Slow down
Every day you come and go between two worlds.
You start in a house, low to the ground, its roof pulled tight around it like a hat. A house with a garden, and in that garden, a cherry blossom tree, and every time a cardinal alights, and every time a cardinal takes off, a few more leaves drop to the ground. The blue jays announce themselves before dropping down to drink from the upturned garbage can.
You take a train that crawls more than it barrels, this train crosses the Meadowlands, the stadium and the wetlands, the Hackensack River. You transfer at Hoboken – itself a body of water, where the fish are glued to their phones and do not move in any kind of concert – to another train, that gets you across the Hudson.
You emerge in a collage of a place, where the trees have no chance against the buildings that grow, subsidized and assisted, ever upward. Where steam escapes from below the streets, people sleep, bundled in whatever they could find.
What kind of sleep is this?
("the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it,"
– Robert Creeley)
And back again at night. Can you tell what stop we're at, in the dark? Do you avoid the train with the conductor who sings the stops, or do you seek it out?
On the neighborhood group chat, women trade shoes, their own and their children's, the baby names repeat, the deer mate.
Weeks after the town repaved the road, you are still waiting for them to paint the crosswalk. They painted the double-yellow, though, the drivers didn't have to plead for that. You write a letter to the church on Bellevue, asking them to arrange their sign to say, "Slow down for children and animals," instead of something about prayer.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
I got a job! I work in the city! I started June 1, but/and I feel like I've always been there. ("Among my many functions, I am also a clock," says Lady Demerzel in "Foundation," and that's all I will say about my role for now. Laura Birn is brilliant in this role, watch the show if only for her!)
The bike shop has been disassembled, Ilya is on open-ended sabbatical, in recovery from entrepreneurship. He is building a garden shed from scratch. For the exterior walls, we chose "Salty Dog," a kind of navy blue, the night of the election. ("Imagine if we'd chosen red," said Ilya.)
Divinity School • a letter every Sunday at sunset • if you’re always looking, after some time you’ll have seen
