The cracks. There are so many cracks and uneven alignments in New York City’s streets the continuous decay combined with continuous construction, digging up holes, patching them back up, only to dig them up again the next week, and then the trees whose roots cannot be held captive under the cement and the ice and salt in winter which add to the damage expanding already growing cracks and eating away at the molecular edges like a corrosive fungus.
A piece of me fell into this one almost ten years ago. Unable to withstand gravity any longer. Consumed in the disconsolation of irreconcilable realities. Or perhaps it wasn’t this exact one, but one of its many predecessors. I waved to that piece of me as I passed by this time, marveling at how long it had been lingering there, lost to the events of time.
Evelyn Waugh describes love as lifting you a fingers breadth above the turf and holding you suspended. This is love’s radicality, it holds us suspended out of time, out of place. It slips into our brains and tweaks the chemicals just so, to create a state of pure presence. No wonder we desire to feel this way… always…
In the shock of its loss, a chasm opens. It doesn’t have to be a large one, just pothole size is enough. A piece of you slips through the crack, and a different kind of presence takes over, one which draws a darkness over all the senses, leaving you again just beyond time, just beyond place. You black out standing in place. When you come to, you move forward, but a piece of you remains, to be patched up by a worker from the DDC with a shovel full of steaming black asphalt. I wonder, if I reach my fingers into that hole, will I be able to reclaim that piece of myself? Or is this just where it is meant to lie… always…
