Be the Comet

New York is the song I’ll never know the words to but I sing it anyway. I’d cross every avenue just to feel it call me in. To be under its wing and suddenly real. Standing between the buildings like ladders reaching for the sun. Let me make a run for it. Past the psychics with their everlasting, neon, outstretched palms and their promises of love and reunions. Through the grid-locked swarm and the choir of car alarms and hummingbirds. Shoulder to shoulder in the subway car, we are swinging in the yellow-white light. Young and breathless and spinning off our axis. Wrangling a dream to the ground, reckoning with its charms, and this cannot be helped. Like the others, I fall for the town and the town carries me. Down by the river, over the highway, waiting for the sky to flash.

Send the spectacle in my direction. I need it. The entire city—a man-made milky way—to throw its arms around me. Me, the small animal abandoning my grief in the daytime and returning to it at night. Lighting candles in your name; waiting for you to walk to me from wherever you are; to whistle down that long great hall. Standing at the crosswalks, holding out for the sound that never comes. Spent that first American summer—all blue—clinging to life the way loss renders you to. Watching orange wings, the butterflies that find me, convincing myself it must be you. When you were younger than I was now you left everything you knew and rode into the face of the wave. Like you, I must turn towards mine.

All the perfect strangers try to herald me in. They grab my arm on the street; hold my hand like they can see it. “You must be further than you’ve ever been from home”, said the old woman with magenta silk floating off her shoulders. “I just had to tell you…vulnerable, but such a strength”, said the woman with long grey ringlets and hands like a pianist. Taxi drivers pick up on my voice and we act out the movie dialogue. “It’s a crazy city, you know that right?”, he said. “Uh-huh”, I said. And I know the next step is to wind down the window and stick my head out of it like a maniac, but instead I sink into the seat and squint my eyes at the streetlamps and turn them into stars. “I remember it all”, he said like a half pinky-swear, “that’s our problem… I can tell”.

I want to believe you. I remember. I do. But one day I’ll forget. Before I do, let me remember it all again. I cast my shadow across every street I don’t know. I play astronaut on the floors of skyscrapers. I tip my head backwards, skywards, in the park that goes on for miles. Bumblebees the size of my thumbnail. Taxis roaming the streets like lions. The news crashing down and the kids pressing their hands into the wet concrete. Hydrangeas, rosary beads, and fast food wrappers. Roy Orbison singing to the lonely over the speakers in the supermarket. Bart Simpson with a brain freeze hanging on the wall. The girl on the train wearing a shirt that said “SUMMER OF LOVE” in the middle of winter. I guess we’re all trying to flick that switch. One shock of love: that zoom-in.

I have never felt smaller. My emotional arithmetic has never felt larger. My heart is the amphitheatre. And every night the show begins. Walking in the gloaming until I’m flying until I’m free. Mid-transformation, in the backseat like the belly of a whale. Only the sky and the city knows where I go. Looking for one golden hour on earth where it all floods in. I would like to get so close to this town, to this world, it becomes me. I’m a skyscraper. I’m the man in the pick-up truck howling to the radio. I’m the last light. The blue-dark nights. The actor rehearsing her lines. The kid sequining everything that scares them. The comet that sprints above this world every 400 years. I am the understudy for the woman who now happens to be me. I am all smoke, all rivers, all waves.

This is a city you cannot outrun. It is new and ancient, and it will wait. Beneath the steam pluming from the streets, the trees talking back and forth, and the seasons slipping into each other—it is waiting. One day it will catch up with you, take up residence in your chest, and show you who you are. New York: that talisman of reinvention. The multitude of love. The stomping ground for every mirage—all the play-pretend—that goes real. It is a cathedral of tangents and detours, rumours and intuitions. A forest of rock, steel, and glass. A magnetic field of memory—some yours, some mine, some borrowed. New York is the song. It is the song with secret notes. I will never know the words. But I sing it anyway.