Even when I’m startled by an object flying in my periphery. Dust. Refracted light. Anxiety’s UFOs. Or when a GASP! is disproportionate to why I’ve gasped, my heart continues, as ever, pulsing toward its daily quota. More than one hundred thousand times a day. Eighty beats per minute.
Even when I stand naked in my room after a long day of stupid letdowns, when I consider becoming a woman who screams or hacks off her hair, or tosses her purse instead of hanging it. Even then, when nakedness can’t undo the day, when my heart is lodged in my throat and my whole body falls limp—my whole body like my left wrist when I fasten my watch with my right hand. Limp like that. Even then, when I feel completely poured out and defeated. A Dyson in the desert.
Or what about the day MCA died. My heart seemed to chasm because the Beastie Boys were—I’m not sure how best to say this—one of many attributes, albeit a critical one, that firmly positioned me as a younger sister. They were the music my brother listened to with his door closed. The CD he wouldn’t let me borrow. Still now, on those hot summer days when the sun lacquers Manhattan storefronts into something aureate and amber-rich, when the air is impenetrable, blistered, and rank, and when brick tenements on Ludlow evoke whatever decade speaks to your nostalgia, my brother’s copy of Paul’s Boutique comes to mind. What I perceived back then in its cover art was the possibility of New York, New York: a city so in possession of itself that I fathomed an entire kingdom in those five-by-five inches.
Even that winter long ago, when I was running late to a holiday dinner at my friend’s apartment, clueless as to where I’d jotted down her new address but feeling somehow lovely because I was in a hurry, wearing tights that cinched my waist like a secret tension under my shift dress, and bell sleeves that gave me extra wingspan to sail around the corner. Mid-scramble, my then-boyfriend rattled off my friend’s street name from memory, without even looking up from his book, as if he’d been to her place before. Even then, despite the wrench of good instinct—that queasy wave of it—of learning young that having a hunch is, like so many female facets, both misery and boon. Even when I said nothing because Why start something? he’d say. Is there anything less clear than an accusation made when you’re running out the door? When those fault lines inside of us quake on account of all that is built up and unkempt between two people in love—on account of perceptiveness and wariness resembling in tone. Even then, when I felt tremendously sad in my lovely dress, my heart did not stop.
Even when I’m caught off guard by a lathery shade of peach on the bottom corner of a painting at the Met, as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors, and how there’s more to see, and how one color’s newness can invalidate all of my sureness. To experience infinity and sometimes too the teasing melancholy born from the smallest breakthroughs, like an unanticipated shade of peach, like Buster Keaton smiling, or my friend Doreen’s laugh—how living and opposite of halfhearted it is. Or my beautiful mother growing out her gray, or a lightning bolt’s fractal scarring on a human body, or Fantin-Latour’s hollyhocks, or the sound of someone practicing an instrument—the most sonically earnest sound. Or how staring at ocean water so blue, it leaves me bereft. In postcards, I’ll scribble “So blue!” because, what else?
Or even when I hear a recording of Frank O’Hara recite “Having a Coke with You,” gleefully anticipating him saying yoghurt, saying flu-o-rescent orange tulips.
I listen
to him and I would rather listen to him than all the poets in the world
except possibly for Dorothy Parker occasionally and anyway she’d hate that
Or the first time I saw Jackie cry. It was December. She was moving to San Francisco, so we spent the day strolling around midtown, stopping at the Rockefeller tree and pointing up at its peak, curious as to how it stood so big. Wondering how trees are made to look immovable once they’ve already been displaced. In Bryant Park we talked about manatees because I’d recently seen an ad in a magazine to adopt one. “For the Holidays,” the ad proposed. “Nature’s Precious Treasures.” Jackie and I both agreed how naturally forlorn manatees look—like underwater shar-peis stuck in some forever torpor. Like they’d already surrendered themselves to their endangered fate. For half a block we pondered adopting one and sharing custody, because when friends move away, what else is there to talk about? Nothing material feels very good. I walked Jackie back to her studio in Woodstock Tower and watched her pack some boxes and determine whether she should leave behind a lamp. I considered taking a pair of purple three-pound weights she was getting rid of. Would I use them? Probably not. But they were purple. And talking about taking them was yet another way of not talking about Jackie leaving. I teased her for deciding to schlep a rusty step stool across the country. She insisted it held sentimental value. It was clear to us we were both in slow motion, appreciating the other person for little reasons, refusing to say goodbye, formally. When I finally did leave, in haste, I realized I’d forgotten my earphones on her bed, and when I hurried back from the elevator and knocked on her apartment door, Jackie answered in tears. Together, in that moment, we could have probably adopted a hundred manatees. Easy.
I’ve felt infinity too, late in my twenties, when I discovered a word in English I’d only ever known in Bengali. Or when I spot, with hours still left in the day, the moon’s hazy thumbprint. How the moon enjoys debunking the day. Or when I clutch my Playbill as I exit the theater, regretful that I don’t see more plays. I’m so vitalized in those seconds—all set to gulp more, to not speak but to stand under the marquee bulbs and grab the arm of my companion as if corroborating impact—that I’m certain, if I wanted, I could walk home from West Forty-seventh, across the bridge and back to Brooklyn. That spiked measure of awe—of oof—feels like a general slowing, even though what’s really taking place is nothing short of a general quickening. The sheer, ensorcelled panic of feeling moved. Infirmed by what switches me on but also awake and unexpectedly cured. Similar to how sniffing a lemon when I’m carsick heals.