where you get that sugar from?

The city is waking up. Awkward and naked, as if the elastic waistband from underwear marks its hips. Mascara smudged, trash cans are on their sides rocking slightly in a low wind that comes up from the river. The snow is gone here. Forgotten mittens and store receipts, dog shit and rotting leaves. Everything awry.

I don't like sleeping alone on foreign beds, no matter how soft the covers.

I miss you.

I wander in darkness, headlights blooming in my tired eyes. I walk in the gutter, not the sidewalk. The Empire State Building is white, magnificent above me for a little while. I feel a bit like Brando in Last Tango. I want to chew some gum and stick it under a railing. Some mark that says I was back for a few days. Yes, lost. Yes, foolish as ever.

And now it is raining. A fat lady is running for the bus, a smile pasted across her face. The driver waits for her, umbrella crashing into her coat as she disappears inside.

Men wear heavy perfume, and I smell Polo, Ralph Lauren as they pass, thick and mouthy in between the raindrops. There is construction down here. Workers in slick yellow suits are digging a great hole on Fulton Street.
"Yo, Steve." On yells from below. "Yo, Steeeeeeeeeve."

Yes, I am back to eat great bowls of soup alone. To gaze up at the fog hiding the rooftops. To buy birthday presents for my little girl. Maybe a jar of maple syrup.

A lumpy fellow is dressed as the Statue of Liberty, dancing around on a particularly wet corner, passing out flyers. Behind him, a new place that serves the best bacon egg and cheese I have had in a long time. Music is playing, John Lee Hooker.

Sugar,
Sugar Mama,
Sugar all over this town.
Sugar Mama,
Where you get your sugar from?

the other side of the window

Looking out the windows for so long, I decided to make something of it. Camera resting on the tripod, left in odd positions that could not describe what flitters of life it captured, I gathered moments together. N does not ask me why anymore. She knows in a general sense what it will be, what it will always be. E is oblivious, lost in a lego castle where all of her dolls are playing at being Rapunzel, where countless wicked women dole out punishment to Spongebob, Natiri and a dark-skinned Bratz doll named Sasha. 

People are plodding through the snow out there, holding hands out there, honking in traffic, looking at the sky. Soon it will be Valentine's Day. My first one with N. Last year we were far too awkward to mention the day or lend it any significance. I think we joked about it a bit. There was no chocolate or flowers, no hard-won restaurant reservation. I am sure I was alone with E that night, probably making chicken soup or doing laundry. 

Some years ago, I was married on Valentine's Day. It was at the courthouse downtown. It was freezing cold. There were a few friends there to witness things, to give us awkward well-wishes. Everyone else had been estranged. My family had no idea what was going on. I was lost then, more than normal. I had traveled so far down a road of self reliance that I believed I needed almost no one around me. I had my old apartment, the windows littered with pennies that looked out on 1st street. I had my guitars, pots and pans and a closet full of fancy shoes. I had watched the towers crumble from those windows, drinking my morning coffee. I mistook the first plane for some kind of gas explosion, thinking ConEd had really screwed up this time. That's the kind of man I was then - trusting, innocent, incapable of imagining what people are capable of. I began to turn sour. I walked the empty streets as sirens and firetrucks rumbled down Houston. Almost everything annoyed me, disturbed the delicate balance of the solitary life I was leading. 

The details are too complex and bizarre to imagine, but I found myself getting married on Valentine's Day about a year later, not far from that empty wound in the earth where the subway trains had just started working again. There were sunny blotches on the walls, in Russian solnechnei zaichiki, or sunny rabbits.  They are supposed to bring luck. Looking back now, out the windows on the riverside in Moscow it is hard to imagine some things being worse, but I am sure they could have been. 

If I look away from the window, I see N and E. 

I see a flower we bought at Ikea for a few rubles, a tiny bulb in some dry earth. Both of us nervous, we watered it every few days. N laughed out loud at the green shoots pushing their way towards the pale winter light. We made bets about what color the flower would be and E won, knowing it would be purple. The flower sits in front of my desk, perfuming the cold air that drifts towards me. 

I go and buy chocolates and roses. Walking in the street I know I am outside the window now, somehow with warm shoes on and something important to take care of. After the blank pause of last year, it has become a new day, a common one, the day many people share in some personal, shared tradition. 

I will make little chocolate cakes, I decide. I will put blueberries inside them if I can find some.

окна (window)

what the black birds know

The chimes from the train station are drifting towards us, but not the announcements. People must be arriving, with great boxes wrapped in twine. Others depart, with long faces and gifts wrapped in newspapers. The snow is falling, flakes as big as my hands it seems, floating upwards and circling the rooftops before they finally land. You can hardly see past the parking lot. There is just the sound of what is out there and the smell of detergent on the clean floors, cigarettes the neighbors half-smoke in the hallway.

I coax E into taking a bath, then squeeze a chair into the tiny space, playing guitar for her as she sings to her dolls. Splashing, acting out great dramas and a collage of fairy tales, she creates a tiny world.

It is Sunday night, and there is a sense of great calm. Some soup is bubbling away on the stove. The washing machine sings a little melody when it finishes its cycle.

In the morning, the snow is falling again. I do not find it beautiful or magical. It is ugly, filthy, oppressive. I fight it, and imagine it wants to suffocate me. There are black birds winging around the dark sky, shuttling from somewhere to the rooftops next door, back and forth with great purpose.

I hold E's hand, as we creep across the ice towards school. It is a sort of skipping record, this winter life here. Countless repetitions of the same journey, the same white sky, the soot and grime that stains everything.

I find myself looking towards the twin smokestacks next to us, wherever we go. Like two dirty candy canes, their faded red stripes stand out against any sky. This is the heating plant that pipes hot water to all of the buildings in the district. It is a living monument that produces a pair of steam clouds without the slightest interruption. It must be the New Yorker in me, looking for a surrogate Empire State Building, some sort of architecture that pierces the sky, that looks down on us when we are buying milk, or bread or turning a corner. Ah, there it is again - so I know where I am now. I know where home is now, and I know the heat is still working.

And now the week lurches into motion. The sun is finally up, somewhere beyond the cottonball sky that hovers above us. Truck drivers will wake themselves with strong cups of black tea they drink from clear plastic cups. They will splash through puddles, turn hard on tight corners. The black birds are working away, reversing their paths to enter those little windows. I have no idea what they are doing in there, and why they leave.

The snow swirls once more, flying sideways in opposite directions.

I can't see anything.