Cracking it open

Now that you're in the home stretch, you imagine walking around DUMBO, holding a torch of burning sage, or beating the buildings and the cobblestones with a venik, a whisk of dried oak or birch branches like in the Russian baths, to a brassy soundtrack of the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, the wedding and funeral mix of Goran Bregovic.

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There was something romantic about being open on Jay Street, open past dark, a safe harbor, once someone got locked out of their apartment without their phone and came to us to make a call, people came to us with questions and problems, and Ilya solved for x again and again, or helped them figure out what x even was.

There was also something absolutely and utterly exhausting and consuming about it, it was obliterative, determined to snuff you out no matter how much you asserted yourself, no matter how many days you put the book you were reading on the counter as a way to start conversations, and also just remind you who you were, not just "the girl in the bike shop," but a reader, a writer, a thinking person.

And in the meantime: evening rush, people buying helmets, lights, locks, de-packaging them right there on the spot, leaving you with the cardboard and the shrink wrap and the zip ties and the plastic that you then tried to sort so you wouldn't just send it all to landfill.

You broke down boxes whenever you had a lull, fifteen seconds, a minute, if you had a minute you might go to the bathroom.

You didn't trust yourself with a knife, you used scissors or your hands, you tore boxes apart like an animal, you nearly used your teeth.

On Friday nights the boys carried out a single frame box or bike box containing all the cardboard from the week, and when it landed on the curb with a thud you thought of a body, a shop of boys, and up front two women trying to keep order, until one of them took her own life, and you never processed this loss, you just found another woman with a similar old-world energy and you taught her everything you knew, weighing pennies, nickels, and dimes instead of counting them, and worked together, every day confronted by some box or bin labeled in the handwriting of the now departed.

And years later in job interviews you would almost mention the departed, but at the last second bite your tongue, don't say it, this is not the time or place.

NEWSY STUFF

I am so jazzed for the A Public Space writing retreat at Kaatsbaan in just two weeks! I'll be taking a workshop with Jo Ann Beard (!!) and I'm looking forward to conversations with other writers and also some quiet time on the page, or in the fields if the weather is good. (Please, weather, be good!)

Divinity School • a letter every Sunday at sunset • if you’re always looking, after some time you’ll have seen