City Life

There's an utter exhaustion that accompanies the miles of city stoplights that keep us breathing just well enough to slide through the yellows and resentfully satisfied when they flicker green. "It'll be red next time," we remind ourselves, and statistically speaking, given the lonesome stretch ahead, it's unfavorable that we'll be wrong.

The cliche: "Happiness is an eternal quest" helps elongate the deadline, pushes back the arrival time if the destination is still there to meet us at all, and ices over today's early February motionlessness with dank hope for moving traffic tomorrow. At the same damn time, it invokes a frustration that the likeliest possibility is that it won't be tomorrow's winter we're surviving for.

Actually, the "eternal" part of the cliche promises an almost holy certainty that it'll arrive at our latest rush hour when we're all but asleep at the wheel, in our narrowest bottleneck season when all we've got is one gasping final leap backwards, when all our deathly waters is behind us and we score the chance to scan panoramically our whole standstill skyline life for the first and only time, a last tourist in a city built entirely from our gravel eyes, lost work forgotten but still standing.

Inspecting closer in our final fall, we see that I-75 drive south through Kentucky to Atlanta, when we rapped multiple Eminem hits from a cassette tape in your rackety red S-10, all bleeping words bleeped out because you recorded the parental advisory version; and when Joey smashed the giant rubber band ball into the 50 inch, causing us to watch our flatscreen lives in black growing spotches until that Superbowl second quarter when it all fuzzed to gray, leaving us to eat Mexican dip, echoes of Amos Lee shuffling through the speakers, and reading an entire anthology of Curious George in one long sitting; and that crazy night that turned to a crazier morning when he dislocated his shoulder falling off the table after crying two overtired hours past his bedtime because the butter didn't reach every edge of his raisin bread, literally because we had not a scrape left, and you, the next month, waving around the $200 E.R. bill we charged as a reminder of my refusal to let you run to Walgreens. "The most expensive tub of butter I ever bought" you said, ego waltzing into the kitchen; and the night when Addy blew her curfew to smitherines, half past two in the morning, inebriated with love, searching the window for turning tailights, smiling past us wild and furious, and me, crying, in flannel pajamas, as if we never lived her glorious teenage punch-drunk moment; and that misty Novemember riverwalk in the lamplit fog when the sugar maples fell upon us, gold and amber walls, just long enough for you to wrap my cold hand like a glove and find me, waiting, all my life to be pulled back in.

Now there's nothing left to build. Every word have been chiseled, the music has soaked through as deep as your soul sculpture would let it, and the buildings of your life are going, leaning away, more majestic and interesting than you ever imagined in those years behind the bricks, tasting gritty mortar and crying at the raw feet of your unfinished work. In fact, you can't believe that there's anything left standing since you spent so much time and inner earth tearing down and recreating that you assumed you'd wind up with nothing but collapsing soil mounds and a cardboard sign that came to you by way of wind and chalked with red rock reading: "Hey, I tried." The cardboard, funny enough, is there, amidst your scraping walls, littering the corner streets of your footprints, but it escapes view before you can really read it. You wonder for a flash second what secret it spells.

For the longer part of the river plunge, you see dimensions of new depths through wide lens lines all the way across, and in, and all the way up. Especially that one mountain of a tower, the cloudy summit of your skyline. You wonder what you were doing when you got there, how you climbed up, and how you got back down, whether you took the elevator or ran the stairs, or just fell all the way down in one long excruciating descent. Searching for memory, you can't remember, lest who was with you, cheered you on or summoned your demise, but you must have happened that way, given the post-architecture of the following year, that steely bridge you hurdled up to connect the disconnect and the typefont sidewalks you paved to keep those parts of yourself from wandering into groundless intersections.

Those were your hands, alright, planting a whole city life, unmapped back alleys and flowering parks, and rooms of all kinds for others to live in and occupy like tenants, some renting a little space for a few months and others settling indefinitely into your larger suites and repainting you over and over in shades of themselves. They filled you, not just with the good stuff, but with the stuff that burned turkeys and broke windows and made you fully alive to the calamitous hues of pain masked as humor. Or, was it the other way around? You'll never quite be sure.

You can't help but wonder who's left and who has stayed, and, who is yet to go. It matters not one cent, you've collected your final inflated rent, a few debts and promises unpaid, for which you can do nothing, not even be sorry for slamming doors and refusing to reroof the garage he wanted for reasons apparent only after the flood. Apologies dissipate to clouds. Now, your meticulous measurements, everything you've built and labored to birth and bought to collect, it's all been given back to a city you've taken clay from and molded into a destiny that was never yours to keep. You were borrowing space with an unsigned lease. Who knew you never owned a thing.

So, you do just as you should, all that you can do and all there is left for you to do in your last winter snowfall as you watch that towering summit disappear into a whitewash sky: You breath in happiness like it's your first wondrous spring moment on earth. Then you exhale a long warm prayer through the gusty air, just long enough for it to be carried above you and deposited into the silty soil, grounds of a life you loved, roots of unbuilt towers beckoning like tomorrow's ghosts, for children of their own cities to, one quiet day, bend their summer souls toward sunset street corners in search of a lonely cardboard sage, unchiseled with words written in wind and waiting beneath city lights.