There are places in this world where the past and future hold hands, never eager to let go of one for the sake of the other.

This photo captures one.

I walk under this bridge and think of Brooklyn. I walk under this bridge and think of home.

The future and the past, the constructed and the ethereal, flirting with each other in the present. Like ballroom dancers they hold each other as they pirouette around the room, around my mind, locking eyes, trying to understand how one led to the other.

Which always brings me back to photographs. What they do and what they mean. How they allow moments, pixels plucked out of the void, to persist. How those pixels coalesce to suggest grander maybes than perhaps what the actual moment really entailed. How beautifully they provide evidence of linkage between eras otherwise disconnected.

I fall more in love with them everyday.

THE PROCESS

Speaking of falling in love. I was recently talking with my grandmother about the process of being creative. She was explaining how when she makes something, her favorite part is the end product. The process is made worth it once she holds that beautiful scarf or skirt in her hands.

I am not that way. The end product is gratifying, but it’s the gritty process itself that makes time stop. As a kid, I was always making things. They rarely turned out. But I can still remember the blurry haze that the world around me became as I chased an idea, running around the house grabbing materials and envisioning a masterpiece, envisioning greatness. It was the possibility of achieving it that made it so seductive.

Now, more than potions and paintings, it’s writing that sucks me in. There is no better feeling than reaching for the string of a metaphor, pulling it closer and closer to earth until you find a big red balloon on the end of it. It feels like floating, like chasing the sun but never minding if you catch it because it’s light is enough. To feel the ground running beneath your feet, the muscles of your legs working, the sweat on your forehead dripping, is enough.

TRAIN STATION TIME TRAVEL

In other, more concrete news, I picked my brother from the train this week, the train station that you try very hard to pretend is time machine into 1940, but then a tweaked out homeless man tries to attack you and almost takes the romantic charm out of the whole thing.

Almost.

For I then watched the train pull away like some old war movie scene to reveal my brother, tall and serious, crossing the station as the golden light spilled on his trench coat and briefcase.

Since when does my brother, my always cooler than me older brother, walk with a briefcase? Since when are we—grown ups?

The world looked just like an Edward Hopper painting in that moment. In that moment where he was all alone, walking through the world, just before my family intercepted him like a child off the train tracks of the world, turning Edward Hopper into Norman Rockwell.

LOVE IS EVERYWHERE

I hugged him and thought of the opening scene of Love Actually, where the camera pans the ongoings of the airport as Hugh Grant explains:

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends.

I could feel people’s eyes on our family as we enthusiastically reunited at that station, my mother practically falling over from joy, and felt pretty good about maybe having made the world feel a bit brighter for a moment or two for some random stranger like Hugh Grant.

And we weren’t alone. All around us buzzed the holiday rush of people elbowing each other, parting people like the sea, wigged out on the stress of facing another Thanksgiving with Aunt Rhonda, only to be intercepted by people of their own. Hugs, smiles, laughter, mothers in holiday sweaters barely able to contain their love as they spot their son. Teenagers running with skateboards under their arms, couples finding each other through the crowds, college students returning home.

There’s something undying about those moments.

They sink in like medicine, healing something you didn’t know was hurt.

Love, m.

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