Some Vintage Stuff

Last night was lovely. I had dinner with a great friend, her sister, and her sister's boyfriend - delicious food, great wine, and lots of fun. Afterward, I was lucky enough to spend the rest of the evening with some wonderful family, feeling the love. There was a lot of talk about art, following creative pursuits (one of my cousins is living the dream as a musician). It's great to spend time with people where there is so much mutual understanding and appreciation - particularly when they're family. What made last night so great was being able to be around people with whom I felt so comfortable and happy - family and a friend who feels like family to me.
Anyway, it brought me back to the super-observant descriptive writing that I'm actually trying to move beyond. There's nothing wrong with it as far as sketches or little portraits go, but I need to get better at integrating plot and dialogue -which is significantly more challenging for me. So, here is a bit of an artifact from the not-so-recent past:

Sunday Afternoon

As if on cue, the bugs started to come into view at the first sign of sweat gathering on my upper lip. My nose predictably reacting to the summer cold I can’t seem to shake brings more sweat, that of frustration. I stare at the huge box of sand and gravel in front of me, longing for a beach as a dog lifts its leg against a nearby bench. I watch a couple probe the insides of one another’s mouths as the light begins to change – the sun feeling no less powerful despite its waning position behind me. Summer in this city shows itself on my feet, which are a different shade than my ankles. A fly lands on my second toe, and I don’t brush it off right away, which feels perverse and satisfying. I stare down at the bricks that serve as pavement, mismatched and from different years. I am suddenly conscious of how eagerly I am avoiding checking the time. I even attempt to connect the dots of an excessively annoying nearby cell phone conversation. The man is bent laboriously over his phone, almost yelling into it, ending each sentence on an incline, as if asking an infinite amount of questions.

It quickly becomes too much, enough to rouse me from the bench and force me to look down at my watch – still more than an hour to waste. Somehow the idea of having nothing to do is incredibly enticing until it is all there is. Having no job and dwindling funds leaves me at the mercy of my busy friends’ schedules and the shortage of inexpensive things to do. To take my mind off the burdens of independence, I have discovered an hour and a half of yoga every day at a donation-based studio on St. Mark’s Place. Instead of the eight dollars the studio suggests, I offer a genuine, if slightly embarrassed, smile and thank you on my way out the door.

By the time I have traversed across the park, offering the proper reverence to the old brownstones and attempting to ignore the surplus of tourists on a Saturday, and east on 8^th Street, I try to find a place to sit and wile away the fifteen minutes before the previous class trickles out. I take refuge on the steps of a combination noodle restaurant/tattoo parlor, and stare at the door to the studio across the street.

After feeling a vibration against my waist, I reluctantly answer the call of a friend who seems to be constantly in some sort of psychological turmoil – or at least whenever she calls me, since she consistently asks for advice. Since I can hardly seem to help myself these days, I mostly just listen to her talk for fifteen minutes. For some reason, she sees me as wise, though what I really have is common sense. In my mind, wisdom implies experience, which I certainly lack. It’s all I can do to hear her words through the never-ending debate in my head – is it better to not feel pain and be alone? It’s difficult, even now, to distinguish whether what I feel is numbness or solitude. I hang up the phone with a combination of envy and pity, still with twenty-five minutes to kill.

Fed up with the hard cement of the steps and my inability to get away from my thoughts, which were slowly becoming more and more overwhelming, I gathered myself and climbed the two flights of stairs, wide and probably tiled before I was born.

Before I go to yoga, it always takes a fair amount of inner convincing, my mind forcing my body to be dressed and be at the studio on time, but once I am inside the building, I am in complete accord. The combination of sweat, the wood of the large, wide room, and various perfumes and scents of the surrounding bodies truly reconcile everything that bothers or conflicts me in the moment. What is initially difficult becomes fluid, simple, and focused 90 minutes later. What complicates and frustrates me is eventually simple and unimportant. I feel flexible, aware, and a little breathless – not to mention drenched with sweat and a strange awareness of my femininity, the sexual experience of breathing deeply with thirty other people.

Afterwards, I eventually sink into the reality of the humidity, my unemployment, the construction workers taking note of me very vocally, and my intense thirst for nothing but water. I begin to inevitably come down from the high I have become used to receiving, but there is the memory of it. Also, the opportunity to recapture something so elusive.