled down my pants to see a shiny red slick in my underwear, I sat for a moment, somewhat stunned. I left the bathroom that day feeling altered. My tiny girl body had made something tangible, something I’d heard about, something so…precisely...woman.

I walked into the kitchen with a secret. Mom, I muttered, newly shy...I got my period. She gasped. Congratulations, sweetie! This is wonderful.

I’m still somewhat amused at the blood in my underwear each month, how every time it arrives like an old friend, surprise visiting me when I least expect it. It’s no longer new, or a novelty. Most months it is ill-timed, causing me to rummage through the apartment with my pants around my ankles, searching every cabinet for a lone, hero tampon. And yet I’ve been bleeding for fifteen years and still feel gratitude at what my body can create. I think that’s why I am attracted to partners who possess an element of awe at the female body, as though I am something to be discovered, and then studied, and then practiced, over and over again.

At thirteen, I wanted big boobs. At twenty-five, purpose. Now, a t twenty-nine, I seek deeper understanding. Of the girl I once was, the woman I am today, and the she I continue to evolve into. I think, maybe, I am learning to become the love of my own damn life. She would be so proud, my ten-year old self, to know of all the wild and wonderful stories she’d take part in, both thrilling and at times, deeply painful. You were so brave, I’d tell her. And for the record, blowjobs are nothing like eating corn on the cob.

[emma-poole]

I’ve cried a lot in 2018. On the subway, in the shower, while teaching. On my yoga mat, while grocery shopping, in bed. On buses, cars, and Robin. I cry at the movies, while I sing, at beautiful passages in books. I cried at Sephora while putting on mascara, watery black ink dripping down my cheek.

I don’t always cry because I’m sad. Often times, the burnt orange and yellow mosaic of fallen leaves on pavement takes my breath away. Or birds flying in unison, every shift in direction a sudden, melodious, whoosh. I get teary eyed at elderly couples holding hands while walking down the street, their splotchy skin adorned with ropey veins and gold wedding rings a triumphant anthem- after all these years, we’re still here.

I cried when my sister told me she was pregnant. And again the second time. My eyes pool up watching my barely 3 year old niece be rendered speechless at receiving a set of Frozen themed legos. I choke back the tickle in my throat when I feel my students breathe together, the room wired by silence and the energy coursing through it.

Years ago, during an interview, Matthew Mcconaughey (or was it him?) proclaimed- I probably cry every day. I’m easy to cry. Always have been, always will be. And I embrace it. I remember feeling solidarity with him in that moment, at the ripe age of seventeen. I FEEL you, Matthew. Same here!

I cry because I miss you. And I wish I didn’t. Because it feels like you don’t deserve it. And because emotions are so jarringly up and down and I can hate you one day and by evening time, crave the shadow of you next to me in bed, and the warm skin on the back of your neck and the way you looked at me the first weekend we ever met. And because despite how much you’ve hurt me, I know it comes from the way you hurt inside. And because I’m angry and exhausted from wondering if you will ever love yourself enough to be able to give that love away. And because I know that you need me more than I need you, and I still want to be the one telling you it’s OK. But mostly, because despite everything in my mind telling me otherwise, my heart, in its soft, incessant whisper, each night repeats- it’s still not over.

Over the years, some of New York City’s most popular publications have released their very own “Best Places to Cry in Public in NYC.” A few top contenders: The prescription pick-up line at Duane Reade. The Bryant Park bathrooms. Chelsea Piers. The Bus Stop. The giant tunnel between 6th and 7th avenues at the 14th street subway stop. The Museum of Natural History.

I wonder if New Yorkers cry more because we walk everywhere and have to take public transit and are constantly getting bumped into. Moving vehicles are my personal therapy, unassuming in their call to gently coax out all the emotions you’ve been carrying under 5 layers of monochromatic clothing. The second I spot a subway crier, my heart pings with solidarity. I see you, I want to say. It’s OK! I’m probably crying, too.

Last year, one of my best friends told me that I don’t often let people see me break down. I paused, measuring all of the times I’ve sat sobbing, brought to my knees by grief and despair. She was right. The majority of these moments occurred on my bedroom floor, in the dark, alone. As a child, I bashfully insisted friends and family turn around or close their eyes if I were to sing. In middle school, I ran for student council while stuttering through my campaign speech. In high school, when a teacher called on me to read aloud from the textbook, I’d feel my chest begin to heat up and my heart pound. Ironically, I craved these moments as much as I feared them. Something about the unknown, its potential to thrust you into disaster, or brilliance, thrilled me.

It’s still wild that the career I’ve chosen requires me to stand in front of large groups of people every day, all eyes on me, and tell them what to do. Contrary to my generally outgoing and sunny disposition, when moments of introversion hit, the desire to be alone is almost overwhelming. I have developed deep appreciation for the solace of an empty room, the soft crackle of quiet emanating off each of my four walls.

The most beautiful song is playing in my earbuds. Listening to music on a moving vehicle is like watching your life play out in a movie. Except you get to be the DJ, which in my case, means masochistically curate memories I want to re-live. The last time I was on a bus, during one of our many absent periods, I wrote about you and me. The next morning, you sent me a message, echoing the very words I’d typed the night before. Almost like I was speaking to you in your sleep. That’s always how it works with us, as though there will forever be some alchemistic force greater than you and me orchestrating our story.

Whatever that is. Wherever you are.

Last year, on a chilly Friday evening, I sat at the bar of a restaurant I used to work at and ordered myself a three-course meal. (As I do when I’m trying not to remember someone) To my right, a handsome middle-aged man poked at his chicken parmesan. He was old enough to be my father, but emanated warm energy. I felt him looking at me, waiting for the eventual comment I knew was to come.

He turned to me. Food is good, right?

I nodded and smiled. It is. I actually used to work here. But the food is why I keep coming back.

He laughed, asked me what I do for a living. I’m a yoga teacher. . . that’s always a strange question for me to answer, though, because I went to school for music and theatre, and I love to write, and I’m still figuring out what I want to do with my life, and…..

He smiled again, stopped me mid-sentence. I can assure you that you have plenty of time to figure it out. And by the looks and energy of you, I’d say you’re doing just fine.

On any other night, a comment like that from a man I didn’t know would have made me chuckle politely while internally rolling my eyes, yet something in his eyes stopped me. He spoke with the candor of someone who had suffered deep loss, but instead of turning hard, had softened into a more open and sensitive version of himself. He spoke not with self-pity, but tender nostalgia. Somehow, his kids came up. And then his wife. He had lost her a few years back, to cancer.

I never thought widow would be a label I’d wear, but you just don’t know what life is going to bring you.

I wanted to hug him. Instead, I kept eating, swigging small sips of wine, and listening. On the television at the end of the bar, a recent news story echoing the Me Too movement, played. Aromas of fresh Italian food filled the bar- linguine with clams, penne a la vodka, shrimp oreganata. I thought that I probably had olive oil on my face somewhere, and that he probably found it endearing. Beneath the dim lights, we glowed.

I asked what he thought of the movement, baiting him in some way to see if his answer would elicit a sort of toxic masculinity that I assumed most middle-aged privileged white men possessed. He had money. He was in the city on business. I think, most likely, he was flirting with me.

I think it’s wonderful, and important. These women are brave.

Pause.

I was sexually molested when I was 10 years old. By a man. To this day, it affects me.

He looked down, unsure how to react to his own confession. He seemed surprised that he said it. I put my hand on his arm. I’m so sorry you went through that. I don’t know what to say, but I can’t imagine what that must have been like.

His eyes welled up. I hadn’t really looked into them until this moment. They were the most beautiful cerulean blue, watery and kind. He was crying.

And then the moment passed. As quickly as it appeared, we were talking about football and the stadiums he was helping to build and how about another glass of wine? It was getting late. I mentioned I needed to get going, and without time for me to decline, he paid for my dinner, hugged me goodbye, and when I returned from the bathroom, he was gone. We emailed a few times in the coming weeks.

I never saw him again after that night. But I think about him every time I am in Midtown, when I return to that old bar where, without fail, I always end up talking to strangers for hours.

I think of the old adage, how it’s often easier to cry in front of someone you’ve just met because you have nothing to lose except maybe a little pride; how bustling, crowded bars are breeding grounds for intimate, quiet conversation, and sometimes, the loneliest place you can live is in your own mind so why not tell your life story to an unassuming stranger who probably needs the warmth of human connection just as much as you do.

Each time I walk by the candlelit windows of restaurants filled with people, especially in Winter, especially in New York, especially during snowfall, I imagine all of the stories and secrets, full of pain, full of joy, being shared among mouths. And how lucky I am to have experienced magic evenings like those, when you are momentarily, brilliantly present.

It would take far too long to imagine all of the places I have yet to cry. And so I take solace in knowing there are many, humbly offering themselves up whenever the need arises.

Thank goodness for wooden benches and yoga studios and coffee shops with oldies music. And kind bathroom attendants and airplane windows and cozy movie theatre seats. For all of the seemingly mundane landmarks that have witnessed my tears in steadfast solidarity, without uttering a word of judgment.

And to all my beautiful, sensitive, beings; to anyone who has ever cried in public/without knowing why/more often than not, and wondered- do other people feel this too?

Here’s to you.

[emma-poole]

I spend too much money on hot drinks. 4pm hits. I want hot chocolate. In the morning, oat milk lattes that taste like the earth. I’ve tried to kick this habit by purchasing ground coffee when I buy groceries, with the intention to create a morning brewing ritual. With a little extra time, I opened the bag today and brewed a mug. It sucked. I rushed. The coffee was weak and we didn’t have any half n half. Minutes later, I walked down the block to the new cafe that opened a couple weeks ago. I like their aesthetic, all exposed brick and mismatched wrought-iron furniture. I like the interaction of being customer too much, the smell of fresh coffee beans when I enter, how the barista mutters how are you? before taking my order, the thoughtful, frothy heart at the center of my paper cup.

When my heart feels precarious, I seek comfort in ambience. I will browse the entire bedding section of World Market just to luxuriate in the throw blankets and tactfully placed succulents. I’ll smell every candle if only to ignite a spark of warmth in my spirit.

The first of November arrived at an uncharacteristic 70 degrees. On my way to purchase my hot drink, I wore a shirt with no jacket, watched the men who do construction take in my body with the same attention they give to the jackhammer that’s pierced our concrete the last 3 weeks. I imagine women’s bodies as the pavement they penetrate. Do they picture our shrill screams the moment they feel their tool cracking earth? The world is confusing these days. I can’t walk by a construction site without imagining the exploitation of mother earth at the hands of men in hard hats. Then again, I can’t deny that I like the feeling their attention gives my body. I am a walking contradiction, of body and mind, wanting to resist and still be found appetizing.

You’re edible, he whispered to me under the bright Middle Eastern sun. We were at an olive farm in Israel, on a dusty hill shaded by giant, leafy trees. The picnic table had been set up with cookies and ice water. His proclamation amused me. I bit into the cookie and smiled at him. Crumbs fell from my mouth into the dirt. A few days later, we’d kiss for the first time on the cobblestoned streets of Jerusalem, tipsy from cheap wine and vodka. Days after that, we’d have sex in Tel Aviv in a tiny room overlooking the beach. I’d hear the ocean behind me as he moved inside me, taste the salt on his neck when he buried his head into my chest, and said, I’ll move there if you want me to, Emmush.

I went to Temple on Friday night for the first time in 15 years. It is not that I am religious, or seeking to find some higher meaning from life. I already possess faith. I see meaning every day in the work I do, watching people shift and unspool only to put themselves back together again. But the world feels bleak and I was craving community with those who share a part of my history. Last Saturday, 11 Jews were shot and killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh at the hands of a white supremacist. 6 days later, during the very same hours I attended Temple, a gunman in Florida walked into a yoga studio and shot two women dead. I am no longer surprised that our places of worship have become crime scenes. I knew before reading the description, that the gunman was white, male, and most likely had a history of violence against women. I don’t know why I feel the need to justify my reason for going. I don’t know a lot of things.

I’ve had a stomach ache for 7 months. I realized this the other day when I woke up for the first time with a calm heart and an appetite. I don’t want to say that you stole these things from me. I allowed you to yield power over my emotions, put my happiness smack in the middle of your far off world. You’re not here. You don’t see the leaves change from green to gold or watch the days turn darker as the weather gets colder. You don’t listen to the news or go to sleep in the same time zone. You are surrounded by a language foreign to me. It’s been months since we’ve woken up in the same bed. These things used to keep me up at night. I’d cry myself to sleep, longing for the day we finally had time.

I no longer imagine a world where you and I exist. The vision of us doesn’t make sense anymore. Instead, I imagine you and her. My brain is ruthless- it pictures you fucking her; missionary, on your side, from behind-your favorite. Her huge, engorged tits bouncing with each thrust. I felt her presence in my bones the first time you ever mentioned her name. She is in love with you, whether she admits it or not. This is easy for you. You need someone telling you that you did good. I wonder if you tell her the same things you used to tell me, if she’s talked you down from a panic attack or knows how badly you want to make your parents proud despite resenting their lack of understanding toward the person you feel yourself to be. I wonder if she knows how deeply embedded your insecurity lies. You lie because you lack confidence. You lack confidence because you have no idea who you are. 

For a long time, I tried to make you see your light. I lost my energy in the process. Sucked dry like a plant thirsty for water but fed only one drop per day. Friends asked me if I was OK. I don’t know, I’d reply, blankly. I woke up recently and could not understand why I’d held on so long. I cannot blame it on a singular moment, but the clarity has come and my brain won’t unsee it. It feels effervescent, bubbling, palpable. My inhale stopped hurting.

In letting you go, I am beginning to feel like myself again. I laugh more. I fall asleep and wake up thinking about myself rather than where you are and what you’re doing. The anxiety has left my body as quickly as it made a home inside my chest, festering with each passing day. I believe in the goodness of your spirit, but it’s shadowed by self-doubt and the need to be validated by everyone you cross paths with. I hate the way you never really listen because you’re too busy thinking about what to say next. I hate your stupid fucking instagram captions. Your predictability embarasses me.

 I want to tell you that it’s OK. I’ve released you. I hope you continue to work on yourself so you can become the man I saw the first day I ever met you. And though I will always love you in my own way, I no longer want to be with you.

 Two candles burn as I write this. White tea and leather & oakmoss. Robin is asleep on her side, pink belly breathing beneath my feet. Mini string lights hang beneath open shelving and a charcoal drawing of a naked woman. One year ago I got rid of anything in my room that didn’t bring me joy. I surround myself with beautiful things because it makes my spirit feel good. I am weak for a budding flower, the curve of a jawbone, the silhouette of our bodies in my floor length mirror. There was a time in my life when I thought you more beautiful than anything else in the world. There was a time when everything felt new.

 Last night, we elected over 100 women into Congress, making US history. A small, significant leap. My heart beat faster as I looked at women of all races and genders sharing the screen. I watch the news and stay informed and celebrate women, then go to sleep and get turned on by questionable, slightly demeaning porn. I answer texts from old flames who always have a way of reappearing anytime a major shift occurs in my life. I am feminine and feminist, constantly examining the intersection of these two worlds, where they coexist, where they collide. I embrace what I don’t understand.

I take a deep breath and inhale the tangy scent of the olive farm and sweet, sweet, Emil. My innocence in not knowing what was to come. My memories are roadmaps to a deeper understanding of myself. I close my eyes and there you are, somewhere between nostalgia and forgiveness. I’m thankful for the new brain space. The sun went down. I woke up different. I can breathe again. My heart is full of hope.

[emma-poole]

I buy myself flowers at the market now. Last week it was a bird of paradise, long-stemmed with spiky buds, veins made of violet, orange, and green. I keep her on the metal tray table next to my bed, in the company of sage, palo santo, rose quartz, and amethyst- talismans for good juju. She is starting to die. I need to take her out of her foggy water; her leaves are withered to a crisp brown and it seems unjust to keep her bowed head on display any longer. Bright colors stop me in my tracks these days, punchy orange and purple-hues that look the way vibrancy feels. I fantasize about giant, aromatic bouquets spilling out of brown paper cones, the all-consuming sweetness of lilac to the the lungs, how eucalyptus lingers past the inhale.

In my 29th year, my twenties appear like a film reel played in slow motion. To go back is both to relish and grieve; to see my former self with clearer eyes. Faces are roadmaps of my New York: every time I walk by the Irish pub on 7th and 28th, I think of Dean. On Third avenue, Devin. East Harlem, Robert. The yellow pickup truck is Jonathan. New Jersey, Anthony. Benny is the candle section of the Columbus Circle TJ Maxx, each wick flickering as we fucked in broad daylight, only the shadow of his black curtains protecting me from the type of sunlight you reserve solely for the person you love to see you in. Julius is No Ordinary Love, Sade’s smoky voice narrating our silhouette, shea butter skin and pre-rolled joints in glass jars. Lance resides on the rooftop of my building, no longer in use, where we drank red wine out of cups and stared at a murky sky, the prelude to our first night spent together. Chris is deep Brooklyn, dating a father, and white tee-shirts over a heavy gold chain that tickled my face every time we made out. Walker, who makes his own salad dressing and who I contrived an elaborate fantasy of marrying the day I met him, is Chinatown. The wooden bench on the crossway of 74th and broadway where we met, Clinton Street Bakery and pretending to meditate when I really wanted to fool around and how could he possibly be focused on his breath right now.

Some of the faces repeat over the years, their recurrence coinciding with my need for familiarity or the desire to scratch a persistent itch just once more, only to result in the same unease. Others come in and out of my life as quickly as a water blot drying on paper, their features frozen in singular, vivid images. They say to love is to die a little, that you lose a part of yourself you can never get back. I have died many times in love, believing in the moment I would never recover from the warfare that is a broken heart. Looking back, I question the purity of my feelings-not only in rootedness but intent; in my early twenties, my desire to be wanted far exceeded my desire to be understood.

People belong to these memories, but the lessons are mine. I am no longer the fresh faced 22-year old who willingly stepped into disaster for the sake of experience. Her New York exists in summer evenings when you are awake to see the sun set and rise in the same night, where Harlem still feels new and the sight of a cockroach is somewhat thrilling because it means you’re here and doing it, tiny, rat-infested apartment beside the point. She hasn’t even walked the Brooklyn Bridge yet, or learned to verbalize the way she really wants to be touched, that two fingers feels better than one, and consistent, steady pressure is always more effective than a manic, flicking tongue.

How do I possibly convey her journey- the she who is no longer me and has always been me?

I write these words from a moving bus on the Massachusetts Interstate at golden hour, watching the sun playfully peek its head between each stand alone tree, together a massive green mosaic that takes my breath away each time I look up. The person I love is worlds away, in a small city that requires a six hour bus-ride from the capital’s airport. I still imagine taking that ride with him, the intensity of our reunion, the way he’d smell, look, feel. I see our two bodies finding each other in a busy terminal, the way they show it in the movies, which is never how it is in real life, hugging before speaking, my nose searching his clothing for familiar scent, my eyes, finally, to his face, for a recognizable feeling. Would this body-new and the same- I had fallen in love with, react to my touch the same way? Would he remember how we talked about making babies together, hoping they get his eyes and my complexion, that we could see our lives together, 20 years down the road?

So much has happened since that night. We had no idea.

I’m still here, I want to say to him now. Don’t you dare forget how it felt.

Sometimes I press my face all the way up against the mirror in my room until my breath creates a circle of fog around my mouth. My vision narrows; I am momentarily cross-eyed. I like the feeling of cold glass against my skin, watching my cheeks suck air in and out. I like taking sensation a step further, testing the boundary of my own proprioception. I slowly back up from my reflection, each feature becoming more pixelated with every inch moved away. These are eyes someone could love, I think, tracing the half moon of my eyelid with my thumb. I stick my forefingers in each of my dimples, imagine being kissed in the tiny divots every morning. As a kid, I demanded my father’s attention by cupping his chin in my hand and aggressively turning his face toward me while he was in the middle of a conversation. As a kid I was much more incessant in my demand for attention. Adulthood has softened me, but I still find myself searching for the precocious little girl who stripped naked in her carseat so she wouldn’t have to get up.

My life these days feels more inward than out. For a long time, I have lived between two worlds: the world in my mind and the world before me. The two were constantly at odds, which resulted in me being at odds with myself. It is a maddening reality to exist more abundantly in your head than your life. How many times I’ve scratched pen to paper in my journal recalling this sentiment, and then played out the same crippling scenario again and again in my life. My freshman year of highschool, during volleyball tryouts- a sport I took up more for the spandex and social aspect than love of the game- I pretended to hit my head on the gym floor so I wouldn’t have to finish out the suicide drills the coaches were dosing out like sergeants. I made the team but was often asked to remove myself from the huddle for inappropriate laughter, my desire to entertain my teammates greater than the desire to come out on top, to compete, to win.

I look at my newborn niece, two weeks old. She has lungs that know how to breathe, the tiniest brown hairs on the rim of her left ear. Her eyes are cloudy blue saucers that roll back in her head when she’s relaxed, and fixate on mine when I raise my voice to a higher pitch. If I place my index finger beneath her miniature, translucent hand, she will latch on instinctively, as though touch is a sense not learned but remembered. Let her tiny body not fool us as a veil for the deep wisdom her spirit carries.

Looking at her, I see God. I study each pearly fingernail, tiny and symmetrical, and marvel at the home my sister’s body made for hers to form. How babies come into this world trusting that the person who lays her hand in theirs is safe, and good. And finally, how my niece’s perfectly formed heart knows to pump blood into her body without ever being told how.

Have you ever noticed that if you hold your hands upright, connecting each thumb and index finger, a perfect spade forms? The spade is a heart flipped upside down, each curve inverting to form a sharp point. In tarot, spade is the death card. How fitting that a shape representing love and life coincides with death when turned on its head. I realized this in yoga class the other day, when I sat on my mat in the meditative time before class starts and and made shapes with my hands. The people who bring their phones into the room and play on them until class begins are missing out-I’ve had some of the most profound realizations about life staring up at ceilings while listening to the foot patter of those slowly trickling in around me.

Life and death coexist all around me. I admire a flower’s beauty only to smell its rot the next week. The news barks of another mass shooting while I sniff the sweet, baked warmth of a newborn’s head. We fall in and out of love, homes, places. New ideas are birthed based on the mishaps of others- if we see the destruction happen, perhaps we can prevent the end result for ourselves. A sort of selfish altruism, to observe the pain of others as a preventative measure to preserve our joy.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Sometimes I can’t even plan more than what I will have for breakfast the next day, let alone take care of the crumbs on my bed since my bed is the place I do everything- are there people more dignified? The moon is new and then it’s full and people are dying and loving and making love and messing up and gluten is bad for you and then, actually, it’s not. The only unchanging force is change itself, which feels tragic and hopeful at the same time. And so I wish to cling to the scent of my niece’s milky skin, bottle it up and dab it on my wrist each time I feel pain, or taste the bitterness of jealousy. I wish to wrap my loving hands around the face of the person I love and ask him, point blank, can you handle me? To press my lips against the hearts of those who’ve hurt me and whisper thank you for the learning.

Robin is asleep next to me, tucked in beneath the covers as she does. Her snores are my metronome. The weather dropped to 65 degrees tonight and I can feel Fall’s crisp promise in the cool breeze coming through my window.

[emma-poole]

I can’t believe I was pregnant once. It hits me on First Avenue, the side of the city I met him for dinner days before I had the procedure. He took me to a cozy Italian spot in the East Village. The waiter kept asking if we wanted wine and I kept fumbling because I didn’t know if drinking a glass would be disrespectful to the life growing in me. Even though I knew I wouldn’t keep it. Even though one glass doesn’t hurt. We decided on red. One each. He reached for my hand across the table when I cried and told him I was scared.

I thought no one in the restaurant that night must have had any idea what we were talking about- to their eyes, just another couple sharing a meal at a dimly lit table on a Wednesday evening in early Fall. We weren’t a couple, just two people trying to do the right thing. But we created something that at times leaves me wondering what my life would look like had I chosen differently. Nostalgia seems like a better word than sadness on this balmy first night of August, where in bustling sidewalk restaurants, storefront bakeries, and hookah shops disguised in brightly lit bodegas, I am struck by all of the life bubbling around me.

I can’t believe we met and fell in love and then you moved away and it became an earthquake. I think of you because I’m always thinking of you. Especially tonight, on the side of the city we have yet to explore together, one day after we decided, yet again, to take time apart. I think of you when pondering the hypothetical life of my unborn child- three years old this July- because you are the person I hope to make children with someday. As a teenager, I combined the last names of boys I liked with mine, rolled them around my tongue until I felt satisfied with an ear-pleasing combination, only to then consider if the person attached to the name was suitable. When I met you, it wasn’t me but our future children I imagined with your namesake.

Two white guys with brown beards pass me on my left. This must be where the people my age gather. I am surrounded by the ripe scent of millennial pheromones- sipping rose, scouting, looking down as if feigning distraction will make the veil more mysterious. I have to think we looked more interested than the present but slightly always distracted gazes of the people eating dinner outside, that our first meal together was not merely a consumption of food, but of all the potential that lay in the distance between our two plates.

I need to get out more. Probably. My roommates will tell me I stay in my room too much, closing myself off to the vast world around me, losing out on the vibration of a city people move to in order to feel more alive. That’s what happens when you run around all week for work and are in love with someone halfway across the world, and therefore less inclined to seek the immediate satisfaction of the slick in your underwear when kissing someone new.

Except. Tonight. Feeling the hot stick and cool breeze of the new month, I want it. I watch every pair of eyes that lands on me and feel a kind of dull pleasure, like a buoy that’s been sitting in still water and suddenly gets rippled by a wave. I, too, am ripe. (From the dictionary, ripe: having arrived at such a stage of growth or development as to be ready for reaping, gathering, or eating.) My hips fill out my clothes in the right places. All these months, my tactile hands have saved themselves for you. If tonight is different, it seems I am willing to share what has been left deliberately dormant.The vision entices me, but the act itself elicits dread. I’m afraid I’ve misplaced a feeling.

It’s sunset on the Hudson River in early July when the breeze hits your skin at seventy degrees. A constant internal hum. Subway tile and the exposed brick of fancy New York City bathrooms glowed up in candlelight. Being unphased by hot sidewalk grates and the assholes who get on the train before letting you off. The sensation that no matter where you are, there is someone else feeling the vibration you make.

It’s you, today. For now.

It is 4pm in the afternoon and I’m laying on my bed naked, after a scorching walk with Robin that’s soaked my clothes through. The AC blows on my bare breasts and belly, making the tiny blonde hairs around my nipples sway like those white dandelions that disperse with one puff. Do you remember what I look like naked? As in, not through photographs, but the physiological reaction your body makes when it remembers the curve of my hip bone underneath your mouth. The way my back arches and where my hair falls and the area my thighs dissolve into something softer. If someone asked me the hardest thing about distance, I’d say how humbling it is to forget tiny details. How maddening it can become to wonder if you are remembering correctly.

Sometimes I wish we’d met in high school so I could tell people you threw paper airplanes at me across the desk with tiny offbeat notes inside. I’d have decorated my locker with these notes, waited for you outside study hall during free period when we’d drive to your house and fuck for thirty minutes. The kind of first love fucking that eventually develops from the innocent fumbling of bad sex; disjointed, new, but still magical from the sheer act of having it at all. I used to perch in front of my hall locker pretending I was looking for something when I knew my crush was walking by during his free period. I used to go to his house and lay flat under his covers when his mom came home abruptly knocking on the bedroom door. By the time you went through puberty, I can’t imagine how many girls he’d convinced to lay flat under his sheets, like tiny robotic statues, waiting for his hands to undress them again.

But now it’s late and you’re not here and I’m tired of creating you all these nights in my mind. I want skin, scent, and an eager mouth next to me in bed. I want the people I love to stop looking at me with a furrow between their brow when they ask about us and I reply, with a faint wince in my gut each time, I just don’t know. Only time will tell. And of course it’s not their fault.They have seen me suffer each day since you’ve been gone, wondering when you’re going to come home, when the self you’re looking for will reveal himself long enough for you to willingly receive what I am giving. I wonder- has anyone ever looked at you the way I look at you? And then- have you ever looked at you the way I look at you? I know the work isn’t mine to do. I am no longer afraid of my capacity to love and be loved, or of the immense strength it requires of the individual chosen to share it with. So far, it has felt hard. And that keeps me up at night.

I walk by Veniero’s Pastry on East 11th two seconds before turning around and going inside. Golden light dips into the bakery window. It is summer in the city, when the sun sets after 8 pm, bathing its inhabitants in a lustrous glow. We all look fertile. Including the pastries, lined up like tiny toy soldiers in perfect, colorful rows. I choose two cannolis, already sweating from being taken out of their home. The cashier places them in a red and white box, wishes me a pleasant evening and sends me on my way. He has eight other customers in line behind me to attend to.

Three years ago, on another Wednesday night in the Village, I sipped wine with the person who had gotten me pregnant. Six months ago, I stood outside the 23rd street 1 train stop and let 10 trains pass while we talked on the phone for the first time. Tonight, I am walking pastry to my friend for her 29th birthday.

And so it goes.

[emma-poole]

The older Dominican ladies in the neighborhood get freaked out when Robin lifts her snout at them, as if to say hello. They quickly start walking away as I mutter under my breath, both amused and annoyed, it’s ok! She’s friendly.

The family that lives below us complained to our management company last year that Robin was too loud in the apartment, the click of her paws a daily nuisance. They dislike her not because she is actually loud, but because she is a pitbull. As a compromise, we purchased a floor runner for the hallway and all has been quiet since. This was only after our company threatened to take measures against us if we didn’t “get rid of the dog.” I told them I’ve had my dog long before they owned this building, and they could not force me to give her up. I expressed this far more politely than I experienced it, rage pouring from each finger as I typed the email with pursed lips- To Whom It May Concern, and then an imaginary, go fuck yourself.

How dare they ask me to dispose of my beloved. Looking at her while writing this, she is a warm croissant rolled up and freshly baked. Sleeping beauty in her palace. My beating heart manifest.

Sometimes I walk down the street looking far more sanitized than I feel. The dogs in the neighborhood, unlike the men, never undress me with their over eager eyes. I cannot leave the house in anything less than a baggy sweatshirt without feeling like meat. From the English origin mete, food.

Men- how many times have you walked down a sidewalk scared of a woman?

I hesitate before pulling the bathing suit up my thighs. The straps dip low in the back, cut in at the ribs. Wearing it, I am exposed. Without armor. I throw loose pants on, emerge into the ninety degree heat and brave the stares. Robin, oblivious to my dress, leads the way.

“Nice dog” they say, (not looking at her)

“Mami can I walk with you?” They say

Their hissing makes rage boil in my stomach. The tip of a knife held steady to a burning flame. I imagine pointing it to their slowly swelling bulge. It is a delicate line, wanting to be desired and being desired by the uninvited. It is especially frustrating feeling the animalistic want of the opposite sex when the one you want it from isn’t there to give it you.

I flashback to our first weekend together. With you by my side, they averted their eyes. We went to the park at the top of the stairs and I showed you the moon and you looked at me the way I hoped you would, equal amounts of kindness and desire. We had sex for the first time in my bed and I thought I might cry because of how tenderly you kissed my neck, as though you were afraid to press too hard.

I wish you’d stop trying so hard to be interesting. The tattoos, the minimalist aesthetic, the need to be away from everything in your life that reminds you of your past. The things that used to intrigue me about you now pantomime your insecurity. I am most interested in your beautiful heart and sensitive spirit. The voice on the other end whose rasp felt like a lullaby on the long nights I wished you there. I fell in love with your voice first. Some nights, I play old messages just to hear it again.

The other day, I ran into an ex of mine who I had a very strong sexual connection with. I saw him before he saw me, so I could have kept walking. You felt really far away that day, though. I think a part of me just wanted to feel his eyes on me.

Dirty, is the word that comes to mind when the attention is unwanted. I am their whore for those five seconds, made unsanitized by feasting mouths. I wonder what must go through their heads in the moment they stare directly at my breasts, thighs, waist. Surely not that I am someone’s daughter, or intelligent, or that my choice to wear a top I feel empowered in implies my consent to be fixated upon.

Am I being too hard on these men I don’t know?

Most of them grew up in tiny kitchens with tired mothers who continued to put on lipstick every day for the husbands who came home late and expected a meal on the table. They were taught misogyny as an act of valor. To be masculine was to keep track of the number of times a woman asked for your validation by stuffing her ass into tight jeans and saying yes when she really meant no. By lowering herself onto freshly moisturized knees and unzipping your pants to make you feel like more of a man.

I am no better than any of these women. I, too, have put on an outfit knowing the attention I’d receive. I’ve felt the swell between my legs watching a dick get hard at the sight of my naked body. These actions don’t make me any less of a feminist. Oscar Wilde said that everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex, he said, is about power. To desire is powerful. To be desired, intoxicating. I struggle to find balance in my need to be seen as both human being and sexual being; I fear I’ll grieve the day the men stop looking.

I wish we taught little boys to see divinity in little girls. I wish the men they grow into would do better.

I recently spent 24 hours doing plant medicine in the company of 15 incredible women. We gathered in a circle from morning until night, sharing our stories. It was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had. When we began the ceremony honoring the spirit of the father, I watched in awe as women spoke of the men in their lives. Men who loved them and men who had hurt them. Men who were here and men who had died. One woman, a willowy, fairy-like pixie with dark eyes, spoke of honoring Isis, the Goddess of water. Her husband, along with his brother, drowned in a river years back. She thanked the water for its cleansing, honored the men whose spirits were now embedded in its streams.

I cried that day for all the women who have endured, and continue to endure. Together in that room, we spanned three generations. I left the next morning knowing that women need to start gathering more. We need each other just like the plants need fresh air and strong men still need their mothers.

I’ve inhabited my current neighborhood for almost 7 years now. Naturally, I know which men to find on which stoop, what the ones who emerge at night smelling of liquor will look like in the morning. I’ll smile at the mild-mannered bodega owner across the street who calls me sweetie and takes extra time counting my change. These sidewalks are my home, and in a way, I feel protective of them. And so I’ll nod at the men who nod at me, if only in solidarity that we have shared the same streets over and over again.

I hope they never underestimate the ferocity it takes to step outside each day as a woman. The brave faces we have put on since society has worked to silence us.  

I hope when they see me on a day I don’t feel like smiling, that they bow their heads respectfully in grace, not questioning what they did to deserve that.

They will look at me almost quizzically, head tilted in awe-

How brave it is to exist, I imagine them saying. 

[emma-poole]

I like the shapes my sweat makes on my yoga mat. Sometimes it’s an animal- two palm prints formed to butterfly wings, a frog made of belly and feet. The space between my eyes is a dewy blob in child’s pose, my thighs giant clouds evaporating into purple sky.

I like the way my pores feel like dug out canals when a cool breeze blows across them, the satisfaction of witnessing my body transform from lethargic to supple.

I practice mostly with my eyes closed. In some lineages of yoga, there is a strict adherence to the the drishti- where you focus your gaze. Mine works best when I shut off the outside world and see the shapes in my mind. It’s like holding your breath underwater, or a conch shell held up to the eardrum. I like the whisper an enclosed space creates.

I was in a yoga studio when I first learned I was pregnant. I took the test 10 minutes before the class started, hoping to give myself some relief. The pink plus sign punched me in the gut, but I stayed. The theme of the class that day was twisting, something women should refrain from as the pregnancy grows. Although I was too early along for it to matter, I cried in every twist we took that hour, the weight of my reality felt in the turning of my ribcage, the awareness of an additional heartbeat inside of my own. Two weeks later, I stepped back onto my mat with an empty womb. The teacher had no idea I’d had an abortion and was practicing for the first time since the procedure, that I was terrified to breathe too deeply in fear of crumbling in a room full of people. I closed my eyes and let her voice take me elsewhere. Step your right foot forward. Inhale your left arm up. With each cue, a bit of steadiness. My tears fell onto my mat in droplets. They landed in the shape of stars.

Twice now, I’ve had to teach a yoga class within an hour of getting broken up with. Thank God for sunglasses and headphones, the comforting anonymity of a subway car when you want to grieve. Leading the class, I faked it until I wasn’t faking it any longer, the will of my students a poignant act of solidarity. They showed up for me, and I would do the same. They didn’t know that thirty minutes prior, I was sulked over the chair in my room, weeping. But of course they didn’t know. We all arrive wearing the masks that protect us. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we feel them sliding off amongst company. Sometimes a deep breath in is all that’s needed for the scream lodged in your throat to become an exhale.

I’ve had students come out to me, reveal held traumas, and break down crying after their own personal loss, whether it be breakups, death, or every day disappointment. I taught the morning after Trump was elected and Orlando was attacked. You could hear a pin drop during that first inhale, the energy of the room so potent that it was difficult to tell which breath belonged to who. This is not to say that I am some martyr for teaching yoga; every day I wake up and realize how little I know about this vast world, and most days I cannot believe that I have the odd privilege to stand up in front of a room and guide people closer to themselves. Rather, it speaks to the power of the practice- we put ourselves out there by showing up. And by showing up, we come undone together. I have never witnessed such bravery as I have watching a room full of people hold space for themselves.

Anxiety feels like a twisted ball of rubber bands stuck in my chest. If described poorly, one could even say it tickles. But that would be an unfair description, even lending the listener to believe it enjoyable. There is nothing pleasant about its pesky existence. It taunts. At times, I cannot breathe without feeling its constant, humbling presence. It takes my hunger away, which only makes me feel emptier. The stirring in my heart gets louder. I want to stick my fingers down my throat and release what isn’t there.

Before experiencing anxiety in my body, I never truly got it. Mellow by nature, I’d watch my friends have panic attacks and wonder why they couldn’t just pull it together. The whole thing seemed self-serving at worst, and psychosomatic at best. About a year ago, I was in a yoga class when my knees buckled and I felt like I was going to pass out. My vision blurred. My heart, suddenly an enemy, beat in triple time. I had to lie down for most of class, although I probably should have left. I blamed it on my birth control at the time, convinced my doubling up on the pills in the same day had caused the episode. About a month later, it happened during rush hour on the subway. I was on my way to teach in Soho and was suddenly seeing stars on the F train. The walk to the studio felt brutally long, and when I finally made it through the doors, I alarmed the front desk staff by telling them I didn’t know if I’d be able to teach. Somehow, I did. The second my energy was focused elsewhere, my nervous system calmed down.

I don’t live with anxiety every day, but it persists enough for me to write about it. I wonder at what point my subconscious mind decided to reveal itself through sweaty palms and the feeling of impending doom. Was it a specific event, or a series of small traumas over the span of my life? Most days, I am joyful and optimistic, enigmatic in my love for the natural world, animals, and human beings. I have been moved to tears watching a leaf blow in the wind, or witnessing two people in love share forehead kisses. Yet somewhere within me, doubt lingers.

At its worst, it cripples me. A sleepless night:

I’m feeling the urge to write about you again, which means something bad is going to happen. I do my best writing when I feel like shit. To purge is the only way. I haven’t slept well since we got back together- even that first night, high on adrenaline from hearing your voice and re-enmeshing ourselves in each other’s energy, my mind reeled.

I am writing prematurely about our break-up, which feels like a trick. You are not gone but sometimes you feel gone.

The first time we break up, I joke to my friends that I’ll get really sad and lose a bunch of weight, at least making a come back with my body. I have felt the pounds drip off of me in past relationships, unhealthy ones. It is a fleeting pleasure, to feel hollow. You, different from the others, fill me with comfort and reassurance. You don’t feel unhealthy, but at times out of reach. I am weary of your indecision, drained of having to pry into your psyche to hear your voice.

A vivid lyric-

Where do you go when you go quiet?

I wonder this about you. When your eyes cannot make contact with mine and your neck is a canvas dotted with bright red splotches. When someone who doesn’t know you as well wouldn’t notice the way you clench your jaw when you’re frustrated, how your face looks like it’s in pain when you cannot discern a thought. Sometimes I want to shake the words out of your beautiful mouth to relieve you of this agony. It is maddening, for you I presume, more than anyone. But for me, too, because it makes my mind spin. I’ve looked at my phone too many times waiting for you to show me you’re there. You live so deeply inside of me, I don’t remember how it feels not to miss you.

And then-

I eat mushrooms with my best friend from college. We chew the fungus to a grainy pulp in our mouths, careful to digest as much of the medicine as possible. It is disgusting- somewhere between animal rot and cardboard. At an outdoor patio of a hotel I’ve never been in, the drug begins to hit. It feels like my body is revolting against me and I immediately want to stop feeling the way I do. Like a belt tightening around my chest. The worst case of food poisoning. Hot flashes and a giant throat lump.

My friend is amazing. She refuses to engage in my panic and talks me down. I call you, my love, the person who keeps me up at night and with whom my mind sometimes struggles to make sense of. You are no longer my anxiety but my safety net; warm, all-consuming, home.

Deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth, you both say.

A lucid moment. The same breath I instruct my yoga students at the beginning of class, while sitting in meditation.

The trip begins to shift, and a magical night ensues. In yoga, we call it samadhi. The state of enlightenment, unity with the divine. Rarely experienced by human beings.

I took my first yoga class at sixteen. I once tried to track down one of my earliest teachers, Joanne. She taught at the local Gold’s gym in my hometown. I spent that summer in a tiny, dim-lit studio with women three times my age, loving every minute of Joanne’s contagious warmth and energy. I haven’t been able to find her, but if I could, I would thank her. At a mere 18 years old, with a newly broken heart and tenacious but naive spirit, she treated me with dignity and respect.

After twelve years of practicing and five years of teaching yoga, I continue to find solace in the plush rectangle of my mat.

It is my island. The place I go when I go quiet.

Today during practice, my scapula became two sweaty wings along a blotted torso. A bird, in flight, evolving.

[emma-poole]

I’ve been thinking about chopping all my hair off. Or losing ten pounds. Fitting into a new body to shed the one that makes too comfortable a home of sadness. I cry in bathrooms now. Before teaching, after taking class, during a shift at the restaurant, to put off walking out into the world with my overly tender heart.

I used to fuck in bathrooms. 2012. The Hurricane Club, New York City. A massive tiki-bar themed eatery. I saved thirty thousand dollars that year, and lost my sanity. Female servers had to wear white tee-shirts and short black skirts, our aprons barely covering the bare skin of our thighs. I fell in love with someone I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with there. Or was it love? I have a hard time deciphering that as I get older. Loving someone at 22 feels different than 28. As I imagine it will feel different at 35. And so on. Loving someone you cannot have is like climbing a steep cliff without ever reaching your destination.

Every server worked in a pair, and sometimes, if I was lucky, I’d get paired with Dean. One day, while wiping tables down to prepare our section, he asked me if I was single. Yes, I replied, with an eye roll. He assured me I had nothing to worry about, that I seemed like a lovely person. And that I was beautiful. I carried the word beautiful home with me that night, rolled it around in my mouth imagining him saying it.

We wiped down a lot more tables together over the next few months. I learned he was in an unhappy seven year relationship. More like domestic partnership, he’d add. When I questioned why he stayed, he sighed deeply and said it was complicated. He said a lot of contradicting things that year.

Dean was 26 to my 22, an age that seemed old to me at the time. (!) He had ruddy, reddish skin, and a huge smile. If you saw him on the street, you’d think him somewhere between a young dad soccer coach and a cowboy who drank too much. Dirty-blonde hair. Green eyes. Raised in upstate New York, which we bonded over. His family looked like they grew up on whole milk and biscuits. The sight of him in a flannel made me wet.

He constantly told me I was too good for him. Which made me want him more. I thought I could pull the goodness out of him by bandaging all the broken parts he kept hidden beneath his self-deprecation and cocaine habit.

One day, after a late night shift and while walking to the subway together, he asked me if I’d like to grab a drink. We’d spent months teetering between ridiculous amounts of flirtation while acting aloof. I remember the pants I was wearing. They were wide-legged and grey, but most notably, they made my ass look good. We walked to an Irish pub on 28th and 7th avenue. I ordered a beer I mispronounced. We spent the entire evening with six inches of space between our bodies, my feet perched on his stool, his hand on my leg. The question on both of our lips what would happen after.

That evening propelled us into a year long catastrophe. I got high from even a second spent with him. He had a girlfriend. He made me laugh. He had a girlfriend. He told me I was one of the most amazing people he’d ever met. He had a girlfriend. The passion and chemistry was unlike anything I’d felt before. He had a girlfriend. He revealed secrets about his childhood to me that he had never told her. A win.

That’s the way my mind worked. I calculated all the moments gathered between us and fixated on which were mine. How much ownership I had over the details of his life that he had revealed to me and only me. I was haunted thinking of him going home to her. I became obsessed with imagining the two of them in day to day happenings, eating breakfast, doing laundry, having sex. I couldn’t imagine their sex was anything to close to ours but then again I couldn’t imagine their sex at all; he had alluded to a nearly sexless relationship. And yet I could, still. Some nights, I touched myself thinking of him fucking her. After I got off, an overwhelming feeling of loathing came over me.

The mind and its capacities are endless. I had very little control over my mind back then, nor do I think I wanted to. I let it slip often into the deep abyss of what ifs and agonization, swam myself into a tunnel of madness and curled up there, comforted by the thrill of not knowing.

Which is why we ended up fucking in bathrooms. When you have to hide a relationship… if I can call it that… you create ways to convince yourself that it’s intoxicating more than it is damaging. He bent me over the sinks of dirty bathrooms at the bars around the corner after work, where co-workers gathered just feet away on the other side of the door. In the room, called bora bora, used for private events at the restaurant, my skirt hiked up so that my apron and it became one bunchy mess around my hips. In the bathroom of my first apartment, the shower so small we had to wrap our arms around each other, where I was finally able to hold him the way that I wanted to, where I could burrow my face into the woodsy moss of his chest hair.

We cried together. I did things with him I had never done with a man before, and he let me do things to him that were buried somewhere deep within his psyche.

Dean is married now. He lives in California with a wife I know nothing about, a woman who is not the woman he was with for seven years, whose ghost I became well acquainted with. He seems happy, and well taken care of. I have not seen nor spoken with him in over five years. And Although I am well past feeling attached to him, I often wonder if his current wife knows the things he told me, or if somewhere along the way, he chose to delete certain events in order to cope. Perhaps there is a part of me that still believes those stories are mine. That if I could relish one thing from our time together, it’s the ownership of knowing intimate details of someone else’s history.

He will forever be the relationship that fucked me up for the longest period of time. He was my first significant New York story, and for that I am grateful. I did not expect to write about him today. But sometimes you sit down thinking of how you spent three minutes crying in a restaurant bathroom the night before, upon news that the person you are currently in love with is in your city and will leave the country the next day, taking with him the hopes and dreams that you had envisioned for your life together, and are pulled back to yourself five years prior, enmeshed in a story you thought had written itself an ending.

Somehow, in the midst of my chaotic emotions, I keep coming back to small enclosed spaces. Bathrooms, funnily enough. The place we create rituals, cleanse our bodies and release what’s holding us down. The precarious line to be or not to be crossed in a new relationship. Hot baths at three am with a partner who is too big to fit in the tub but does it anyway because it’s a moment. Shower sex. Having my hair washed by someone else, by him. Watching my future unfold before me in the way he holds soap- so that’s the way he washes himself. Brushes his teeth. Sees me completely as I am, in the light of day.

Wet eyelashes and the pale half moons of faded tan lines. Soap suds streaming down a mass of thigh muscle.

They were all mine once.

[emma-poole]

My roommate finally bought a toothbrush holder for the bathroom. Not that it was his responsibility. We’d been using small glass mason jars that would eventually accrue sticky residue at the bottom. What was initially a good idea, a noble attempt, even, turned into a sad aesthetic. But we kept doing it. Sometimes switching up the jar. Most times ignoring its gradual demise.

When the toothpaste ran low, we consulted our medicine cabinet for spare travel tubes. They sat idly on shelves or hidden away in forgotten zipper pouches nestled beside miniature bottles of shampoo and conditioner. And then the travel tubes ran out and we wondered which one of us would be the next to purchase new toothpaste.

The other night, after a particularly hard day, I came home to a sparkling clean bathroom. New hand towels, bath mat, shower curtain, the dim glow and aroma of a fresh candle. And alas, a brand new toothbrush holder. (With a separate slat for the toothpaste!)

My roommate is Puerto Rican, born and raised in New York City. He taught me the significance of Goya products and cultural appropriation, how to tell someone to fuck off and the success of fabric softener as air freshener. In addition to his brilliant mind, he has an affinity for succeeding at anything involving his hands. He grew up with a mother who ingrained an intense cleaning habit in him. He doesn’t do it all the time, but when he does, he goes IN. We let him clean the bathroom because he simply does a better job than anyone else. It’s the same for waffles, giant vats of homemade pasta, and hanging shelves. He rolls his eyes when I bang a hammer eight times into drywall that clearly cannot handle it, or hang a picture slightly crooked. He is my most beloved handyman and home goods guru.

So when I came home last night feeling like a centipede scrambling to use its legs in quickly draining water, the clean bathroom was a poignant act of love. An I got you. A quiet reminder that even when my psyche feels like shit, I can pee in peace.

Mundane tasks such as using the bathroom and taking a shower become small victories when you’ve just experienced a hurricane come in and out of your life. The type of catastrophe that leaves you searching for evidence that it actually existed at all. I blinked and it appeared. I blink and it is gone.

Getting dressed and putting on makeup turn into acts of bravery. I wear my masks comfortably, make self-deprecating comments in the right moments, call out his infantile behavior in others. He— and how do I explain the “he” I am still grasping to make sense of—is very much there. He hangs on my wall memorialized in snapshots, in the sneakers he convinced me to buy, the groceries in my fridge that taunt me with their colorful ripeness-corpses of future meals made together. He comes to me most vividly at night, when I pause to hear the steady whir of rain outside my window and look up at the ceiling wondering why he became the lesson and not the joy. Silence, it seems, is the loudest of all the sounds.

But sometimes residue builds without being seen. It’s like the glass of water on your nightstand you let sit overnight and wake up in the morning wondering if it’s still OK to drink. A barely there film discolors the liquid slightly. It doesn’t taste as good as you remembered.

If wholesome had a face it would be his. Dimples, watery blue eyes, the gait of a boy slightly unsure of himself. I loved him the first time I met him. Or I knew I could. It’s grainy now, the looking back. I see glimpses of the falling; a first late-night dinner on ninth avenue, discovering each other’s mannerisms and food choices. Candlelight and red wine. So much red wine. His hand under the table reaching across for my thigh. White sheets and bright afternoon light the first time we touched. The stranger who told us we looked like we were made for each other. The way he tried to say I love you by asking me, while driving, if it was weird that he felt he could fall in love with me. That maybe he already had.

The mind, like weather, the news, or hot water supply during a New York City winter, is precarious. It keeps taking me back to before the knowing. When he was just a face on a screen that lit up my insides. That same face, seen months before in my mind, that brought me to my knees one winter day in February when I curled up in bed, fingers typing anxiously in anticipation, at his sweet asides. He said things to me no man has ever said before. And though he is far from being grown up, he made me feel far more whole than anyone I’d been with prior to him. If I could go back now and do it all differently, would I? Would I protect myself from the impending pain just to save my heart and a little slice of my pride? Probably not. Because in the short albeit intense time we shared, I saw all the puzzle pieces of my life come to fruition. He was my vision and our future together was bright.

But now he is leaving and I am able, finally, to write about him. I recall three weeks ago, sitting down in this same spot, typing and re-typing the beginning of our story. I couldn’t find the words. I still don’t know where they exist fully, which is why I write about clean bathrooms, as though clinging on to what is tangible helps remind me of what really occurred. Because sometimes I think I will wake up and my knowing him will have been a dream. That the love we so openly poured into each other was only my imagination and its wild heart, like a child running for the first time through a giant field of flowers, unknowingly but with wild, primal abandon, tearing down what lies before her.

I close my eyes and sink my toes into the plush bath mat beneath my bare feet. It is cool, soft, home. There is goodness all around me. Joy to be seen and felt. My heart is a fist pumping in remembrance. I squeeze out toothpaste from the brand new tube. It sits on my toothbrush like a promise. The pink flowers I bought from Trader Joe’s are beginning to wilt. The water is turning brown. I put my nose to the vase, inhale gently. Beneath the slow rot is a faint reminder of sweetness, of what once was. He is here, and he is not. Gone, and still arriving.

[emma-poole]

Do you ever hold your breath until you can't hold it anymore? Close your eyes and think of me as a song? Do you smile at trees? Or cry at the tenderness of the wind? Are you capable of softness?

I imagine attaching myself like a leech to your insides. You kiss my neck in the same spot you squeezed with both hands, hard enough to surprise me, gentle enough that I let you. There is a recklessness inside you that reminds me of my father on the manic days. And yet you're warm like him. Soft and kind.

*

I remember bonfires and in-ground pools sprawled over manicured lawns. Screened-in porches laid out with bowls of chips and red cups. We lifted our legs into bathroom sinks to shave when the boys with long torsos invited us to their parent’s pools. Our bodies turned soft and round overnight, curves poking out of bathing suit bottoms, glimmering cleavage in shallow water. We topped sprite with vodka and made dressing rooms out of each other's closets. Our hair, flowing and healthy, was worn with the brash effervescence of invincibility. Being caught was thrilling as much as it was horrifying. We were told no and did it anyway.

As children, my cousins and I washed our hair in the salt water of Cape Cod Bay. Three days without a proper shower, the smell of beach and brine trailing behind our small figures. Summers by the sea, dirty knees and flip flops so thin from being worn far past their expiration date. Family dinners grilled on the deck, twenty sets of sunburned forearms reaching for salad dressing and more cheese please across the table. At nine years old, I fell asleep dreaming of homemade cookie dough ice cream up the block; at thirteen, secret beers and cigarettes smoked in bushes dotted with tiny red berries. I never inhaled properly, more amused by the glamour of the paper wand in my hand, the way my lips puckered around it. The day I finally let the smoke in, I vowed never to pick one up again.

My father smoked cigarettes every day until my mother begged him to stop before my sister was born. He did, for twenty-five years. As a little girl, my mom snuck into her dad’s cigarette case and broke them in half, determined to rid him of his habit. Will we ever stop trying to save our fathers? I wonder, as I watch my dad exhale smoke out the car window.

He hides the smell with incense and chewing gum now, asks me politely if he can use my roommate’s fire escape when he visits.

*

Time erases memories. Until you see a person you haven't seen in ten years who reminds you of your fifteen-year old self. It makes you want to run your hands through his thick hair, pull back his stubbly jaw and devour his mouth. Chest hair peaks out of a white tee shirt. He is no longer the skinny boy with a buzz cut and hemp necklace rolled with seashells, but a man with warm eyes and a mischievous spirit. When he kisses you against the Hudson River, the moon a perfect waxing crescent, your body reacts as if in remembrance. You feel the slick in your underwear, the way your skin blushes after two cocktails and the soft breeze of summer wind.

Days pass, then weeks. You watch him methodically chop vegetables in his kitchen, help pick out lighting fixtures that will delight his son. He as a father makes you think of your own. Love of cooking. Addictive personality. Life of the party. He takes your hand while pointing at New York city's architecture. Isn't that amazing? He says, head cocked. You can't put your finger on the doubt that appears suddenly. Perhaps it's the feeling of being with someone who takes up too much space, absorbed so deeply into his life that you question if there is room for your own. He hits your face during sex. It is harmless, motivated by desire, but you can't shake the muted voice inside your head echoing slowly, deliberately, be careful.

When he starts to slip away, you set him free without questioning why people's actions so often contradict their spoken word. The romanticism of your shared history fades as you realize behind the precocious and charming man, there is a wild and deeply unsure boy. You hug him goodbye, allow yourself to be disarmed by his smile, the way he appears suddenly nostalgic as you leave him.

*

Do you find comfort in solitude or does the absence of another grate like a shrilling siren inside your head? Can you remember my middle name without being prompted? Do you believe in past lives? When is the last time you cried? Do you find it strange that I'm asking you these things?

*

The smell of cigarette smoke lingers on the steps of my apartment building. I think about my father in his twenties- specifically, an image of him at a party, standing next to a buddy. His arm is slung casually around his friend’s shoulder, balancing a plastic blue cup and cigarette in the same hand. He is smiling with his mouth open, adam’s apple buoyant in throat. His eyes, deep brown and ominous, seemingly peer through the camera as if slightly elsewhere.  

I think of all the ways we judge people without really knowing them. How I see a younger version of my dad in that image, happy and handsome, and I want to know him. I wish I could dive into the photograph and ask him what he dreams about, where he sees himself in ten years, and what is currently delighting him. Did you know you’ll pass your eyes to your daughter? Isn’t that magnificent?! I’d whisper, laughing. And you’ll have not one, but two! He’d shake his head in disbelief, write me off as a tipsy broad prophesizing his future. I'd lean in close and whisper I forgive you, in hopes of freeing him from all the future burdens he will keep embedded in his mind.

*

When all the others are gone, it is you I come back to. I see you only in the late hours, when my resistance softens. You're in my stomach. A swell at the pit of my lower belly. I always feel you in my body first. You, with the same name as my Father. You who live with your mothers. Who sometimes call me at strange hours and in whose voices I recognize a longing in myself. I have spent whole nights replaying your voicemails in the hushed dark of my room. I have watched you love me from afar, missing me in the passing of time and the conjuring of a memory.

But now I do not know which you I speak of, and that both confuses and emboldens me. How is it so easy to lose track of what caused something? My memories are watercolor paintings with no clear edges; I can’t seem to place where one ends and the other begins.

*

In the backseat of my cousin’s car, speeding down a windy Cape Cod highway at night, I think about my life: How staggering it is to exist. How every single moment has brought me to this one right now.

I close my eyes and breathe in the salty air. Imagine myself as the song playing from the car speaker. Fleeting, beautiful. Gone just as soon as it appeared.