What’s Next?
From Washington, D.C.
I’ve been in D.C. for over 2 months now. That number seems both too short and too long. Not much has changed externally in that time. I go a few extra days between shaves, and am really wearing through my rotation of 4-5 shirts. My hair has changed the side I part it on. From left to right. Forever too short, or awkward, or undefineably off, it’s finally settling into something presentable. And I’ve gotten to know the city of D.C(!?) Maybe, although I sense really I’ve only gotten to know my way around a routine. The number of minutes it takes for me to get out of bed in the morning, or make breakfast, or do the however-many hours of work daily that I call productivity.
It’s been two months, and while it hasn’t felt either long or short, it has felt like a demarcation. That there was a before this time in D.C. and that there will be an after. I get the sense the old ways I walked-in in life are now closed. I can’t simply move back to New York (although admittedly I might). If I do, I worry it might feel like trying to go back to a party you’ve already left.
“Hey, Hi! Oh my god, it’s you! You’re back.” They’ll say, giving me a hug, as they make way for me to hang up my coat.
“Didn’t you already walk home?”
Not that long ago, on my last birthday as it so happens, I did walk home. Down Bergen Street, all the way maybe 1.5-2 miles, at the end of which I had a little room in a 3 bedroom apartment where I could close the door and monthly make the rent. Now those luxuries have gotten up and gone off on me. I watch them waltz through the night, cooly wondering when, if ever, I might have the strength or good fortune to chase them down again.
“You left us,” they’ll say, “You gave up on us.” And in this admittance, I’ll lapse deeper into my contemplative silence. Because we don’t always want to leave the party, but sometimes it’s best. Sometimes we’re tired.
What’s Next
Now I exist in the quantum state between the here-&–now and the what’s next. I’ve got to figure out at this point what’s next. I’ve got about a month to do this, to decide whether D.C. is it. My incredibly gracious host (who’s home I’ve been staying in) will return in mid-April, at which point this hermit crab will have to find a new shell. 
A Shell, Georgetown University
I’ve heard from a recording studio in Virginia that they might be accepting recording interns––I’ll meet with them on Thursday and while the work won’t be paid, it will be a trade. Something I can polish until maybe it’s saleable.
And how to survive while that polishing occurs? I’ll work at Sweetgreen or a Mexican Restaurant. For a year, maybe, hopefully only a year. In D.C. I’ll fall in love with the woman I’m even now getting to know and who reminds me, if I’m honest, of the first woman I fell in love with. From a time that hides now behind a vail separating not the past from the here-&–now, but this reality from the fuzzy and indistinct something that came before. A wholy different life, or so it feels. Once I loved (crooned Astrud Gilberto in the dance halls of Rio in a summer made hot with sound). In a summer on a hill overlooking a manmade lake in San Diego, listening to music I’d first heard when I was a very small child, and now felt bold enough to share, I’d asked her what she thought. She liked it, which I liked. We liked each other.
It was good, but not innocent. It’s never innocent. But then at that time I was not perhaps ready for what growing close to someone means. No, at that time it wasn’t possible for me even to imagine what that meant.
Where We Are Now
So time goes on. Closing-in overhead like waters over the crown of a diver. I’m holding my breath at the bottom of this bathtub, hoping to live forever in one of those special moments that sometimes find us for 2 or 3 minutes on a completely average day. One came along today actually––I was out walking on the National Mall. The sun was out, really out, for the first time this year and while the air was not warm it was also not unfriendly. I sat there on a bench as afternoon turned to evening by degrees, and the monumental buildings all around––cast in the sharp relief native to very clear days––grew golden about the edges. I put on that same music I’d played for Olivia all those years before, and after 30 minutes on the bench, began to walk towards the Capital building. A particular song came on then, maybe my favorite song, and I become so taken with its sound, and then with the passing landscape, that I stopped in an awkward spot in the middle of the path, enraptured. Because the sun was doing that thing it did when I was kid, growing-up as I did amongst endless fields, mowed low for soccer season and then inexplicably kept that way all year round. The sun in fall, in spring, would get down so low over that grass in evening, and hang there for so long, its light almost invisible, that it would make the fields literally glow.
And the fields now of the National Mall, as I stand there looking at them and listening to Parallel Lines, are glowing in the same, well-mowed way.
I let the song play-out while the joggers, or dog-walkers side-stepped me in all manner of ways and with varying degrees of politeness. I thought distinctly that here in D.C., this place in which I have at times felt very far from home, I’d found that very same homely feeling I’d been looking for. And not simply an approximation, but the real deal (i.e. sun on a lawn)––occuring here independently of my having cultivated it.
It’s a strange sensation, finding love at the bottom of someplace you haven’t yet come to know. If it could exist here, couldn’t it exist elsewhere? Or even anywhere for that matter? As someone who’s searched, and searched, I’ve begun to suspect that maybe there’s nothing to search for at all. That maybe it’s all right here, and that maybe the reach is all in the holding-out.
Close
Leonard Cohen, when asked what his Zen Master, Sasaki Roshi, had taught him after living together for close to a decade in his monastery on Mt. Baldy, said to his interviewer: “He taught me that I didn’t need his teachings. He taught me that I wasn’t sick, and didn’t need to be cured. And then, the whole search began to dissolve.”
It’s trite to wrap-up a bit of writing with a Zen quote, let alone the most Zen quote ever (the journey is you), but this is my hand and I’ll play it.
What do we find in tunnelling backwards? In searching? Ring the bell, look at the doormat and you’re on the grass again and you’ve spilled the wine she brought paper cups for all over her blouse. You’re flushing, embarrassed, turning to grab something, a napkin, unspooling, rolling, turning, turning, further and further down. A dog you gave away runs up and down the backyard in Southern California, frantically, as if he knows he won’t have long to ply that expanse of grass or exercise his freedom. A boundary wall replaces the garden fence through which you once grasped at honey suckles growing just beyond reach, and then, with time, growing just at the tips of your fingers. Then from inside the house comes the chime of a clock striking 10 and suddenly you’re again beneath blankets and lying on the family’s ancient green sofa. You’re looking up at the TV. You’ve just turned 5. The pillow under your head smells like the cat’s hairballs, birthday cake, and your mother’s sweaters.
Try not to fall asleep you think,
Try not to fall asleep,
Try not too miss a moment.
You want to stay up that night, watching movies, eating sweets, forever and forever. And to your amazement, you do. You stay up for the next 22 years.
And now suddenly facing you like a long forgotten friend, inexplicably produced, is that same feeling. That home feeling––strong, if a little unsure of its new surroundings. And as it stands there before you now with every good intention, its presence only stirs-up a confusion inside of you. A confusion that asks in a voice from yesterday, so, what’s next?
