2020
The year of the local. Specifically, the ten-twenty block radius around my apartment on Bleecker Street in Bushwick.
For a time, after the dust had settled and the new paradigm had formalized, we lived like people bound in ascetic fraternity. Breakfast at Paolo’s, lunch at the Salvadoran spot (fried fish over rice and beans, and yucca, always yucca), dinner at mines - and we’re making pasta. We rode bikes and collected unemployment checks, living each day to its relative fullest, in simple serenity.
There was a fullness in the sphere. There were no more hollow moments, as each second passed like a quaver of sunlight upon a leaf. For a time, loneliness was banished to the realm of the unfounded and incorporeal, kneaded away by floured hands making the world’s worst sourdough.
Breakfast at Isaac’s, lunch at mines - we’re making katsu curry - and opening presents back at Isaac’s. Walking to the Staten Island Ferry, and biking back, on my birthday. Breakfast at Jorge’s - we’re making croquettes - lunch at Paolo’s, dinner at 2AM, after the show.
Is this that adult life I hoped for? It felt like it, in the moment. Somehow, it was unattainable before, and is less attainable now, but for that particular slice of life it inhabited us, and made us feel whole. Even surrounded by death, and the tragedy of the world’s continued entropy, it was there I felt my youth for the first time.
For youth is friendship, and the willingness to ignore the rest of the world. It is a place that only the happy and friendly folks can be, when they are working together in communion. Finally, I had felt it - even as I let my beard grow scraggly, I was younger at heart than ever before. Living like a child, I knew that this feeling could only last so long. I also knew, that it wasn’t just one feeling, but a cacophonous roar of the halcyon samsara - call it contentment, or satisfaction, the supreme feeling of feelings. What brought it was not my superior goals of world dominance, or any sort of intellectualism coming to fruition, as my at times gnostika self can lead me to believe, but the brilliant smoothness of a day passed in peace. This is a feeling that the hormones cannot replicate, that the drugs cannot bypass - it is ultimate togetherness, feeling glued together like the crust of a planet bursting with life.
As someone who invents the universe to make apple pie, I am grateful for those blissful months of 2020, where I grasped for a moment what a good life can look like. That it is irrespective of materiality, or of time, or even of progression, but rather, it is like an hour of sunlight, frozen into a window by which ones eyes can adjust to a new morning. That it is like rain, before it hits the ground, but after it leaves the cloud. I know that there are material aspects to the situation, boundaries to the rules - but there is, as I’m finding, always a better way.