month to month

on loving what you were never promised you'd get to keep.

i have a talent for loving things and people i was never promised i’d get to keep around.

there’s a corner store down my block where the guy knows i’m a blue moon and not my name. i’ve been in this neighborhood barely a year. he reaches for it when he sees me come in, before i’m even at the counter, and we have never once said a word to each other that wasn’t the total amount of the item. i have decided, privately, that this counts as being known. that reaching for the beer before i ask is a small kind of love. i don’t think he would put it that way. i don’t think he would put me anywhere at all, if you asked him at the end of the night who came in.

i’m not even a year in and i already know the neighborhood the way you learn something you’re trying to deserve. i know the n train runs all the time and the w train only on weekdays, and it doesn’t much matter which one shows because they go to the same place. i know the hour the light reaches the back of the apartment. i know which block is quiet at night and which one never is. i know there’s a stop by the river, at the edge of the park, where the water drops twice a day and the rocks come up out of it like they’d been there the whole time, which they had. and none of it is settled. it’s a one-year lease, the work comes and goes, and the paperwork on whether i get to stay in this country has sat open in an office i’ve never seen for longer than i’ve lived on this block. i’ve been here ten years and on this block not even one, and neither number feels any steadier than the other.

i don’t think it’s only me. a lot of us are giving everything to something we were never promised, a person, a job, a place, and showing up the next day anyway, order ready.

i’ve wondered if that’s just foolish. whether someone with more self-respect would only give his heart to the sure things, the ones with a contract and a name on them. but the honest answer is worse. i think i might prefer it unsettled. i’ve gotten the yes a few times in my life and been quietly alarmed at how fast i started looking out the window once i had it.

there is one creature in the apartment that actually decided about me, a cat named fairy, who has spent the entire making of this record on the chair next to my desk and been impressed by none of it. fairy does not love me on a maybe. fairy loves me in the flat, bored, permanent way of something that isn’t going anywhere and isn’t especially moved that i am. through every hour of this thing, the takes and the retakes and the nights i was sure i’d ruined it, fairy was on that chair, asleep or close to it, there in the way that asks you for nothing and hands you no credit either.

and that, i’ll be honest, is the harder thing to sit inside. with everything i’m not sure of, i am always earning it, crossing the street, remembering the order, refreshing the thing that hasn’t answered yet. i get up, i pace, i go looking for a yes somewhere in the apartment. and fairy just stays on the chair. the one that already decided asks for nothing, except that i sit back down next to fairy and let myself be loved back, which turns out to be the muscle i never built.

low tide, fri jun 26. pre-save lives at this link if you want it. no pressure, i'm not done with it yet.