The Apartment- 112th and Amsterdam

 

1. It was the season of my life in which my mind did things my body found appalling. Or maybe it was vice versa.

2. That seemed to be the wound of my 21 years. 

3. It was a summer of willing myself into loving things I’d usually loathe, since I had just learned I could tell myself I could do anything and be happy.

4. And I could believe it. Or at least believe I believed in it.

5. I lived between two stops on the Six train. I was Green, like all the other things running on the IRT Lexington Avenue lines.

6. Two of my teeth had been pushed out of place, meaning that I bit my tongue more often than I should’ve.

7. Perhaps this is a biological response to the confines of braces years ago. This supposition is the most logical. Somehow in shifting back to their old positions my teeth were caught in a position of self-harm.

8. I was tired of surprising myself and worrying about canker sores.  Mostly I was tired of being overly conscientious about the resting position of my tongue. How it would sometimes dangerously perch itself in between my teeth at rest. 

9. While less logical, I think the only real reason it happened so often is because I thought of it so often like noticing a phrase or word or a name all the time in unusual places where they never were until you heard about it for the first time. And everything I noticed spoke back to the surprises that existed in my own body, as if it were betraying me.

10. It’s a phenomenon that I had ironically forgotten the name of.

11. After a google search I find it’s called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Named after an urban German guerilla group. The syndrome was colloquially named such in favor of more technical terms like frequency illusion. It was named this because someone heard of the group and then kept seeing it everywhere without seeking it out. Somehow, they kept hearing about the obscure group.

12. That’s not entirely dissimilar to seeing him again after some months. Let me be clear: I never liked him as much as you thought I did. I cried because I finally realized I was losing the ability to zig zag on trains between lovers’ apartments, work, bars, and my own bed. Losing here.

13. I liked existing between the subway stops of reliable ways to get fucked. At least for once I wasn’t in the driver’s seat.

14. But in seeing him now I think I’ve liked him for the first time, and maybe always did, despite not really caring about what happens to us at all. I am just overly aware of that summer. The place that summer sits in my mind, in my mouth, in the back of my throat. What really should occupy my mind is why that summer even began. When did I chose being a banker over what. Being a poet? Claimed convictions often mismatched my commitments.

15. There were many times I took bathroom breaks at the bank to have random fits of vomiting.

16. (i.e the body appalled at the mind)

17. I let him fuck me even though it hurt.  I remember what it was like to have him inside me but be outside myself. But I don’t see him. I just see my blinking eyes, eyelids heavy. Ass high. Like on a silver platter.

18. This was my first out of body experience. (Certainly not the kind of mind blowing experience I had hoped to get from sex).

19. (i.e. the mind appalled at the body)

20. But at least I offered it up myself. 

21. It was in that moment I learned that pride and shame are at a confluence, not on opposites.

22. After he and I had sex for the first time I told him about the time I was assaulted.  While I was telling him, I was laughing. And I didn’t stop which usually is a sign of one being uncomfortable. Not for me. It was true, because I thought my therapist would be proud I could call something by its name.

 

Morningside Heights

 

 23. From the farmlands I dreamt of cities. I studied them from afar in the only way I knew how: reading. The equivalent of the Bible for true American urbanites is The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

24. Unfortunately, I can’t stand to be home for longer than a few days. The silence and solitude and inaction doesn’t feel like a purposeful retreat. I miss the onslaught. I suppose this is what one calls loneliness.

25. Jacobs, for her part, found no sense of home in Morningside Heights in 1961. Jane Jacob’s New York City wanted no part in this, “area of city failure” this, “surly slum.”

26. Nearly sixty years later the neighborhood has some 60,000 residents who officially live within its blocks according to the census. But I only thought of it in relation to Jacob’s warnings and the place listed on the return address to yet another college rejection that still made me feel like an imposter in my own skin.

27. Until reading about the real Morningside Heights, the Morningside Heights enclosed within the book Sakura Park by Rachel Wetzsteon. It was the gleam of beauty seen through other’s eyes that make us love a place.

28. The first time I went there was somewhat by accident, or perhaps the correct word would be incident. It was the third date with him. That man. I told my best friend was the worst first date. He, both devastatingly handsome and dull, not for lack of intellect but passion.

29. On our first date he spoke Spanish to our waitress because we went to a tapas restaurant. He insisted that it was in my best interests not to catch feelings for him. So, I showed him the messages I was sending to another man about how I’d much rather be with him than this shitty date. Then I brought him back to my apartment to hook up and promptly shooed him out.

30. The third date would be the first time to go back to his home, his neighborhood. Was it his? And was date the right word to claim it as? I called it what I wanted to. I didn’t care if he would disagree. Those memories are mine.

31. How long does it take for us to call something ours? Can we call it ours if we never truly had roots in it? Is it ours if it belongs to us or us to it?

32. I am just beginning to question why I became attached to it. Why do I keep feeling to go back when it has never existed fully for me? And the difference between space and place.

33. As in, as said in A Companion to Social Archaeology, Space: the setting. Place: the process of valuing a place, a product of imagination, of desire.

34. Jacob’s book on the other hand would consider Morningside Heights more of a place through the process of devaluing it. Which is another way in which a place can take form, from that empty vacuum.

35. In his many delineations, Aristotle would arrive to the idea that place was “the first immobile limit of the surrounding body.” In his mind, movement from a place proved the place’s existence by way of displacement.

36. Only after leaving it, and him, did I realize I might’ve actually lost something.

37 .Displacement Aristotle would say is followed by replacement.

38. But some things are only true in the metaphysical. And how can we really prove those things anyways. Better to just theorize. To keep writing it out.

39. I wonder if I am more in love with loving than I am with people. I know all at once that this is profane, and childish, but isn’t it also a bit wondrous? It’s the latter qualifier that allows me to continue to make the same mistake of overcommitting. I am working on my own passivity, which of course seems inherently oxymoronic. My therapist calls that mindfulness.

40. I want to act towards him like the topless French woman we sat by on the beach, who while reading her magazine would not know whether her child was still tracing his fingers into the sand or beyond the point of no return in the ocean. I want to sit in that moment of no acknowledgment, comfortable with the idea of being adrift. I want to be entirely ignorant of him.

41. (Now that I’ve referenced him he’ll only read that I mentioned him and love in the same grouping.)

42. In regard to privilege, Thurgood Marshall would write that no one gets to a place on their own.

43. As to why Marshall ended up in Morningside Heights, he moved here as a result of someone else: his wife. They moved into an apartment building that allowed for interracial couples.

44. I came here for someone too, even if I thought for just a night.

 

Artopolis Espresso

 

45. That sleepy, summer midday haze makes itself slick over us both as we walk the few blocks down to his neighborhood coffee shop in silence. The kind of place everyone seems to have in the city I project out of my mind, where there is a one to one ratio of person to the bodega where they order their bacon egg and cheese, black coffee with three sugars.

46. Once when I lived abroad I made friends with the woman who took my order at the salad place near my work. Really, I mean that she remembered me, and I always took a little time to chat with her about her day since I knew no one here. In my head she is only ever sunlit. It’s remarkable really, my romanticizations of small talk. A very Midwestern by-product.

47. He guides me toward the cashier with the hand on the small of my back, bracing. My head curls like a fern, bending on his shoulders. The cashier’s familiarity with him made me all the more familiar. He orders for me. It’s not what I would get, but the gesture makes me feel like he thinks he knows me.

48. We wait, leaning up against the curved plastic bubble of the pastry cooler, its track lighting refracting against perfectly smooth cheesecakes. Some were topped with strawberries, their garish red laughed at us in their falsity.  They were essentially the two of us.

49. Under my breath, I am humming River by Leon Bridges.

50. I used to want it to be my wedding song. But in an interview, Leon said it was about being born again. What I would do for that kind of transformation. 

51. Artopolis is a conjunction of two Greek words: artos for bread, and polis for town. But the bread I saw came in plastic wrappers.

52. Two months ago, the restaurant changed its name to the New York Basics. It is no longer Greek. Schmears are now called “Spreads & Things”. Wood paneling replaces vinyl and donuts turn towards flavors like honey lavender. I don’t mean this to sound like a lament of catering towards millennial desires. I would probably like the food more. It just changed without anyone telling me about it. As things of course do. I know. I know.

53. The fourth letter of the Greek alphabet is D, delta. In mathematics and the sciences, it refers to the change of any changeable quality. In A History of Mathematical Notations Vol. 2, the author notes the symbol is first used by the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli. Johann was also known as Jean or John. There are so many Bernoulli family members in the book it is hard to keep track of who discovered what.

54. He also is believed to be the true inventor of the calculus principal called L’Hopital’s rule, after the name of his student. Misattributed affections can persist for centuries it seems.

55. Now, it’s most commonly used in reference to Mean Girls: the limit does not exist. Really the rule makes it easier for us to make evaluate limits of these indeterminate forms.

56. But then as he and I are walking out, I am not thinking about making sense of anything. I am avoiding any sort of limit. I know he will walk me to the end of the street and the station, but I wanted to take my time with it. I wanted to be lulled by the muteness, by the sun. I needed to go to work. I needed to drink my coffee. I needed to wake up.

57 .My therapist says that I seem to handle the loss of people I truly know much better than those I never had the chance to. Pretty soon I will move and have to get a new therapist. But I suppose I could try phone sessions. I’m not ready to explain everything again. Even she doesn’t really remember his name.

58. “You’re referring to that Columbia rower boy from this summer, yes?” Yes. My mother doesn’t even recognize that nickname. “I know you told me about him a couple of times, but I can’t remember. It’s hard to keep up with you.”

59. He seemed to think so too, I tell her.

60. The kind of deltas my father spends his time in are those of airlines and waterways. River deltas, named for how they look like the Greek letter. My father, normally always in motion can be so at ease when remarkably still. Patient. Knowing that something will come along.

61. “Don’t you ever get bored of relaxing?” “No, someday you’ll truly appreciate these breaks”. He’s said that to me for years now, always when I complain about taking time to do nothing. How long is it acceptable to not apply the lessons I am constantly given? 

62. I have always been quick to tire while fishing in those places. My father always reminds me there will be times that you can see them so clearly but can’t get them to bite.

 

Westside Market

 

63. The doors are flanked by the clashing colors of produce, which spills out life and light out onto the side walk. The store has always felt like a farmer’s market in the city, like the stands back home where you slip a dollar into a wooden drop box for a few ears of corn. How quick we are to trust back there.

64. He and I go to pick up ingredients for chicken fajitas he makes that I don’t remember eating. I know he and I bickered, but I wasn’t paying attention.

65. Earlier in the day we went to Rockaway Beach with his crew friends, and none of them look twice as I fall asleep on his shoulders, or when he rolls on top, pressing my body firmly down so that when I get up there is a perfect outline of me in the sand. Eclipsed between drunken lust and the earth.

66. An hour later we break up on the ferry. “I don’t want you to get too attached to something that you can lose.”  But isn’t that the whole point of tethering to something? So you don’t get lost?

67. Thirty minutes later we head north on the one train deciding what we will do for dinner and if I should stop at home to get a change of clothes.

68. I am running my hand over the peppers, exaggerating my smile as I make small talk with the man who responded “you should!” when I wondered out loud if I should get the overnight oats, moving through aisles, half-singing, half-dancing, iridescent.

69. Even he lets out an unwilling laugh, but from memory’s distance I still am not paying attention to him. I love that version of me like I love my own mother.

70. My mother, who took me along on weekly trips as an act of provision for the ones we love, an act of exploration for us, a reason to get out of the house where there’s nothing else to do.

71. Grocery stores since then have always been a temple.

72. Westside Market is a place of family, the same family owning each location since the 70s, seeing themselves as a firmament of what they call the “Upper West Side”

73. He too, calls it the Upper West Side.

74. “I want a three-bedroom in Morningside Heights someday”.

75. “You don’t want to be an UWS mom. You’re better than that.”

76. How nonchalantly glamorous yet characterless probably for the sake of association with its Eastern neighbor. All done for real estate developers.

77. Indeed, listings with Upper West Side monikers come at a higher asking, scrubbing the away the sing-songy “Morningside Heights” which sounds like the town in a children’s book.  How it cleaves out the quaint.

78. Cleave, a word whose dual definitions make it its own antonym. Merriam Webster: intransitive verb: to adhere firmly and closely or loyally and unwaveringly / transitive verb to divide as if by cutting blow.

79. Transitive verbs are in relation to an object, while an intransitive verb can live without something so tangible.

80. And some verbs can be both. And some places have two names. And passion and indifference are closer together than I could have imagined.

81. I walk out while he’s still checking out towards the street.

 

 

Cathedral of Saint John the Divine

 

82. The way the light hits St. John at the end of the street in the middle of the day makes me understand why people see it as holy. People I’ve loved but never known were memorialized here. John Dunne, Madeline L’Engle, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin.

83. I try to find a trace of something more tangible than their words here but there is no mark of their presence, dead or alive. I remind myself my faith has always been about the living word.

84. The priests used to try to claim the neighborhood as Cathedral Heights, but the name never stuck.

85. I am a believer that you can heal in the same kinds of places that hurt you.

86. That early morning cab rides that someone else pays for are acts of contrition.

87. There are answers to be had but at least we know the questions now. But don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to. Expect and accept a lack of closure. You don’t need to love for the sake of receiving it.

88. Loving an inanimate place will not change the way it receives you. An inanimate man was enough when you needed someone to exist around, not with.

89. Ask and you shall receive, unless of course it’s not on the menu.

90. The cathedral began construction in 1892, but still it bears the nickname St. John the Unfinished. Ed Koch once remarked “I am told that some of the great cathedrals took over five hundred years to build. But I would like to remind you that we are only in our first hundred years.”

91. I don’t have that kind of time. But I still haven’t given up on it reaching maturity. Not yet. I still want to believe in him.

92. And sometimes, Him, too. 

93. But Forever, forever was a long time ago.

94. The Cathedral charges an entry fee and I’ve heard what’s inside isn’t worth it. Just because something looks larger than life doesn’t mean it is.

 

 

 

 

 

From The Cab Near the Park

 

95. Pulling off the highway I am triumphant, holding his hand while he already drifts towards sleep. I am looking off towards the park as the cab finally pulls turns on W 123rd, into the neighborhood, having gone up the East side of Manhattan through Harlem.

96. In my phone I drunkenly write a letter to myself to dictate what this really meant, that I deleted months later thinking it was non-sense.

97. Something along the lines of “holding hands in the back of a cab is enough for the perfect summer love isn’t it? He always said that he couldn’t be a summer love in the way you wanted but isn’t this exactly what you wanted? You’re having fun. This is how it should be”.

98. If I still had that letter I would respond, no, that’s not what I wanted. Do you remember what really got you in that car in the first place?

99. From another man’s apartment you were planning on texting him but not sure about the spin.

100. Option one: “I get everything you wanted without really even trying. We have the same jobs technically except that mine commands more prestige, pays a bit more. I’ve always been more successful, and you can’t handle that.” Option two: “I hate your uncircumcised dick and when you give head you think your eyes look like a porn star’s but really they bug out and make you look crazy.” Option three: “Since the first day we met I think we both know we fit together in some fucked up kind of beautiful way. Can’t we just exist in that for now? I don’t really need anything special, I just want to enjoy what time we have left.”

101. Instead, truth “I’m at a guy’s house who I was going to hook up with, but I’m not attracted to him and I’m getting uncomfortable. I need an excuse, can I come to your friend’s birthday party?”

102. Stoking jealousy, sure, but more so letting him be the hero. Letting him pity me. He likes submissiveness.

103. Looking back, I’m thinking about how happy I was in that cab. I’m not picturing how I stood outside a bar in sweatpants that I get you to leave your friends in. Is that what victory really looks like? My eyes are drawn to the park before we turn on Amsterdam Ave.

104. The first cabs in NYC were horse-drawn. They were both a symbol of opulence and decay, either seen as swank or bearing the reputation for cheating fares and abetting crimes. The nighttime cabs were called Night hawks.

105. My memory has a way of glamorizing things in order to not lose them.

106. Damn distortional dopamine. I have been taught by my therapist the biological roots but rarely acknowledge them. I want to think I am being moved by something larger than myself.

107. How pathetic it is to care for someone pathetic when you simply want him to like you so that you feel validated, so that you aren’t unable to gain the attention of someone so utterly pathetic.

108. That kind of dopamine rush modulated in laboratories produced a boost of memory. But the rush comes warped, and so I write to map every little detail my narrative overlooks. As if giving a place helps me not misplace those feelings. I can’t tell you how many people I have written myself out of love with.

109. And if he read this, would he be afraid I’d make it true? No sense in wondering since he never asks to read what I write.

110. I grew to hate myself because I couldn’t make him love me, even if I didn’t love him.

111. Tried to pull attention seeking tricks for him to fall in to compensate for the traps I laughed at and still stepped in. Sometimes we want to be stuck in one place just to stop moving. But I didn’t think of this as the cab pulls up to those blue front doors. They reminded me of Paris.

112. Birds of a feather. Nighthawks. Etc.

113. We’ve always heard bird’s mate for life. But in reality, very few birds are truly monogamous. Most cheat. Some even “divorce”. Sometimes female cardinals raise eggs that aren’t even theirs. How natural deception can seem.

114. He wants me “to find someone who loves me the way I deserve”, I want him to find someone who holds their breath around you the way I do.

115. Of course, this is a lie. I would rather he be fucking miserable than with someone else. I don’t care if he’s happy if it’s with someone else.

116. And I don’t care that it sounds selfish and bitter. It is both of those things unashamedly.

117. I’m just being the only version of me he ever fed.

 

 

110th and Cathedral Parkway

 

118. As he walked me to the station just a few blocks away, he was droning on about how this really should be the last time we meet in this way. “Friends though.” “Your coworkers are friends with mine.” “I just respect you.” He really couldn’t quit this game. I really couldn’t think about anything but catching the next train.

119. Cool kid persona turned cataclysmic. Believing that the slick talk of apathy, tongue retreating wields a world’s ending. He’s right, it’s just not my world or his. Ours though, certainly.

120. He and I were both raised Catholic, so it makes sense his love ends in the way of Revelations. Revelations 3:19: “Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.”

121. His goodbyes seem as heavy handed as this literal interpretation of the word. They slip towards slapstick, sitcom, soap opera, at the subway station’s bellowing mouth. How many times do I find myself playing out scenes from movies about the city. 

122. His face craves a study of itself, but I am looking down at the stairs, waiting to see if I can hear the train approach. Waiting to be swallowed whole by them, enter the whale, end the belief in something higher now.

123. When Jonah was in the belly of the whale he cried out to God, “I have been banished from your sight; yet again I will look at your holy temple.”

124. I’m not offering my lingering here while he still talks to me as a sign of rapture. I really just am waiting for the train in the summer, where it’s better to wait in the open air. Were it not so hot, I’d chose to be underground in the undistinguished concrete.

125. That day I saw clearly his love as a lust to pity me. The way he kissed me goodbye as if I need it, as if he wanted me to need it. As if sucking his dick is a favor to me. As if I’m not taking the subway because he has stopped paying for my cabs because he knows I’ll come anyways.

126. The artwork in the station underground is entitled Migrations. The artist Christopher Wynter invokes freedom from slavery, industrialization, multicolored figures in the city.

127. “Overall, the panels represent the ideas of uprooting, migration, and progress in symbolic form.”

128.  In plants, uprooting is a forceful rupture from the ground. Is that what progress looks like?

129. How easy it is up in that sunlit memory to hate you. To see I wanted to love someone terribly that summer the way I wanted to only love being here. He and I keep getting interrupted by the awful noise of it all. I was a disciple of waiting. This time at least for the subway and not for who stood beside me.

130 .I walk down the stairs hoping it all envelops me. I am not wiping away tears. I am not even thinking about him. I wanted the train to pull so far away from this place that it severed us and salvaged me. A boy amongst the overgrown rats down here.

131. If everything in that second had turned to a sinkhole, I don’t think I would’ve minded it so long as I was ten stops down and ten minutes from my apartment.

 

Sakura Park Revisited

 

132. The truth—without Rachel Wetzsteon I would have never come here. Or rather come to know it. And no matter what words I give to it this will always be hers.

133. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Rachel’s poems were compared to “possibilities held open, and to the city whose own sharp openness seems like a standing invitation.” And to her the city was at its best in Morningside Heights, in Sakura Park.

134. My roots were mildly entangled at best. Some place to not be alone at night. Some place to pick up a bodega sandwich, sit in a park I once read about, and be alone, perfectly.

135. As it once was for Rachel.

136. Using an author’s first name suggests a connection. She is not on a first name basis with me. The connection is there even if she is not. Even though I found out only after leaving that she was never in our place at the same time I was.

137. When I visited Sakura Park I thought maybe I’d see her even. I was looking at the faces of women and trying to see if they sparked some recognition in me.

138. By this time other poets have already been writing about her. Elegies. Remarks on another promising poet taking her own life.

139. I do not come here to have a séance with her. I am trying to resurrect my own voice

140. “the petals lift and scatter / like versions of myself I was on the verge of becoming.” The truth: I’d rather fail in love and my career than fail to find my words, or someone else’s right words.

141. This, like most truths about myself are temporary. As he would say about us.  And Rachel would say “‘get over’ getting over it.” My therapist tells me it is okay to appreciate that summer too.

142. I am wondering what she couldn’t get over. I am wondering that in reading her poems if I can find it. I am wondering what’s over where she is now. Does it look like this place?

143. “There is still a chance the empty gazebo / will draw crowds from the greater world.” But sitting in it I know no one will come. I know he will not meet me here. I know he has left temporarily and I am soon to be gone for good.

144. But for now, I sit with Rachel. And “meanwhile” is indeed “far from nothing.” At least I’ve got the park.

145 .Sakura Park, named for the gift of 2,500 cherry trees from Japan to the city. Sakura, which means the cherry tree in blossom. Trees which only bloom for two weeks are not said to be less beautiful. It is not about their blooms, it is the memory of them.

146. Mootori Noorinaga, a Japanese Scholar used cherry blossoms to describe the concept of mono no aware, the way of savoring life more deeply due to its fleetingness, the pathos of things, places. He believed that the heritage of his place was that of spontaneity in natural feelings, for the allowance of feeling deeply. He claimed his Japan through poetry, comparing it to a cherry blossom in the morning sun.

147. And I can’t take this home from him. He will have always walked these streets first or shown me my favorite bar. When I walk through Columbia I am the one avoiding making small talk with his friends.

148. No one I know lives here, not even me.

 

Grant’s Tomb

149.  How can you close a tomb? How is it that I always forget it closes, and show up again in the hours it isn’t open?

150. There’s a fence blocking off the steps leading up to the white stone mausoleum, that looks more like the Capitol building in miniature. By design, it is to be imposing. The architect wanted to make it very clear that this was an uninhabitable place.

151. Those same steps were once a site of pilgrimage for confederate and union soldiers alike. Now they are barricaded off by crowd control fences.

152. My best friend walks on the other side of the road whenever we used to walk by cemeteries. She fears them, even though I’m really the one afraid of death. I like how even in the city, they are spaces of silence.

153.  My first time in New York City I visited the memorial for the Towers. The first thing I thought noticed was how the falling water drowned out everything else. Standing by the names, we were no longer in the city. In that stillness, we could only focus on the memorial, the collective American memory.

154. Maurice Habwachs drew out from society the first idea of collective memory, where the group’s frameworks of living existed around their shared memories. In his world, there were no individual memories. Only group memories that live beyond us, untouchable.

155. If that’s the case, what about the memory of an ended relationship? Can one person own it really? Or does it live beyond him and I?

156.  Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb” Groucho Marx asked on his TV show. But it was a trick question. No one is buried in Grant’s tomb.

157.  Grant is “not buried” alongside his wife Julia in the tomb. Instead, they are above ground, resting in twin red granite sarcophagi.

158.  Grant was no native to this place either. It became the home of this site because of a promise.

159. The promise was to allow Julia to be memorialized alongside him, in an equal state. Civil war veterans wanted Grant in Arlington. Grant wanted to be buried at West Point. All national cemeteries prevented wives from being buried alongside their fallen husbands. So, New York, where he time couldn’t separate them. Grouped together in memory.

160. Julia for her part would’ve preferred Central Park. Or Union Square. But they ended up in Riverside, up on a hill, where you can see down to the Hudson. Plus, Columbia and St. John were going to be built around it. Soon this place would be something.

161. Even now, you can see down to the Hudson through the tree line.  Columbia grew around the Tomb. Sakura Park blooms just a block away. You can hear the bells from every church in town outside the tomb, in the silence.

162. To build it, 90,000 Americans donated $600,000 dollars. At that time, it was the largest public fundraiser ever. Still, it is the largest mausoleum in America. Over one million people attended his dedication ceremony.

163. That day, it was just me. And one man sleeping on the mosaic benches. I came here without telling him I was in the neighborhood.

164 . Even tombs can decay. Even the tomb of a president. If everyone could forget about the tomb of the president in the middle of the city, I could forget about even those who will still exist in the same places that I do.

165. Once he said he’d be there for me no matter what we were. When I needed him. How he loved when I needed him. Except of course when I really needed him. “I’m a sinking ship and I don’t have the emotional capacity to talk”. Maybe I’d hoped somehow, we could come together in the wreckage.

166. If I learned one thing, it’s how angry men can get when you believe the promises they give you.

167. Apparently, there is a limit to which promises made last. And what does Grant care? What does the city owe to honor a deal between two men, both dead? Nothing.

168. In 1994, Grant’s great-great Grandson threatened to have the bodies removed if the federal government didn’t repair the tomb. A reliquary marked over with graffiti, pieces of concrete and granite chipped away. A tomb now being lived in, mostly by the homeless, and the occasional criminal hiding out.

169. From the 60s to the 90s, as the city around it seemed falling apart the Mausoleum did too.

170.  I can’t decide if I should be grateful or angry about how hard it is to hold on.

171. But things can come back too. 100 years after the tomb’s creation it was brought back to life. Promises kept.

172. (I am not sure I want things to be restored if there’s just the chance they will go to shit again.)

173. In the 1970s, the public arts program in the city decided to build mosaic by children and artists alike in those benches.

174. When the restoration happened, they tried to get rid of the benches, to restore it the tomb to its original intent.

175. Who is the city changing for? And who am I changing for? I’d like to answer myself. I’d like to mean it.

176. The residents of Morningside pushed back against taking out the art made by the community. One woman said, “You can’t change your mind, when you put your soul into something.” So, I suppose I never gave him my soul.  

177. The next time I’m here I’m here for good. I mean it this time. Not in Morningside but at least I’ll be able to call this city my home. Even though native New Yorkers would deride me for it. X many months to be in love. X many years to call a place home. X many loves and homes before you get it right.

178. I’ll take right now over being right. I have to believe right now is alright for right now. Change comes whether I start it or not. The things I used to be are irretrievable.

179. Like last season’s cherry blossoms. Versions I never became, trains I never caught. Bells’ wrung out for mass, how I can hear them but can’t make them ring out anymore. There are some things I remember him saying but don’t remember how he felt saying them. Rotten fruit and tale coffee in the home that was never mine, the apartment only shared for a night. It was only one summer.

180. The season of my life where my body and mind recognized their gap and sought to bridge the space between them. For seeing things as they were. For seeing every time as a fresh first.  

181.  But not the tomb. I have never walked in those doors. Never gotten the chance to see it as a place where there is no coming back from.

182. n three hundred years, climate scientists have projected that much of the city will be underwater unless we have something to say about it.

183. There’s nothing more I can do to pay homage. Morningside, my Atlantis.

184. What does this place owe me? Nothing. Neither do its inhabitants.

185. “Let Us Have Peace” Grant said after the war. It’s inscribed Perhaps that is what I have tried to give us now.  But we all know how that went.  

186. Even promises are malleable. Even concrete.