pockmarks in pink marble

i've readjusted to new york, to chinatown. i sit on my paisley couch across from the reproduction of andrei rublev's 'the trinity' that i bought at st francis cabrini shrine for $5 two years ago. across from my key-hook & keys -- mail key, apartment key, building key, silver e charm, nypl special-edition wild style library card, mini yellow baseball printed with pictures of taxis, lucky cat, & blue key-tag reading dream world. across from my prayer beads & my red chinese tassel pendant, which hangs over my door. 

it's very important to me to feel grounded in the place i'm in. the seeds of this were planted in me by my parents, raising me in a house whose muted earth tones & paintings of ducks & snowy fields & rivers reflected the landscape around us. these seeds started to blossom when i lived in los angeles & felt compelled to read history books about it, to wander the main library staring up at its frescoed ceiling, to ride angel's flight & watch the exiles & think about bunker hill. to swim in the city pools. to develop a favorite city pool (the LA84 foundation swim stadium in exposition park). 

when i moved to new york, i was miserable for about a year. i lived alone in ridgewood, which felt too much like philadelphia, & i feared that my freedom was over. the colors were over. it was back to brick red & dark brown & sage, chipped blue & sand & pale grey. i was happy about the pale grey. but i missed the pink. the lime green, yellow & aquamarine. prayer candles & tacos with radish on the side. 

then i adjusted, around 2019. i remember taking a photobooth strip & posting it to instagram with the caption, 'surprise, i love new york.' it took a while. joining 8-ball was the thing that really did it, giving me a home, a place to grow from. then at the east village zine fair in 2021, a girl with bright blue eyes bought my poetry chapbook & said she'd just gotten a job at kgb bar, & was i the sort of person who was well-connected in the literary scene, was i the sort of person who might want to bring young people back to the bar. i said yes i am that, & i was that, & i became that even more. the next year i met a man who lived downtown who asked do you know my friends, & i said yes i do know them, & i did knew them, & then i knew them even more. & then i moved here, & he moved away & i bought him a red chinese tassel pendant, so he can take hollywood by storm. 

i went to montana last summer & met walter kirn & amanda fortini. i met them at a rodeo, where men with names like fulton rutland & wacey schalla straddled the backs of writhing bulls, & the ceremony ended with a brilliant fireworks display set to 'proud to be an american.' i was 4-H queen when i was 17, improvising an acceptance speech on the concrete stage after they placed the sash over my paisley dress, but since then i've done ten years in big cities. & so have amanda & walter, though they grew up in the midwest & live in montana. when we shook hands & met each other's gaze for the first time, that was obvious. 

theo, who is interested in moving to brussels, told me the travelogue is back. i've always been slightly uneasy about world travel. the last time i did it was when i was in college, studying abroad at oxford university (i usually say 'outside london' when people ask about this, to avoid sounding obnoxious, but whatever) & visiting six countries. had i not taken a spontaneous trip to montreal & swam across the rio grande with a boyfriend in 2013, this would have been the last time i left the country. it is, as of this writing, the last time i went overseas. i would like to go abroad again, ideally this year. 

what makes me uneasy is the way i'm treated as a tourist, how much it others me. i used to feel very out of place in new york, driving up to readings when i worked on a newspaper copy desk in atlantic city, & i think part of why i explore nyc so much & read about it so much & devolve into ecstasies over new york: a documentary film (1999) as much as i do is because at some point i made a subconscious commitment to never feel that way again. & i feel out of place when traveling. you want to be a pair of eyes watching the world, & being received as a tourist reminds you that you're not -- that you have guts & skin. white skin. this becomes relevant when, like now, you want to go somewhere where the majority of the population is not white, & where the population has made the admirable commitment to resisting americanization. to remain as they are -- never colonized, never made christian, free of television for the longest any country has been in the world. i want to see it, to experience that level of peace. but i don't want them to see me. 

the first feature film shot entirely in bhutan came out in 2003. the first bhutanese novel written in english came out in 2005. i'm interested in engaging with them, though i feel uncomfortable with how much they seem to cater to a western gaze. travellers & magicians, the film, features a character who is obsessed with getting to america; he has even fashioned a robe out of denim. (this came out four years after bhutan lifted its ban on television.) the circle of karma, the novel, was written by a bhutanese woman who studied sociology at the university of nebraska. nebraska! she grew up in the only country in the world that measures its success by its citizens' happiness, & she went to nebraska to study how people live...

there must be some deeply human need to move. &, to put it more cynically, to try to destroy something that seems like paradise. if adam & eve couldn't hack it, why should i expect that of anyone else? of myself? i live in the lower east side, which was defined by immigrants, who left their home countries for poverty & struggle based on some promise of the new. & because they heard they could make money. in the new york city documentary, a historian talks about how new england was founded by puritans, pennsylvania was founded by quakers, & new york was founded by merchants. the rivers operationalized for shipping. alexander hamilton on the ten dollar bill. lana in her new york years: money is the anthem / of success / so put on mascara / & your party dress -- 

& in a way money, & the fight against its primacy, has been the central new york story: artists struggling to make it here & make this city livable for us (a centuries-old struggle that my friends & i are now involved in); jane jacobs fighting to save the lower east side from a highway billed as necessary to facilitate the flow of commerce; the spate of labor law reforms after the triangle shirtwaist factory fire, when the city watched in horror as 19-year-old girls held hands on the ledge of a burning ten-story building & jumped.

the other night i got to see 23 wall street, an abandoned bank made of pink tennessee marble that was once known as the 'house of morgan,' the headquarters of j.p. morgan & co. on september 16, 1920, right as the roaring twenties were kicking into gear, someone drove a horse-drawn carriage filled with 100 pounds of dynamite up to the side of the building. at one minute after noon, it exploded. like cantor fitzgerald 81 years later, j.p. morgan laser-focused on returning to business as usual, so much so that it didn't repair the bank's facade, which is pockmarked with holes from the shrapnel. there is no plaque, & this incident is not taught in schools, so you don't know unless you're looking for it, but if you're looking for it, you can find it. john steele gordon, the business historian, calls it the 'stigmata of capitalism.' i touched it that night, having come upon it by accident on the way to an afterparty for a gallery opening. fidi is seen as a chic place to hold art events. i live a 15-minute walk away; it takes half that time to get to the courthouse where they'll drag luigi mangione this spring. luigi who has such refined & gentle taste in music. who was raised in the mid-atlantic, like me. 

i want to visit somewhere that doesn't have money in its bones. that moves to different rhythms. that's buddhist. where the spirit is lighter & softer. it's difficult here. it's hard to keep loving new york. i do feel devoted to it. i've been here seven years; it's marked me & i've marked it. but new york is scary. new york natives are a whole different breed. they grew up so fast. they want to eat the whole world. 

i'm reading new york diaries: 1619 to 2009, a compilation of diary entries by new yorkers collected by the reporter theresa carpenter. every day, i read that day's entry & write in my own diary. i will do this for every day of 2025. my favorite entries so far have been by the novelist dawn powell, the painter john sloan, & the philosopher simone de beauvoir (& also, somewhat surprisingly, the president theodore roosevelt, who writes with great feeling of his wife & family). in dawn powell's entry on february 12, 1934, she writes, 'i want this new novel to be delicate & cutting -- nothing will cut new york but a diamond.' i underlined it & wrote ! in the margins, excited to read it, excited to connect it with the fact that diamonds are formed under pressure. but even so, i daydream of being in a place where i don't have to cut, or be cut. that sounds like paradise.