To the one I can't have.

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things
To yield with a grace to reason
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

-- Reluctance, Robert Frost

She didn't know if their love would ever end, but she tried to understand that it had to. They'd tortured each other enough over the years. They built desire like fires all over their bodies. They kissed in the rain under the bridge. She had to stand on her tiptoes to reach his lips, and he would hold her close with strong arms. They smoked cigarettes together, and drank wine in the afternoon, and sang at the tops of their lungs. When she was around him she was enveloped in a warm haze of something beautiful. No one else mattered. He looked at her with a hunger that grew sharper over time, and wanted to take her away from everything dark. In those moments that were perfect, their passion seemed invincible.

A Brief Study: Gustav Klimt & Kattaca in One

Not quite the real thing, but a damn good approximation and a work of art in it's own right. Check out more brilliance from Klimt and also master stylists/art directors Kattaca.


"The most important element of his fame is his reputation as a master of eroticism."

-Gottfried Fleidel, "Gustav Klimt 1862-1918 The World in Female Form"

Lunar Masturbation

The other night, I was heading home in a rather foul mood. I don't really remember what caused it, and that probably speaks to how unimportant it actually was, but I do recall that I felt empty. I don't like feeling empty. I doubt anyone does.

In any case, it was a foul mood. I sat on the train absorbed in the electronic toys of my life: I listened to music, I played games on my phone, I ignored the humanity around me. My stop. I threw the phone into whatever bag I was wearing that night, I zipped it up, I stood. Trudged up the stairs. Foulfoulfoul. If that motherfucker who started to hiss at me had continued after I gave him a death stare, I would have clawed his beady eyes out of his tiny little head. Top of the stairs. Annoyed by the always slightly dangerous walk home ahead of me. The song I was listening to ended. A new song began. I took a deep breath, stepped onto the sidewalk, and looked up.

Oh.

The moon. Round, and almost full, clear, and so bright it was surrounded by the most perfectly giant halo of light I'd ever seen. A perfect circle of moonlight. I almost laughed aloud for surprise. I'd never seen anything like it. And in this polluted city, no less? I looked to one side to see if anyone was there reveling with me. I looked to the other side. No one walked next to me. I was alone, so I enjoyed the beauty for myself.

More Ruminations on Fall

Remember the smell of cold lunch? The peanut butter and jelly sandwich would combine with the apple and the brown paper bag to create this utterly unique scent, a perfume unlike any other. Your mom packed it at like 7am, so by the time lunch rolled around (which was, what, 5pm or something that seemed just as excruciatingly late)the smell would be especially strong. And you'd reach into your backpack, and the smell would hit you, and you would know that for 30 minutes you didn't have to pay attention to Social Studies or Island of the Blue Dolphins. For 30 minutes in the middle of the day, your time belonged to you.

There's been a sharpness to the air since last week. Gone are the dull-edges of summer, the circular days with blurred beginnings and endings. Gone are the hazy afternoons spent sipping cool drinks and blotting brows. October has brought everything into focus and heralded the return of the triangular 24-hours; days have a specific starting point, a peak, and a decidedly steep denouement.

Even though the crisp sunshine means that winter's bitterly bracing sunshine must follow, even though fall means the death of things which previously thrived, I'm happy. I'm happy! I can feel it in every step I take. The change of seasons always brings a certain excitement, a constant awareness of the beauty of living.

Now I wake up in the morning next to his warm body. Instead of pushing each other away in a sweaty attempt to keep cool, we curl towards each other, a tangle of limbs and hot lips buried under blankets. He smells of autumn all the time - that inexplicably sweet male scent. I'll stop in the street sometimes and put my nose to his scratchy cheek just to breathe him in, when we're walking together in the cool morning from his apartment to mine, or to the train, or to get a hot black coffee (me) and a cappuccino (him).

My head is clear and my heart is on a pedestal. I'm floating through fall, and I'm happy.

I had a fantasy about my future the other day that was unlike any I've had before. It occurred to me on a trip upstate with three of the most wonderful friends I know. To be precise, it actually occurred on our way back downstate (can you say downstate?), in the little town of Phoenicia, while standing outside of a real estate office. The office was closed, it being Sunday in small-town America and all, but there were pictures up in its window of the properties it had for sale. One in particular caught my eye. They were selling an old hotel on a vast amount of acreage for the unthinkably low price of $150,000.

The hotel needed work of course, lots and lots of work, but it was a beautiful, historic, white-washed, romantic 19th century building, and I saw the potential in it immediately. In that moment, for a fleeting second, I set aside the notion of big city living that I've had my entire life. I set aside visions of myself at 30, 40, 50 years old, hosting cocktail parties for fabulous people in increasingly larger and more expensively furnished apartments located in the various urban meccas of the world. I set aside the (admittedly vague, hazy and ever-changing) concept of a Career with a capital "C," one that I would possibly log 65 hour weeks for, taking public transportation home at the end of long days with the masses of other humans pursuing Careers. I let all of that go for one moment, and I imagined myself purchasing this old hotel and throwing my entire being into it. I imagined renovating, gardening, painting and sanding, giving my all to making it habitable. And instead of hunkering down in a dank subway car at the end of each day, I imagined stretching out on my wrap-around porch. Next to me, perhaps, would sit my lover, my soulmate; he would be strong with capable hands, himself a carpenter. Our bodies would ache synchronously from the day's labor, and we would drink a glass of wine together and listen to the trees.

I realized then, more fully than ever, that the only limits in our lives are the ones we impose upon ourselves.

BKLYN

It's called Brooklyn, and I live here. I like the way my mouth feels when I say the word, when people ask me where I live. I like telling them, "Brooklyn." I live in this borough, the one across the river from the sybaritic City, that pulsing sparkling gem on the Eastern Seaboard.

In my neighborhood the air always smells saccharine, like burning sugar or baking cookies, because there is a cupcake factory around some corner.

My neighborhood is an industrial wasteland, full of warehouses and abandoned factories in flat gray and brick buildings. More cement exists here than I ever thought possible, and just down the street at D&G Mixers Inc., they are constantly making more.

My neighborhood is lorded over by Hasidic Jews, populated by Puerto Ricans, driven around by Mexicans in big sleek cars and provided essentials (cigarettes, toilet paper, Poland Spring) by dark men from the Middle East whose language recalls hot sun and dry desert. To get from place to place I walk, or ride my ruby red bicycle, or take a train that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

My neighborhood is covered in graffiti, monumental works of art everywhere, new ones popping up every day. It doesn't really get covered up here like it does in other places, some ruffled business owner hurriedly slapping a coat of paint over it so that no one sees the vandalism. The graffiti stays around for all to see, as a reminder that the people, not some faceless Authority Figure, still rule this neighborhood.

I wake up and walk upstairs to the cafe in my building every morning. I say hi to everyone I see, because a lot of us have been here for a couple years now and we all understand the trials and tribulations and fear, the joy and lazy afternoons on the block, the summers when everyone is outside all the time, the stigma that was always attached living here. We all understand this and no one else does, or could. We are all watching the transformation take place together. We don't want our bubble to be popped just yet, but we can feel that everything is poised to change. This feeling creates a kind of kinetic energy, a quiet buzz over everything that fascinates and terrifies us and never really goes away.

It's called Brooklyn. We used to live on the edge of the universe, but the center is getting closer every day.