Hello dear friends and Salvesters,
I have decided there are two types of clouds: morning and night. They swap places at dawn and dusk. The night clouds are urgent, in a rush to take over the sky. The day clouds rise sleepily, secure in their purpose and command of attention. Usually, I am not looking, which is why I only noticed this today when I rose too early and watched the sun nudge through the horizon. The dog on my lap stared happily at nothing and I realised I had nothing to do. Not just in that moment, but in the foreseeable.
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A while back I was walking down Manhattan Ave in Greenpoint and hearing the ice cubes clatter in my coffee. It was a fine Saturday morning in the fall, there was a slight chill, and a few birds chirped on sparse branches. I was in a hurry. My yoga mat, slung across my back, grazed against my shoulder blades. It was a short walk from my apartment to the studio. The streets were wide and empty, save for a few strollers and battered pugs. The absence of calamity in New York is an infrequent blessing. I hadn’t noticed a shirtless man trailing me from across the street—he picked up speed as I got closer to my destination. He had yelled, but I ignored it, wrapped up in a flannel and the simple pleasure of an empty street in delicious forenoon.
He crossed over and that’s when I heard: faggot, faggot, you fucking faggot, I’ll kill you. I was disturbed by the interruption of it all, a serendipitous morning spoiled by some wailing. The footsteps behind me got heavier, but I walked faster, reflexively, like I was tying my shoe or plastering myself against a stairwell facing the flurry of commuters exiting the subway at rush hour. I dipped into the yoga studio as the shouting swelled, the man banged on the windows and gnashed his teeth. I took my phone out of my pocket to reply to an email.
“Oh no.” The yoga teacher, who I had come to know and like, exclaimed. She hurried to the door and locked it.
“That sucks.” She said, looking at me for something—was I supposed to cry? Call the police? Perform some discomfort?
“Yes, it does.” I looked at her plainly. She seemed unsatisfied by this response. Her expression turned from sympathy to what looked like anger, or perhaps disgust.
Later, when I was holding a crow pose, she crouched over me and spat in a namaste-all-day-sneer: You can do better than that.
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You might think I’d call that memory a night cloud—something intrusive and desperate, a moment that eclipses what predated and proceeded it. But really, it was a day cloud, when I reframe it with what I have now. What I got to experience on that day: the joy of minutiae, the prejudice of a stranger, the failings of an acquaintance. That texture of command and purpose, the sureness of itself—it was a day cloud. For sure.
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There was a day similar to the fall morning in the beginning of spring. Again, it was forenoon. Again, the ice cubes clattered in my coffee cup. I was walking down Manhattan Ave in Greenpoint in the direction of the studio. But this time it was closed and the pedestrians were not yelling at me. They marched down the streets with scarves tied over their mouths and hands stuffed in their coat pockets—charging each other with crime in brief hostile stares. I had been on a date the night before when the sidewalks were glazed with rain and the neon lights from the bar casted a red haze on the granite. This is all a bit ridiculous my date had said, and I laughed coquettishly and batted my eyelashes, sipping a whiskey I did not want. What I did want, was to join him in the casual dismissing of a new world. I thought: there’s not much to hold onto here, but there is something, there could be something.
A murder of crows flew diagonally across the sky as I passed the closed studio and visited every deli in Greenpoint. No hand sanitiser, no anti-bacterial wipes, no masks. In a hardware shop near the Polish church there was a box of 100 pairs of painters gloves and I nearly cried. In my apartment I fit as many pairs as I could in my backpack, which was stuffed to burst, and threw away the things I didn’t have time to sort through. Flared velvet sweatpants I had bought in Tokyo but forgotten, platform boots with a red wine stain on one heel, a sweatshirt that was too big but I loved anyway because my Dad had bought it for me. It’s just stuff, it doesn’t matter. I told myself and it was partly true, none of it mattered, but still. It yanked something terrible in me to part unceremoniously with the treasures stowed under my bed. The summer of transformation in Tokyo, the club with a hot tub in the Meatpacking District found with a different kind of family, the day when I let my Dad choose.
Something was gone. A whole life in one day.
Then I was on the plane and it was like the movie Contagion, then I was in an airport in the middle east on a layover surrounded by Brits that mocked the mask I begged off a flight attendant, then I was under the watchful eye of a border agent in Singapore, then I was in lockdown where I ran every day until my knees buckled and I could get a haircut again, then I was sitting on the balcony with my dog and categorising the clouds and it was like it all never fucking happened.
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So I’d call that spring day a night cloud. It was intrusive and desperate. It nuked the sky and lingered abruptly—unwilling to move. It taunted the day clouds that are unsure of themselves, now, as they push through the dark. But I am wondering, if there is a third type of cloud. When the sun sets and the day/night clouds jostle, there is a wispy thing that drifts between them, unperturbed by the contest. It bounces through pockets of tangerine and crimson, then disappears without a fight. It’s impermanence beguiles me. It doesn’t promise to restore the something I wanted to hold onto but it does suggest there might be something else, something different, there.
That’s me and Gertrude, muddling through, looking at nothing and/or the sky.
Xoxo,
Z
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