This morning I woke up and took a picture of the bridge, where three birds were flying away.
I walked to the subway and noted how warm the sun felt in comparison to the past few weeks.
At lunch I walked around the block a few times. The Empire State Building gleamed in the perfectly blue sky.
I admired what I felt certain was the longest spiral staircase in the world in the form of a fire escape.
I stared for a while at an empty lot and tried to imagine what was there before it was demolished, and what was there before that (and what will come next).
The city, it seems, is filled with passageways that lead nowhere and everywhere at once; it is a series of labyrinths stacked one on top of the other, all of them constantly mutating and changing. This is the part of the city that fascinates me most, the part that exists outside of any maps, the part that seems to arise from our imagination (or sometimes, our nightmares).
I passed a mannequin with an oddly small head. I wondered what life must look like through her eyes, and where she has lived (and where she will go).
I took a picture of myself in the fractured glass as the city flowed ambivalently past.
I ran into my friend J_____, who modeled her faux-raccoon coat, which she was wearing over a leopard-print dress. We agreed that a walk at lunch was sometimes the best part of the day, a means to clear your head from the pressure of the recent past and the impending future, which looms with untenable deadlines and promises.
After work, I met with my editor, who delivered her final edit of my novel to me. The book, she said, is scheduled to publish in September, and the wheels of production and marketing have already been set into motion. It felt strange to think that something about which I have dreamed for so long might be coming true, that words which have been swimming around in my head for years and in some cases decades are actually going to be available in the form of a book, that magical bundle of paper and ink that perhaps more than anything else has taken me to the places I admire most, which is to say removed me from the cruelty and tedium of so much of the present.
I arrived home to find an e-mail message from a friend, not someone I’ve ever met in ‘real life,’ but someone with whom I’ve shared a correspondence thanks to a mutual interest in writing; she told me that her house had burned to the ground while she and her husband were at work and that her three dogs had been killed in the fire. What could I say except to express my sorrow and incomprehension of the amount of pain life can deliver? I remembered the three birds I had seen this morning and for a second felt sure they represented the souls of those who are loved, en route to a better place.
