Walk with me.

It’s a Monday night in Brooklyn. Fall leaves are flying up and pirouetting through the air as children run through them. Pots are being stirred behind glowing windows and neighbors are chatting on their porches. It is early November and this is what is on my mind.

KINTSUGI

It happens like this.

You get blindsided by life, blocked, rerouted, forced to pivot.

It feel so immense in the moment and then, slowly until all at once, the heaviness is replaced by all of this light. Light that comes so randomly and so abundantly that I feel as I did as a child in California, reaching my hands out, just trying to collect it all. I am walking through my neighborhood in the midst of unemployment and I feel nothing but joy.

Things start to make sense so quickly now. You get thrown off and then, quicker it seems with each year that passes, your brain rearranges itself around your newly jostled reality. Light starts to flood in through the cracks and you cannot help but, in all of your glorious humanness, find the beauty in those cracks. You start to love them, and maybe, even, thank them. Kintsugi and what not.

I got laid off but I really got let go. Set free.

I have applied to dozens of dream jobs and internships in the past week that I wouldn’t have touched if I were still at my previous job. I have spent my days doing things that are propelling me closer to what I really want, instead of comfortably existing in a role that was so far from it. I am going to get a job that I love because I was let go from one that I just didn’t.

There is a light to that. I can just make it out. If I hold still, I can feel it tickling the palm of my hand like a butterfly’s kiss.

THE LIGHT

I am walking through Brooklyn on a brisk night in November, feeling nothing but that light.

Before I moved from California, someone I knew in New York told me that I would miss the light. I knew that there would be a certain truth to that. I grew up like a sunflower, my veins constantly infused with the golden, ever-present rays of the California sun. My memories all involve that light. Sunrises, sunsets. Sitting in lazy pools of it, reading, writing, thinking. It was always right there, enveloping me. My childhood was, and will always be, utterly encased in amber. It was a beautiful light.

But Brooklyn has light too.

So much of it.

It pools around my feet on evening walks and shoots down the streets. It trickles down the fire escapes like a fountain, illuminating centuries of brick and iron. Centuries of secrets that I will never know anything of. Whole lives get lived and painted over and started anew. My life is just one among them. It feels so grand and important now, but so did all of theirs. I look at those prewar buildings and wonder how many cups of coffee were poured on Sunday mornings behind those windows before I came here and started pouring mine.

I have always been obsessed with mortality. I have several posts about it on this blog, have read all kinds of books about it, and think of it often. I have always used the reminder of the finiteness of life as a means of extracting the most I can from it. But like with most young people, a distant demise was not too immense of a thought. It was simply a fact.

And then I fell in love.

I came to New York and I met my life as it was always here waiting for me to come and find it as, and suddenly, the thought of life ever ending feels too unbearably tragic to ponder. You fall in love with a place and then, god help you, you fall in love with a person and suddenly, all the time in the world is not enough. You are seventeen and wondering how Sylvia put her head in that oven one minute and 22, outrageously in awe of the world the very next.

WHAT CANNOT BE CREATED OR DESTROYED

I think of death so differently now.

Love makes you believe in things, crazy things. It comes so brilliantly and brightly that you are blinded from any grounded, logical stance you ever might have had on the whole thing.

Suddenly, death cannot be the end. And if death cannot be the end, then birth was not the beginning. There must be something, some essence of each of us, that floats on, weaving in and out of consciousness, finding and holding onto love wherever it can for however long it can muster, until it must dissolve into another form and get to do it all again. I believe in that now. I believe in it because I find it too improbable and devastatingly punctuated to believe in anything else.

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can be transferred from one state to another, but the amount of it remains constant.

I think it must be like that.

THE VERY SAME

I look around and see a yellow school bus soaring under the almost-bare trees, bringing children home from their strenuous hours of school.

I think of how I remember those days. Those chaotic, unpredictable, right-of-passage kind of days. The ones where you are just a child, at the mercy of a world you have not yet been formally introduced to. The ones where you live in the strange, contradictory state of both total freedom and the compete lack of it. They were not so long ago.

I did not know any of this then and I barely know any of it now, but how vast and distant the space between us feels anyway.

I walk deeper through my neighborhood, past moms pushing strollers and kids running home from school and angsty teens with their headphones and the very old woman who sits on her stoop and waves at me each time I walk by and absolutely nothing is obvious if not the parallel cyclicity of life. I look around and see my whole life spinning around me. I am the little girl holding her mother’s hand and the teenager reading her book on the bench and the old woman watching it all from her porch.

I am them and they are me and their lives are the reminders and mirrors and endless possibilities of my own.

Life here doesn’t look like my life ever did, but in a way, it is just the same.

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