PART I: The labyrinth always arrives at the center
July 19, 2023 | New York City
New York in July smells like warm concrete and humidity and, if you’re honest, a little bit of piss. The air sits on you. It doesn’t move, it just presses, thick and close, carrying the exhaust of ten thousand cars and the ghost of last night’s rain still lifting off the sidewalk.
It shouldn’t feel as alive.
But it does.
***
I was standing in front of a 7-Eleven near Canal Street, going nowhere in particular, watching the city move without me. Not really resting, just existing in the middle of too much noise, too much heat, too much everything. Hot asphalt. Somewhere nearby, someone was frying something sweet.
A woman stopped next to me. She lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly into the thick, humid air. We started talking the way strangers do in New York – suddenly, without preamble, as if the conversation had already been going for a while. She asked where I was from, and what I was doing here.
I told her more than I planned to.
She listened. Then she exhaled one more time, slow and deliberate, and pointed:
“Go there. You’ll find your answers.”
Where exactly?
“Just follow your heart.”
So I walked. No map, no destination, just the heat and the noise and the humid air clinging to my shirt. The sky had gone the color of old pewter, threatening rain that hadn’t decided yet whether it was coming.
***
Somewhere on Prince Street, I found him. A man, older, bent low over the sidewalk, painting on old newspapers taped directly to the wall of a building. He worked slowly, deliberately, as if he had all the time in the world and also none of it. Around him, a gallery of faces – painted over stock prices, weather reports, crossword puzzles. Each one staring out from the newsprint as they’d always been trapped inside it, waiting.
One painting said: The Time Is Now (Now Is The Time). Next to it, another face – eyes wide open, mismatched, one blue, one green – above the words of Harvey Milk, written in thick black marker across a weather report:
“If we are not truly free to be ourselves in that which is most important of all human activities: the expression of love; then life itself loses its meaning.”
And besides that, on a deep red background, another face. This one with flowers for eyes, radiating light, the words above its head reading: The Aha Moment. Below: As in Eureka!
I stood there and read them all. A few tourists passed without slowing. A cab leaned on its horn somewhere behind me. The first drops of rain started to fall.
***
I kept walking.
A few steps later, written on the sidewalk in someone’s careful handwriting:
if you want to bloom, water yourself — @persianpoet
I stopped. Looked down at it. Looked at my own feet standing on those words. How poetic.
***
A small garden, tucked between two buildings like a secret someone forgot to hide. LaGuardia Corner Gardens. And there, in the corner: passionflower.
I crouched down and looked at it. That impossible, baroque bloom – purple filaments curling outward like something trying to escape its own center, and at the middle, a cross. The Jesuits named it passionflower because they saw the crucifixion in it: suffering made ornate, made beautiful. Grief given a shape so elaborate it becomes almost absurd.
I didn’t know any of that yet. I just knew it was the most alive thing I had seen all day, and I had been looking.
Just past the garden, someone had painted a labyrinth on the ground in blue. Wide and clean against the gray concrete, its path curling inward in long, slow arcs. No dead ends. Just one continuous line that winds and doubles back and winds again, and always, always arrives at the center.
A labyrinth isn’t a maze. You cannot get lost in it. There is only one path, and if you keep walking, it takes you where you need to go.
***
The rain was warm on my face. The city was loud and indifferent and completely, utterly alive all around me.
I only understood the passionflower later – what it carries, that mythology of suffering folded inside something that still insists on blooming. And I understood the labyrinth later too. That I had been walking one all day. That I had been walking one for longer than that.
But in that moment I just stood there, in the rain, in New York, in July.
Lighter than before.
PART II: Overwhelmed by their own element
July 29, 2023 | Washington, D.C.
It started the way all bad decisions do: looking perfectly reasonable.
The sky had gone heavy and greenish by late afternoon, the kind of color that isn’t quite right, that your body registers before your brain does. But it was just clouds. Just weather. I stepped outside for a walk and told myself it would probably pass.
It didn’t pass.
The first drops were slow, warm, and far apart – the kind that make you think you can outrun it. Then, between one breath and the next, the sky opened. Not rain like I knew rain. A solid, roaring wall of water that erased everything in front of me, even buildings, street signs, and other people, until the world narrowed to three feet of wet sidewalk and a white noise so total it felt like silence.
My phone screamed in my pocket.
National Weather Service alert. Severe thunderstorm warning, winds up to 80 miles per hour.
I found an overhang and pressed myself under it. The wind came in sideways gusts that made the rain move horizontally, made the trees across the street bend in directions trees aren’t supposed to bend. I watched one go. Slowly, then all at once, roots tearing from the ground like the earth was just letting go. It landed on two cars parked at the curb. The sound was swallowed immediately by the storm.
***
I was soaking wet. I had been soaking wet for so long it had stopped feeling like anything. My shoes were full of water. When I shifted my weight, it made a sound.
Empty streets. Horizontal rain. Washington D.C., a city built on ceremony and monument and the performance of permanence, stripped down to its bare materials: concrete, glass, asphalt, water.
There was something almost clarifying about it. When everything is taken away at once, what’s left is very simple. You stand under your overhang. You wait. You watch.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, it eased.
***
Branches everywhere. Leaves stripped and pasted flat against the wet sidewalk. A tree across a car on the next block, its root ball exposed and pale, like something that wasn’t meant to be seen. People were emerging from doorways and shops with the slightly stunned expression of those who have just collectively survived something. A man in a hardware store apron was already outside with a broom. Two women lifted a branch off someone’s front steps – not speaking, just lifting.
Stores were going dark one by one. Owners standing in doorways, arms crossed, watching. Nobody seemed to be going anywhere in particular. We were all just moving through the damage, taking inventory, drifting through a city that had momentarily forgotten what it was for.
The planet stopped. That’s what it felt like, not the end of the world, something quieter. A pause. The held breath was between one thing and the next.
My shoes made a glooping sound with every step.
***
I found the fountain in front of a building in Clarendon, wide and low, its water turned off – oblivious to everything that had just happened, or maybe just done. I stopped at the edge and looked.
Fish. Small ones, pale and still, floating on the surface. The storm had ended them, and around each one, caught in the same stillness, crape myrtle flowers. Pink and delicate, petals barely bruised by the chaos that had carried them here. They circled the fish slowly, the way flowers circle things at funerals.
Pisces is the last sign. The end of the wheel, which also means the beginning of it. It corresponds, in the old systems, with the feet. With movement that never stops, with creatures that live inside the very element that overwhelms them. These fish, killed by water. These flowers, laid by wind.
Too much of everything can be fatal. Even the things that sustain us.
I hadn’t planned any of this. I had just stepped outside for a walk.
The flowers turned slow circles around the dead fish, and the dead fish turned with them, and the whole thing was sad and precise and quietly, unmistakably beautiful. The way endings sometimes are, when you’re standing at the right distance to see them whole.
The planet started again. Somewhere behind me, someone laughed. A store turned its lights back on.
I stood there a little longer anyway.
PART III: A lesson on how to receive
August 4, 2023 | Havre de Grace, MD
I woke up and walked to the store nearby for sushi.
Breakfast sushi, because I could, because nobody was keeping score, because that’s the kind of small freedom you only notice when everything else has been stripped back to the essentials.
She was already up when I got back.
***
We walked to the Chesapeake Bay that morning. She showed it to me the way you show someone something you love. Slowly, without rushing to the point.
The water was flat and wide and caught the light in a way that made everything around it feel quieter. She told me how much peace it brought her. That she was happy to be here, today, with a friend.
I didn’t say much. I just listened and looked at the water and felt, for the first time in weeks, that I didn’t need to be anywhere else.
***
The rest of the day was the couch.
Fleetwood Mac, or Stevie Nicks – that voice like smoke and silver threading through the rooms. Her cat arranged himself between us with the absolute authority of a creature who knows exactly where he belongs. Soft and warm and certain in the way cats are when they’ve decided you’re safe
Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, straight from the tub.
Conversations that skipped past the surface because we’d already done the surface work online – meeting in person felt less like a beginning and more like a continuation. We told each other things we hadn’t told anyone.
The afternoon went gold, then amber, then the particular blue of an East Coast summer evening. We barely noticed.
***
She had a little balcony garden. Lavender, rosemary, sage, basil.
Wild and fragrant and completely her. Not tidy, but deeply alive, every plant slightly too big for its pot, reaching.
We stepped out there at some point and just stood in it, breathing. The August heat pressed the scent out of everything. The lavender almost overwhelming, in the best way. That particular purple warmth that sits somewhere between calm and ache.
She knew what it meant to me. I knew what it meant to her.
***
Her laugh arrived suddenly and filled the whole room, making you laugh too before you’d understood what was funny. She had that quality some people have of making you feel, without any effort, that you are exactly where you should be.
After New York and Washington, I had arrived somewhere that asked nothing of me. Just this. The bay in the morning. The cat in the afternoon. Her laugh. The lavender and basil.
Sometimes that’s what healing looks like. Not a revelation. Just a place where you can put everything down for a while.
I will carry that day carefully.
The way you carry things you didn’t know, at the time, you were holding for the last time.
Memory eternal.
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