Easter Sunday

Probably because I’m new here; probably because I feel very transient, having moved house four times in as many months. Probably because I have no job, yet more work than I can handle. Fortunately.

In my early 20’s I would have tried to wrench control. Or built some pattern of habit and routine to compensate the feeling of such. And it’s not that I feel out of control at present, just that I’m learning to be buffeted by the moment and yield to the opportunities that present themselves, with no guarantee of security for tomorrow. It has taken me to the most interesting places.

Easter Sunday afternoon: following an extravagant brunch-turned-day-long-eating-fest, I have fallen into a food coma. I wake drowsily to my phone’s vibrations echoing in the mattress springs. Several friends are urging me to head out to a bar in East Village. It’s a holiday weekend and I really should be out socializing. Yet with this much work to get done I must stay in tonight to edit. I slide across the bed to rest my chin on the window sill. The sunset strikes the red brick apartments opposite me above a stream of activity on the Williamsburg street below: pedestrians filing from the subway, bus brakes grinding to a halt, a JFK-bound jet looming overhead and several men jabbering in what I think is Spanish outside the Deli below me, though I’m too tired to pick it. An ice cream van sings by. Rap thumps from a throaty engine pausing at a red light.

This is my world for the moment: New York. Sometimes I wonder
what it all means, how I ended up here and where it is leading. One side of me thinks I should have an agenda for success – some preconceived path, a self-image probably formed in my late teen years, perhaps outdated. Another side of me says to throw away all expectations save one: to observe the new experiences Liberty throws at me and enter the path-unknown without fear.