M Train

Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.

How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond.

In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.

I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.

Not all dreams need to be realized.

I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

Just come back, I was thinking. You've been gone long enough. Just come back. I will stop traveling; I will wash your clothes.

All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.

Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.

Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can't draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.

I’m off balance, not sure what’s wrong. —You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. —How do I find it again? —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.

[W]ithout a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.

Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.

-What is nothing? I impetuously asked. -It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.

It’s not so easy writing about nothing.

My great quandary was what coat to wear and which books to bring.

We sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

We seek to stay present, even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away.

If I got lost along the way I had a compass that I had found embedded in a pile of wet leaves I was kicking my way through. The compass was old and rusted but it still worked, connecting the earth and stars. It told me where I was standing and which way was west but not where I was going and nothing of my worth.

Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden... In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture.

The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

We want thing we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment , sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

What do we do with those that can be accessed and dismissed by a channel changer, that we love no less than a nineteenth-century poet or an admired stranger or a character from the pen of Emily Brontë? What do we do when one of them commingles with our own sense of self, only to be transferred into a finite space within an on-demand portal?

I crossed over to Broadway and walked north to Twenty-fifth Street to the Serbian Orthadox Cathedral dedicated to Saint Seva, the patron saint of the Serbs, I stopped, as I had many times before, to visit the bust of Nikola Tesla, the patron saint of alternating current, placed outside the church like a lone sentinel. I stood as a Con Edison truck parked within eyeshot. No respect, I thought. -And you think you have problems, he said to me. -Oh, I'm just having trouble writing. I move back and forth between lethargy and agitation, -A pity. Perhaps you should step inside and light a candle to Saint Seva. He calms the sea for ships, -yeah, maybe. I'm off balance, not sure what's wrong. -You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy we are as dead, -How do I find it again? -Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection. -Thank you, Mr. Tesla. Is there something I can do for you? -Yes, he said, could you move a bit to the left? You're standing in my light.

I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.

—You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. —How do I find it again? —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.