a beaker of fruit in the sun

Some of the friends I made in New York four years ago are so precious to me that I have been saying their names aloud as I walk about my apartment and then smiling and convulsing with love. Flying into New York on the Fourth of July. First time I got there it was Superbowl Sunday: America, I love your peculiar public holidays. It was February and snowing and a lot has happened since then. I am eating up all the fresh fruit in my house and drowning my potplants. The poor sad fig tree by the window drops another sighing leaf. “This. Is not. The tropics.” This time round I want to do all the iconic things I skipped on my first visits, because I was too immersed in the sultry life of the place, the people who surprise you with insightful questions in the street, the man who gazed and gazed at my breasts as we drew closer and gasped, “Oh! I love your… eyes!” dragging his own eyes up to meet mine as he spoke. The longing in his voice, plangent and transparent. The love of life. The piles of people, literally stacked for miles all around, as though the whole population of Australia had been swept up into one giant terrarium. And the way you can feel them in your sleep, breathing and striving and struggling so hard. I want to ice skate in Central Park although the snow has melted now. I want to run into the beautiful man who was reading Rumi on the train. I want to show my Berlin companion the things I found there last time, the Flatiron Building where I laid my hand flat for goodbye and started choking as though I was leaving a lover. I want to point to Trump Towers as we glide past it in a vehicle of some kind and pass on my favourite local pun: “New Yorkers call this edifice complex.”