monday, september 17

when I was eight years old we had just moved from upstate farm country to the albany area. at our spring recital, my tap class danced to new york, new york. (funny, the last time I mentioned that, it was the fourth of july.) after our first rehearsal, I told my teacher, "I'm from new york." no rabi, she said, the song is about new york city. I looked at her for a minute, and then I said, "I know. I'm from new york city."

yes. see you tomorrow.
22:54 ++1

the baby is ten months old with soft round cheeks and olive-colored eyes and a tangle of curly brown hair. she's wearing a yellow jumpsuit printed with pink giraffes that are barely visible inside the dark green snugli that holds her cradled against you, and she's just had lots of milk to eat and now she's blinking sleepily at you from behind the tiniest slips of eyelashes. you offer her your pinkie and she grabs it, but her grip is so feather-gentle that it feels more like a butterfly alighting than like a fist closing. you look down at her and brush the hair away from her forehead and she smiles an angel-pink baby smile, because she trusts you.

you think to her, you will never remember the day new york fell down, the day the world tried to end. september eleventh will be just a history textbook date to you, one of the ones in the very last chapter that y ou never even read anyway, and this will all be just mythology and memorials and she smiles again and leans her head against your heartbeat. you feel it and you know your heart is mending, beating on in quiet persistence.
19:18 ++6

sunday, september 16

somewhere out there, they can't see this, and that makes me a little bit happier.
17:16 ++1

I got up early this morning and walked around the gardens, because everyone always says how silly it is that we live on this beautifully tended arboretum but we're always too busy working to stop and appreciate it. I say I appreciate it whether I bother to stop or not, but if all this were gone tomorrow I would definitely wish I had stopped more often.

I wish a lot of things.

the flowers in the rose garden are wilting, with droopy petals and brittle leaves, but they still smell amazing, like puppylove. everything is beautiful but all this intentional beauty makes me feel trapped and superficial. I keep thinking and thinking, and maybe I will go after all.

maybe.
17:09 ++

I smell like chinese food, cold night air, trains, and a little bit like peter even though the only time I actually touched him was to prove how small my hands are. it's funny how you can remember a backwards story in nothing but incidental smells, though of course you miss things that way like how I kept looking at flags in high-up windows and how the fish had no room for swimming in their tanks and how I didn't cry when the man in thirtieth street station started talking about the necessity of killing evil and how I imagined the whole building would fall down if the statue actually did start to fly.

I know that philadelphia and I will never really belong to one another, but today I was more aware than usual of how I had to turn my back on the cityglow and walk in the opposite direction up the hill to get home.
01:39 ++2