Disclaimer: The entry below is a bit of creative writing that I did tonight – 6/13/2009. It does contain some reworked writings from my past. It’s also a work of fiction and, while life is always the inspiration for my artistic endeavors, enough of the story has been altered and changed that it no longer represents even a remotely accurate account of any events in my life. Please take this as something in rough form. Thank You ~GeorgeGSmithJr
It’s been a gray day, such as one often sees in New York. Walking around this town, my thoughts naturally drift toward the tremendous contrast between this city I now call home and New York. It doesn’t seem like these cities share the same hours, the same days, and yet, for the moment, they share the same color – gray.
The gray here is from a simple palate of color and its association with the pantone of New York is merely in function but not in form. Long ago, while walking the streets of New York, I would study the shades of gray in every window, in every reflection, in every moment where I found myself time to stop and think. New York has a range of gray that seems almost infinite. Here, the singular effect of color just seems lost.
As my thoughts drift to New York, I find myself eager to return home to write – an affliction that hasn’t been the norm of late. Normally, my day would be over and I would instinctively head out to mingle with the crowds. The simple colors that surround me haven’t stimulated the imagination, haven’t given me the inspiration to seek out the creation of those elements that might be missing in my life. Instead, I am just blended and assimilated, producing soft grays that fade into the necessities of daily life.
To the untrained eye, the streets seemed fast, dizzying, with no place to sit down. For me, they seem sluggish, lazy, indifferent – shabby and seedy-looking. Not glamorous; yet seductive. A fire with no heat; lust without love.
On those gray days in New York, I often found myself walking without any specific destination. From Battery to Brooklyn, Harlem and the village – my life was a sting of cafes, restaurants, theaters, lofts, subways and rooftops. To the untrained eye, the streets seemed fast, dizzying, with no place to sit down. For me, they seem sluggish, lazy, indifferent – shabby and seedy-looking. Not glamorous; yet seductive. A fire with no heat; lust without love.
This, however, is not about love. This is catharsis, purgation, a purification of the soul. This isn’t about fate or the implications of such. This is about mistakes, errors, miscalculations that leave you off course and alone. No, this isn’t about love. This is about the truth – my truth. A truth that has its perspective from the moment an event occurred. This is a truth that evolves with each passing day, with each moment that undulates in the shade and shadow of memory. This is a truth that no longer exists.
This is all a lie.
There are events which possess a man and which live on perpetually. In the confines of memory, a man can return to these moments over and over again – withdrawing them at times of convenience. Conversely, there are moments of memory that dance upon the cerebral cortex – which no man is ever truly able to possess. They can not be documented, notarized, assessed or quantified. They merely exist as apparitions that guide a man’s will blindly. This is how I remember New York.
I am writing this to rebuild the past – melancholy reconstructions, which will help to explain everything from the past to the future; which, I now know by heart. To truly start, I would have to go back to conception – go back to moments of perceived love, thrusting, pounding passion which ultimately would dissipate and leave the product of their lives fractured. No – going back to the beginning is too comprehensive and doesn’t serve the purpose of this exercise. Instead, It would best to simply just the story where all the best stories start – the middle.
“I don’t need to be in love.” That is my mantra. I had called Aubrey up just last week and was told that she no longer wanted me in her life, this was going to be the last time she was going to talk to me, and that we should say our goodbyes. I decided then that I don’t need to be in love.
I don’t need to be in love.
It used to be easy to think about my future. Even when I was younger, I always imagined I would take New York by storm. It manifested itself in many forms. First it was as a Filmmaker. My next dream, and most recurring, was to be a writer. At times it was journalistic writing, with images of me chasing down hot stories, exposing the dirt on the men in power, and policing the world with my pen. Other times it was as a literary giant, whose book would define my generation. Most of the time, it simply just exposed my love for highly priced coffee and the ambiance of well-designed coffee shops.
My most recent dream was to be with Aubrey – and all other details were fuzzy. So as I stood outside the theater, waiting for Maurice to arrive, I realize that the entire city was foreign to me. The tall skyscrapers, the millions of people, the buzz of the hive had no definition, no premonition of the life that lay ahead of me. This was a bad omen.
When Maurice finally arrives, I am excited. Maurice and I were college buddies. He lived on my floor my freshman year before an incident, which doesn’t need to be documented here, forced him to move to another part of campus. We weren’t particularly close, but there was a bond established that let me know I could trust him. When I called him last week and asked if he would be able to put me up while I got myself established in New York, he agreed to do so without hesitation.
Maurice is a good looking, with a charm that often makes him irresistible to some women. He used that charm often in college – enjoying the benefits that come with those abilities. I was taken aback, when I learned that he was dating someone just a few months after moving to New York. It wasn’t his style – but he just smiled and said I’d understand when I meet her.
Maurice’s aesthetic summarizes him pretty accurately. He wears designer jeans – faded and ripped in “all the right places.” He wears tight t-shirts that highlight a fit and healthy body. He walks with a confidence – the perfect posture and rhythm of his steps gives him an aura of superiority. He was, for the most part, superior to me in many ways. I was jealous of him: Jealous of his money – both personal and familial. I was jealous of his laissez-faire attitude on life – he always acted like he had no cares in the world. And finally, I was jealous because I always knew that Aubrey found him extremely attractive.
If you took a survey of the average person on the street, I am willing to assume that they would find the most annoying aspect of a friend with a broken heart is how they ultimately bring everything back to the breaker of said heart. Now, I don’t know if this is pure speculation on my part, but I’m willing to bet that it’s the truth. The thing is, when you’re suffering from a broken heart, you think you’re thinking about the other person when you’re merely thinking about yourself. You justify it by tying everything back to the person. Bringing up memories of the past, insecurities, feelings – but in reality you’re really just saying, “Can’t you see I’m hurting! Can’t you hear me screaming!”
In truth, I don’t think people with broken hearts ever really take the time to think about what they are saying. When you’re sick, you’re told to sleep a lot because that allows the body to focus all its energy on purging your body of the cause of the illness. When you have a broken heart, you want to sleep all the time. You want your body to heal, the white blood cells to attack the cancer that has stricken your heart. The thing is, there is no physical damage. Your white blood cells can’t find the intruder. So all sleep does is allow you to dream. And often those dreams bring you face to face with the one thing you’re really trying to avoid: yourself.
It’s early fall, my second month in New York. I am living on 79th and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. I have no job – no source of income to provide for this lifestyle I am living. I am a pauper living as a prince. How I came to share this luxurious apartment with Rebecca, I am not quite sure. I could talk about the moments that lead up to this – Maurice offering his girlfriend’s home without asking, the subsequent fights, my reluctant move in – but those don’t quite summarize exactly how I ended up in this situation.
My everyday existence here is a ruse. For instance, in my closet sit a row of suits. They are mine but they do not belong to me. They were a job hunting gift from Rebecca – who has taken a keen interest in finding me a respectable situation in New York. When I put them on, I become someone else – someone who can leisurely wear fine, tailored suits like they were just every day parts of my wardrobe. The suits were just one of many gifts that Rebecca has bestowed upon me.
Apart from these gifts, I’ve given myself no chance of survival in this barren city. The excuses are there – the job market, my inexperience, the economy – but it’s merely my presence in the city. The beauty and the curse of the City is that it never stands stoic. It’s constantly changing, it’s empty cadences crashing against the shores of countless souls and beating them like wreckage washed up on the pediment of the shore. I am slowly eroding away.
I spend my days and evenings writing about nothing, piecing together these fleeting moments, trying to capture everything – every essence – into words that I may some day make sense out of. I sometimes write to Audrey; fat, blissful words conveying happiness that, in reality, is completely foreign to me. I destroy each letter. I destroy everything I write, crumpled pieces of paper that start to line the floor of my room. In the twilight hour, with the Indian blue hues of the moonlit skies, I cry. I cry because the keyboard doesn’t make a single sound. The words fail to come. The cars, stories below, engineer themselves to and fro without much thought to the mental impasse I am going through. I want to look at the moon. I howl.
(to be cont’d….someday)
