It smells like Christmas on Perry Street and I want to grab 14-year-old me by the shoulders, blindfold her, spin her around five times, then release her with a light push. She will stumble a few steps then look to her right at her woolly reflection in a lingerie store’s window and I know she will understand.
When it smells like Christmas on Perry Street, it is easy to enter a mourning period for time felt lost. Mourning is easy to do. Humans do it very well. We lose weight and focus our line of sight on things very, very far away and sit with our hands in our hair and cry when a child loses their balloon to the wind.
I will blow my hair out of my face and wonder if the crusty, cloudy-eyed Maltese walking toward me ever has stress dreams about its teeth falling out. I will make eye contact with a stranger who smiles with the right side of his mouth. I will wonder if the smile was actually a misidentified grimace. I will wonder what the stranger thinks of me although I think nothing of him. This is, unfortunately, what occurs when men are not interested in you during your adolescence; their opinions feel heavier when you grow older. This also means you feel you must outsmart them in some way because you didn’t spend years being undesirable to turn out to be an idiot with no comedic timing. All of a sudden you are very cruel.
Is someone playing the trumpet a few blocks away?
Caitlin texts me:
“Should we go to Paris
should I just flee
and work at a cafe sneering all day”
I walk to a bookstore deemed local and relatively independent to buy a thank you card for my Godfather and two books whose contents make love feel stale to me.
“Dear Peter,” I write. “I am so sorry for how late this is. I have been busy doing lots of sitting…”
I run out of room on the right side of the card and have to bleed onto the left. I imagine my Godfather opening it and beginning to read on the left before realizing what has occurred. I want to start over but I have no more cards. Suddenly I feel the need to cry because it smells like Christmas on Perry Street and I have just written a backward note and I can’t remember the last time I heard my name said out loud. I draw a dumb arrow on the bottom right corner of the card as if the man couldn’t have figured it out.
“How is London? I think the weather carried over to New York…everyone is dressed like a detective today.”
I wonder if I can work on being more patient before I have children.
“Let’s go to Paris,” I text Caitlin.
I have no stamps.
“Can you please bring me some stamps to dinner?” I text my father. He forgets them. “You don’t have stamps?” my brother says.