Today it is 62 degrees, and I am sitting in my apartment with the window open. Outside the birds are speaking in their babylon of tongues. A lazy breeze moves through the pine trees, and their needles reflect the sun. Shrill echoes of children's voices ricochet off the highrise walls.

There is something divine in having your window open on a beautiful day, something that I'd forgotten during the long winter months. I'm not sure how to explain it properly. All I know is the clock ticking inside my apartment keeps time consistently, but everything outside brings time to life for me.

On this day, one year ago, I met up with a pretty girl in Manhattan. The place we had chosen for brunch wouldn't tell me if I was allergic to their food, so instead we went to a nearby 50's diner that, we later deduced, transforms into a gay bar at night. After brunch, the day went by quickly. We spent a few hours in the Natural History Museum, and prayed the afternoon prayer in Central Park. It was cold and she lent me her scarf. We got on a train to Brooklyn to grab some Bangladeshi food on Church Ave. Worried that I was entering the friend zone, I tried desperately to flirt.

"Oh, where did you get this watch?" (sweatily reaches over and touches her wrist).
"Is that black nail polish?" (sweatily reaches over and touches her fingers).
"Uhm, no! It's eggplant. Who wears black nail polish?!"

Sensing that my flirting was not going quite the way I wanted, I decided to just flat out tell her later, and when I did, it came out like this:

"Uhm... so... this may be obvious... but.... I really like you. A lot. ...you don't have to say anything right now... we can just be friends for now if you want... I mean, just don't feel pressured to say anything..."

I remember she was looking away from me and was smiling at something in the distance, or maybe at nothing at all. "I'm really glad you told me that," she said. "... and I like you too."

--Jan 5th, 2014

There are so many things that can go wrong in a person's life through no fault of their own---consequences of history, geography, birth, family situations, sudden deaths, wars, disease, ordinary decisions that lead to pitholes that everyone knows and that are no less dark for being ordinary. 

I guess I'm just saying, I have had a few conversations with friends that have been a reality check. "We should be people of empathy and decency, we should be grateful for what we have, and we should give from what we have to take care of those who might need it when we can" (?). I'm fumbling for the words to make sense of it all, but I guess that that's a start.

Just some random thoughts.

When they came back, the door to the bathroom wouldn't stay closed. The metal tongue of the latch made a satisfying click whenever they pushed the door snug against its frame, but when they let go, without fail, by some unseen mechanism, the metal latch slipped out of its pocket and the door swung open. They studied the problem, hoping to repair it, but no obvious solution presented itself. So they took their showers and used the toilet with the door ajar, and all the sounds and smells that are supposed to be restricted to the bathroom wafted freely into the living room and the bedroom, which was naturally more of an embarrassment to the person inside the bathroom than to the person hearing and smelling it outside. All of this because of some subtle change that they could not detect. Perhaps the settling of the door on its hinges, the slouching of a door jamb under gravity, or the warping of the frame over time with the inevitable contractions and expansions that a building undergoes from night to day or summer to winter. Their apartment had been changed by some minute and ordinary force, and though their two weeks away made the difference seem abrupt to them, in all likelihood it had been quietly at work all along.

"You only get so much time, and what you do, you want to spend it with someone you love. Otherwise what is life for but that?" 
--Pau pau (my grandma)

Happy Valentines Day

For many of us, these are times of weddings and newborn babes. All of a sudden, we are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, homeowners and caregivers. How absurd to think that just a few years ago we were babies ourselves. Forgotten are the tortured souls of teenagers, the jubilant self-discovery of college years, the existential crises and excitement of not knowing what shape life after college would take.

Stranger still to think that in a few short years, we will begin to know what death is like. I wonder how our perspectives will change when the time comes for our parents and friends, our husbands and wives, when we feel it begin to creep up on ourselves. What will we see from those tall heights before the final mountain pass, when we look out over the lands we once walked through the dusty haze of our late afternoon light, when all our pride and pettiness are stripped from us, and the backs of our shoulders feel the cold touch of shadows from the pass...

I hope we will look back, and see that we did something good with our lives. I'm not sure what better thing there is to hope for in this world.

Someday each of us will come to the place of high promontories before the final mountain pass where shadows obscure the way ahead. Those of us with presence of mind may choose to halt there and take stock of everything we have done--all our choices, experiences, failures and accomplishments will be laid out on the land below and seen in the slanting, dusted light of the late afternoon. What we will see is that everything bad has been mixed with something good, however small, and everything good has been mixed with something bad. We will see our foolishness, our pain, our pettiness as they walked beside us throughout our lives, but on our opposite hand was purpose, and love and soulfulness, which is larger even than life. We will view the map of our lives from such a distance that we can finally accept the whole beautiful, jumbled mess at once, as if the paths we went had been something preordained from the very beginning, and to have known life at all, at every single moment, was to have perfected the human art of imperfection.

Once we bow our heads, and turn our clouding vision away from the landscape below, we will wend our way up through the final mountain pass, and enter into the shadows on the fringes of this world where the making and unmaking of life occurs. I would like to think that for a moment we will hear a concord of infant voices crying out as they pass us heading in the opposite direction. And before we fade into the final dark, we will whisper our blessings on these little human beings whose entire lives stretch before them without limit or constraint, and whose identities are still so shapeless and unformed that they are nothing more or less than the infinite promise of a newborn life.

Oct 11, 2012