Hi. I’m back from a little break, full of clumsy ascents and descents. In this letter I’m picking at the seams of that polysemous word: flights.
Tonight, I am the woman with the lace trim and shiny hair. How strange it is to look into the eyes of someone I’ve hurt. I was so convinced that nothing had happened to me in years, had forgotten all about the element of surprise, so I’m putting on a brave face, even if everyone else seems to find themselves in equally precarious positions: thrusting their foot through a hole rotted through the floor or sprawling out on the ledge of a rooftop more narrow than their tulle skirts. At the top of the landing, I find myself speaking to someone I recognize as a person I would have sent flying down the steps at some other point in my life. If the chronological cards had been shuffled differently, so to speak. It would have been easy. But right now I’m in a vague state of sainthood, as I guess the drugs have already kicked in, and I’m clutching my silver necklaces to my chest and craning my neck up toward a tunnel of gray with stars like tiny air punctures, which convinces me that the open heavens would gladly take me in at any moment, even if my knees are weak and gathering sooty grime from kneeling on the crowded rooftop. I’m up and down and up and down the stairs, stumbling over hoards of wet shoes. My mouth is a calcified object. I’m praying for a cold beer. Someone actually does fall down the stairs, but I don’t get to witness it. I stay calm until the dawn releases us and I go stumbling down the deserted block, humming something or other about my peace of mind. I’ve convinced myself that I’m a levitating beacon of forgiveness.
==
There are so many beautiful people here. You just have to look, Maddie says to a stranger who has given me a dollar bill for a cigarette. He is wearing a fedora and leaning over a rack of Citi bikes outside of Cafe Gitane. In my mind he is now “Man of Malaise.” The three of us are commiserating about having bedbugs for whatever reason when suddenly he asks us what we enjoy about New York. He appears skeptical of our every answer. He is convinced that nothing is as good as it used to be. Not the music, not the art, not the people. He insists over and over that he’s tried. He’ll talk to anyone, he’s spent so much time dumpster-diving on Spotify. He keeps comparing New York to other cities, like Amsterdam, as if pulling them at random from his hat. Neither of us wants to voice the obvious: why don’t you just leave, then?
I’m convinced Maddie is right, because it’s the first perfect night in a while—walking back to the train on an oddly quiet Houston street in tall boots, a gracious wind in my hair. It occurs to me that that man might be an asshole, but his disappointment seems so deep and sincere, so much older and more exhausted than my own cynicism.
I’m terrible at leaving when I should, but I occasionally find the idea of departure tempting. Especially in the context of a tired scene I’ve witnessed over and over, so predictable I could lipsync along to it: names tumbling out of slack jaws and hitting the floor with a thud, the gutted gossip trailing the scent of some dialed-down version of fame, the wide expectant eyes of someone waiting for a hit of someone else’s supply. I make for those thresholds as one would walk out of a bad movie, but the rooms never end.
Truth be told, I was at the end of my tether, the narrator of Last Summer in the City repeats ad nauseam. Leo Gazzara is a genius when it comes to knowing when to depart. The book echoes with the sound of slammed doors and footsteps on a dark corridor, always precluded by the instinct that it’s time to get the hell out. There’s that late summer disease for anyone living in the city. I get it. You’ve fought the hot months tooth and nail and now you want to submit to the alternative instinct. You want to feel wheels grind beneath your feet, the wind rush down the platform, a sudden weightlessness that comes with departing the earth and its nascent dangers. You want the somatic sensation of being shipped off elsewhere. You work your feet at any opportunity, your brittle ankles snapping. You scrap together vague and arbitrary escape plans, etching blueprints that glow in the dark behind your eyelids. That’s when you know.
As for me, I wait it out. Only when the unbearable overcomes the unbearable and the city begins to feel like a closed circuit. Bad habits encroach on the gravelly shores of every river. Worse memories cling like presperation. The streets are already deserted, because everyone else has already evacuated. Gotten the hell out, as if boredom could be a natural disaster.
==
My grandfather had been a mechanic for American Airlines. At the funeral, all five of his grandchildren are handed pins with metal wings, and a lot of the memories exchanged between us involve being jetted off to different parts of the States at a discounted price. Blue-collar-hard-work-so-we-could-go-on-camping-trips legend. By the time I was alive, he’d retired to a motorhome. My strongest memory involves him taping a halved sheet of copy paper to my back when I’d said I wanted wings. Maybe because he used to call me angel-eyes.
Carmine and I take six planes in a period of two weeks. Common sense and social graces seem to unravel at a certain altitude. Too much empty time, and the aircraft rocks and bumps with one big fidget against our seat restraints. The opposite of flight, really. Everyone’s nerves are ragged, watching the unnatural slow-motion birth of sunlight through a tiny archway.
Trying to smooth it all over, we each take one too many benzodiazepines on our first redeye. Someone we’d met at the airport stops us nearly a week later in a crowded gallery, and we’re dumbfounded when we don’t remember talking to them at all.
==
On the way to pick up the rental scooter in San Michele, Carmine becomes convinced a shepherd we saw someone walking with a leash is an actual wolf. We argue about it for a long time, but I have no concrete evidence for my case. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, I conclude. After we climb up and down many stone steps trying to find the garage, a man with starch white hair and the largest hands I’ve ever seen gives us entry to his dusty lair. He asks us why the hell we came to him when there’s a large service located only a few minutes away from where we’re staying. Because we heard you were the best, I offer, not wanting to betray that we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing. Giovanni is incredibly chatty and slow on his computer, so we spend nearly an hour buttering him up and telling lies—namely that I (the one with the valid driver’s license) am capable of operating a Vespa on the precarious cliffs of the coast, and that Carmine (the one who is capable) will be riding on the back without illegally touching the throttle. He eventually catches onto us. I’ll be calling the police after you go, he says with a wink. My nerves finally come loose once we’re zipping over the gorges. When a dry, fragrant wind wraps me up and fills my throat, I realize this might be the closest we’ll ever get.
==
I spend one long afternoon and evening drinking with Evana and Charlotte. First innocent doses of golden wine in plastic cups in Central Park, but after the last Manhattan at an upscale restaurant, and I’ve convinced myself I can run up the down escalator at an empty lobby in the Rockefeller Center, gleefully defying a shout from a security guard behind me. I barely make it to the top step when I feel the muscles in my calves starting to give out. The metaphor feels so cheap I can hardly acknowledge it.
Staircases hold more of an association with purgatory than with heaven. In the underground train in Naples, they rise in infinite lattices toward a heavenly skylight, or otherwise rise precariously toward a lofted bed in Erchie, covered with rotted white paint chips from the hotel ceiling. We take them on a treacherous shortcut in Positano, climb them up to the clock tower in Siena, scramble down them to an empty beach on rocks that leave serrated impressions in my palms. Steps in stone and marble and concrete, sometimes a thousand at one time until my shins burn all the way up into my lungs.
==
Mirò's production is inspired by impulse, by a suggestion, by a form capable of suggesting a series of things with each thing leading to another. As usual, his woman is wrapped in them as one would be a scarf, and they levitate around her like jagged instruments. Among all of the mellifluous, shimmering landscapes and portraits of Galileo Chini, and the stock-still art nouveau windows and lamps, this is the one violent song. It looks like something that has hit the ground and startled you. It feels like missing the last step on a staircase.
Preserved in a tiny gold frame in the high-up tower of Villa Rufolo, I find their aftermath. The physical thing I mistakenly believed was next, I suppose.
Here, I believe I must have found the heart of a flight. What a flight is, what a flight means. Beyond taking off elsewhere, it is a durational term: there is always the expectation of a landing. Hard or soft, winged or wingless, the adrenaline comes from the anticipation of an end. ===
Beautiful + evocative. These lines !!
“Especially in the context of a tired scene I’ve witnessed over and over, so predictable I could lipsync along to it: names tumbling out of slack jaws and hitting the floor with a thud, the gutted gossip trailing the scent of some dialed-down version of fame, the wide expectant eyes of someone waiting for a hit of someone else’s supply.”
thank you my sweet ;)