1(AM)ent of New York - Sierra Blanco

l(AM)ent of New York

By Sierra Blanco

It is 1:41 am, dark-o’clock if I bothered to look, and I hate the stars. They taunt me in

their beauty, an oblivious display of false superiority, “look, you’d never see this in any city”

kind of vibe that makes me wish I didn’t know what they could look like.

If the stars shone like this in New York, you wouldn’t need any streetlights in central

park. Just look up, there’s a million little flames in the sky. Million little flashlights, billion little

trinkets shining silver, like something a magpie might want to steal. We have those too, magpies

fly here. They come in the morning with the crows and try to steal the potato chips we leave on

the porch after grocery runs because we don’t have enough room in the kitchen to decontaminate

everything. The delinquents, these corvids, tend to rip open the bag if I don’t take it in by dawn.

That would sound like some kind of gag story, some kind of superiority joke about the problems

of suburbia if I was back in Manhattan.

I’m not, back that is, and I probably won’t be until God doesn’t care when, but I miss

seasons. I miss having to deliberate whether or not I should put away the jacket that makes me

look like Eurydice in Hadestown in favor of the puffer that looks like the coats in “Ernest

Shackleton Loves Me.” I got tickets to closing night off a crazy girl I met on the bus that one

time. I miss telling coffee-shop employees my name is Wyvern just to have them ask how that’s

spelled and then follow up with “just put Ivy” and watching them smile in relief, in on the secret

of my name without keeping it. Especially that one Starbucks in particular that used to be close

to my mom’s job, they actually did manage to figure out how to spell Wyvern, and thought it was

my real name for the three years I went there on internship coffee runs.

Miss slipping forty blocks from home to school with some variation of bread-and-things

in my hand, one-way half-burnt toaster waffles and whatever I shoved between them before

running out the door like fire was at my feet, the other pilfered cold-cuts and bagel remnants

from the cafeteria.

I miss the subway, skipping stops and getting lost in the rhythm of hurrying for the next

closing doors walk if you can’t run - run if you can’t sprint - curse if sprinting isn’t enough, a

kind of melody to the catastrophe punctuated by buskers.

I miss feeling like nobody in a block full of nobodies, a face in a crowd that maybe is

worth a double-take as I swing-dip-dive-turn kinda-sorta dance to a song on

cheap-knock-off-of-knock-offs earbuds, drumbeat in tandem or contrast to the footsteps

drowning me in vibrant unending uncaring certainty.

I miss the bizarre things, the madness of the streets. There’s that vivid memory, it was

raining and I took the bus despite my better instincts, and the girl sitting across from me I’d

never met before greeted me like a childhood best friend and offered me a black-and-white

cookie I’m pretty sure had pot in it. She also shoved tickets for the show, “Ernest Shackleton”

didn’t I say, into my hand stating she didn’t need them anymore. I looked it up later that night,

she was the younger sister of the lead.

I miss walking, stalking concrete, pretending I’m running to meet someone somewhere,

hurrying off first one block then three then twenty as if late for an important meeting, just

observing the way the men under the scaffolding outside of Ben & Jerry’s start to shift when my

over-bright sneakers trudge by them one more time this week.

I miss being unseen, overlooked in throngs of college kids as I come home with my

backpack and bad-taste being lumped in with the freshmen/transfer/newbie-idiots instead of

native as I hunch over with whatever load of tasks I carry on my back. I miss not seeing the

sunset, blinded when it shines between the grid of metal and dirt, and knowing what time it is.

The clocks in front of me say 2 am, but I don’t know whether that means I’ll need to wake up in

5 or 2 hours.

And so I hate the stars that inevitably shine like beacons or warnings through my curtains

like they all want to outshine the sun. That is not right, that has no right to be so pretty, so

beautiful when what I want is so ugly.

What I miss are subway stations that smell vaguely of urine and summer sweat, the

chalky aftertaste of fake-dairy creamer from stupid-weak caffeinated drinks that I get either

under or over-charged for depending on the retrograding of the planets and how heavy my

backpack looks this week. What I miss are wary glances that wolf-whistle and dance away in the

same gesture, eyes that both strip down and glitch over every stranger that swerves by. What I

miss is the change of seasons, the way sleet and hot concrete bathed my sneakers bit by bit in

dingy layers, the way I’d either be seen or be not seen at any given moment without having any

consistent idea which way the story would go.

How dare the stars shine brighter somewhere not on Broadway, how dare those song

lyrics from so long ago be wrong? How dare this temperature I’ve migrated to alternate between

politely cool and aesthetically foggy when there are blizzards and blazing Indian summers to be

weathered? How dare the sky be blue and wide when there are skyscrapers that could pierce it?

How dare there be beauty here, beauty that in any other time I would love but as each

second drags into a frozen eternity, how dare this beauty rob the world I see of the change and

decay I have set my life to observe and record?

So I hate the stars that shine so bright here.