I wanted to walk faster, to run, far as possible from her, from my entire life, from the first day I ever saw her always just a few steps ahead.
Don’t fall in love or let anyone’s life become more important than your own.
I am a memory house for those I have lost, those I no longer know.
We remained talking, fighting gently or viciously for what seemed like hours, but it was only minutes or perhaps a second, because it was only a dream.
I meditated on my childhood, vague and distant before high school, where Laura still flickered only on the edge of things.
Our past would dissolve. We would move on from each other and from the ghosts of our youth.
My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war.
I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams.
Nightmares always recur, but never our most beautiful dreams.
When I returned to New York, it had already changed. I always wished things could just remain.
With the years, we become even more ourselves and call this change.
I first understood why Christians prayed for a savior in the form of a beautiful man. He had absolved me of the blue-streaked blond.
It was all so foolish then, as it is now, as it is forever. To be in love with beauty. To try to hold on to it.
I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss.
There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.
I look out at the reservation, still and glittering with casinos, and think of all the death dried up and buried in its dirt.
I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.
With this man I will never want. With this man I will never be sad again.
I remember wanting to flee her, and being unable to flee her, so in need of her and half hating her for it, and I still am nauseous from it.
I have forgiven Sonora. I have forgiven New York, forsaken the recursion of history. But I do not yet know how to forgive myself.
One day you look in the mirror and you see your parents’ sadness in your eyes.
I lit a cigarette. ‘Go ahead, take a smoke,’ my father said. ‘It won’t kill you. Only sadness will.
When you are rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it . . . Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend.
Find someone who loves you more than you love them.
Her father kneels and unclasps the urn. Above the waves she falls graceful as snow, my sister, my Sonora.
New York was always so beautiful in the very crux of parting with it.
My father insisted I eat red meat. ‘You’ll lose your brain without food,’ he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.
Look at the lonely fisherman,’ my father says.’Look at his view,’ my mother says.
I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.
For those I come from, there is nothing more devouring than the feeling of want for home, the feeling of need for home. We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer to carry us out of the too-dark night.
This is it. This is how I always saw heaven, always by the sea, always by night, always in the dark.
There is no moon. The stars have risen and fallen and given way to a new spread, to the smeared heart of our Milky Way.
We would survive even ourselves, as long as we were together.
Like hunting for a dead beloved’s face among the living, in places, we find the place we loved before.
Through my sudden tears, the train lights smeared like shooting stars. Lying before the rippling blue window, below the slurred lights of the world above, it was as if we were underwater.
I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.
My father, a Palestinian, and my mother, an Israeli, met in a bar in New York. Their encounter was a blue shift. An anomaly. A collision. In the end, I understand, it is only for this we live. All I ever wanted was to love.
I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts.
You know the most common phrase in the movies is ‘let’s get out of here?