New York is just crowded enough that your image is in some stranger's picture existing in the background while you're oblivious to the fact that you've just been immortalized into someone else's family picture. They'll one day gather around and wonder who that black girl with a lost expression on her face is, they'll make up stories about you and you'll exist independently in different continents, places you've always wanted to go but was never able to afford. Maybe your picture will survive the end of the world and your tights and shorts will be the only clue the new generation has into what kind of life we lived before the oceans swallowed us whole.
It is the perfect city to pretend to love a man who will never find his way into the stories you'll tell your grand kids about how all the men wanted you and how beautiful and skinny you once were but you chose their daddy because you loved him...or because of his money, you'll reassure them that either will do. It is the perfect city to love men who will never love you back, who will not eagerly ask God to bless you every time you sneeze, who will enjoy the vibrations of the bed as you're raked over and over by the sobs of tears that want to escape your eyes.
The cold will keep your body severely explored as he hollows out your bones trying to make claim to this land that was once undiscovered, once uncharted but this will not be enough to make him stay. He will eventually want to leave, let him leave. Countries are colonized all the time, men love to conquer things, someone else with strong hands will sail your seas because you want him to and he will not mind that he didn't get there first, he will stay because your seas are far too beautiful and becoming to leave.
The restaurants will make you step out of your house after your first heartbreak has cleared to make way for the morning. You will emerge to get brunch because you are now the type of girl who gets brunch and you will walk through crowded and dirty streets to that tiny ramen shop down the road. You need food for the days when the tears no longer come and the sad songs pack themselves up again and your belly has had enough of ice creams from tubs that were made when you tried to tame the nomad in him.
Alcohol was made for times like these when you need to remember to forget him in clubs frequented by men whose hands feel just like his. Never mind the hangovers, it's a small price to pay for all the puking done intimately between your toilet seat and you while you purge yourself and everything that is him in you.
You should keep frequenting poetry clubs even if it reminds you of how you met between poems about ex-girlfriends and God. You are a long poem he abandoned unfinished but your ending would have taken his breath away, not all men can handle such a beauty, be glad he didn't stick around long enough for it. Be glad he left you with loads of terrible poetry that you'll never show anyone.
You'll meet the next one in one of the numerous crevices and you'll be glad that he didn't stay. It is not a crime not to love, sometimes being in like is more powerful.
but you have such skinny, straight legs.
Legs made for falling into things we hope will last forever.
Everything i know about love, i learnt from you, New York.
leggy.
