We had a housewarming party last night; a grand success given that Dan and I have put done no roots in this town as of yet. We half-filled our gorgeous apartment with decent people, liberally saturated with booze and food and loud music, and everything was cool. There was conversation and jest and sociopolicial debating, all the ingredients for a swirling cocktail salon scene sometime when we have a couple more connections. I got to talk art-school with some of Molly's student friends, which was refreshing but also made me feel a little old; a few years further out at least. In spite of the fact that there was no one there for me to romance, it was a damn good time. A sizling proof of concept at the very least.
That stuff makes me feel, makes me feel, feel, feel, feel, happy.
Day by day it gets a little easier, the new life. I miss rain and riding on misty mornings past McCarren park on my way to the bridge. I've hit that little stretch of Driggs maybe a couple hundred times over the past two years, and there's no pleasure like spreading your arms like wings and coasting under trees past green grass on either side in the middle of Brooklyn; that beautiful old orthodox church dome ahead on your left, the Empire State Building rising across the river on your right.
In weak moments, whistful or lovesick or something, I replay scenareos, how this or that might have been different. I remember being a teenager and in New England and the rightness of that, and how I kind of crapped all over it; made proud juvinile moves like I thought an adult would. Takes a while to learn these things. I playback the summer's timeline, wondering where I would be if I hadn't had a ticket to California. Pretty much where I am now, I suppose, but the possibilities tickle.
But hindsight is just a story, and usually a convienent one at that. You don't like being alone now. It's highly unlikely that a real solution to that problem lies anywhere in your past, as comforting as that might be to imagine. Better off roaming the streets looking for some bike-riding apparition to pounce upon than mining your past for nuggets of now-bittersweet memory. Chase too many veins of illusion and you might just get in too deep, suffer from a cave in or loose sight of the canary in the shaft, suffocate for lack of emotional oxygen.
The future is out there, and it probably involves a lot of people and places I've never seen before. That's a kind of comfort too, but rather of a cold variety on an unspoken Sunday night in California.
