August Thresholds

The threshold of sleep is fragile; on one side there are dreams, relief... on the other, the exhausted edge of living effort-- work, sorrow, anxiety, worry.  And on the far side, like unexplored ocean, there is death... or we hope so.

Waking these days in harsh light I feel the summer waning like an old moon. Oppressive heat in August is a little more bearable than July.  I memorized Jane in these evenings just one year ago gathering her various delicacies idiosyncratically...  me knowing it would be her last heatwave.  I have learned not to take things for granted... sunsets, weather, annoyances..shade.

Saturday I stepped outside on 12th Street to the distinct scent of animal-- hot fur, sweaty jungle skin... almost as though the street population of Union Square had migrated a few blocks down... the pungent phantom of exasperation-- of disappointment and failure, inequality and bad hygiene.  The park is filled with demonstrators, vendors, farmers' stalls and sidewalk deal-makers... shoppers, eaters... tourists and thieves... Across the way there is the department-store marvel of Whole Foods-- the behemoth horn-of-plenty of the bourgeoisie... the massive cooling machines bless you as you enter... the color-coded cashier lines humiliate you as you exit... back to the steamy sidewalk lined with defeated people of all shapes and colors with signs and cups and stories... the contrast is a shock.

Today I recall the palpable humidity of Neptune, New Jersey-- a car trip at one of those moments when your relationship is wilted and deflated... and you try some vintage honeymoon clichés-- the shore, the old Asbury Park landmarks.   You stand in the surf being photographed with your flowered dress clinging, your hair blowing in the hot breeze... knowing this is the end of something.  Meanwhile, nearly out of cash, we negotiated a basement room in a cheap motel at midnight.  I climbed the fence and swam naked in the concrete pool while everyone slept.  Even the room-conditioned air was soggy... as though our spoiled love had soaked into the walls and there was nothing left but the horrid turnpike back in a rental car that smelled of someone else's stale beer.  

Years before cell phones, when you were virtually alone with whomever... even with a sense of doom and personal despair... the low ceiling of crushing heartwreck hovering like a storm cloud... the summer was somehow the season of homesickness... of being sent away, of lonely nights in tents or cabins or sleeping bags... staring at the moon, longing for something you knew even then you'd never have.  It was as though you could feel love like seawater evaporating on your skin.  There was even a song, that Neptune summer... waiting for me to change your mind.  I didn't understand, and I let the tide run out, as it does.

In the early morning on the threshold of sleep I can hear the hum of air conditioning in the courtyard, the soft sounds of people stirring in their apartments... no longer putting a kettle on, as I do, but making coffee.  They say some children suffer night terrors because they fear death-- like a premonition, a memory from previous lives... Waking in August heat is disorienting; leaving a late-summer day is inherently sad for some of us... we blink in the darkness of rooms and lose our timeline.  Some of us regret.  

Some nights I imagine myself a desert child dreaming of surf... a deaf child hearing his own song... the far-off whistles of trains.  Stuck in the city-- deprived of beach and horizon vistas, I miss the sea like a lover.  It is the 'missing' that haunts my edge of sleep... the missing of things-- of people, the sense of being loved.  "If ever I would leave you,' my Mom used to sing to me... 'It wouldn't be in summer'.  I was safe.  Yesterday marked four years since she passed away... on the threshold of sleep, into another eternity she left me.  I will follow her one day... everyone leaves, someone said... as I drift in and out I remember so well watching her sleep, at the end; it was all she had left...