XXIX. A Girl, A Taxi, A City.

I tell the driver the address twice.

Once for clarity. Once for conviction.

He nods and starts the meter. The numbers begin their climb, measuring distance in increments too small to be called progress, too deliberate to be called mercy. The city opens around us like a wound that never healed quite right, its lights stitched too tightly to the dark, each neon seam holding back something older than electricity. An animal dark. The dark that remembers when streets were rivers, when buildings were forests, when arrival meant only that you had not yet been devoured.

The air in the taxi is dense with overlapping tales. Exhaust fumes braiding with someone's perfume, a sweetness trying to mask the mechanical hunger of the city. The runway still buzzes within me, a frequency lodged between heartbeat and engine, between the body I carried onto the plane and the body that staggered off. Lighter, yes. But certainty that has leaked out somewhere over the ocean, through the cabin's pressurized air, and I am now all aperture, all porous, drinking in the strangeness.

For a few blocks I just watch.

Everything feels translated into something adjacent to reality. The traffic lights perform their liturgy of red, yellow, green, a prayer for order in chaos. But what is order? What is chaos? The lights change and change and the cars obey or they don't and still the rain falls, indifferent as a god who has grown tired of creation. Signs shout in fonts I recognize but don't fully trust. Faces pass the windows like frames of film, people who seem to know where to go, their certainty a violence I can barely witness. I want to ask the street for instructions, to kneel on the wet pavement and press my ear to the asphalt, listening for something that sounds like home. But home is a word that has become suspect. A word that has grown teeth.

The billboards loom overhead:

BUY. BEGIN. BELONG.

Their glow folds across my lap like false holiness, cold light masquerading as warmth, as welcome, as absolution. The advertisers know something about hunger that I am only beginning to understand. That we are all starving for proof that we exist, that we matter, that our small hungers count among the hungers of the world. For a moment I let it. For a moment I pretend these are not commandments but invitations, that somewhere in this city there is a place with my name written on it, a room that has been waiting. But waiting requires faith, and faith requires a self, and I am not certain, anymore, who that is. The self that boarded the plane or the self that deplaned? The self in the passport photograph, frozen in that terrible flash, or this self, liquid and uncertain, running like rain down glass?

Water runs down the glass in rivulets that refuse to follow straight lines, turning every building into a watercolor memory. Edges bleeding, details dissolving into impression. The city unmakes itself before my eyes.

The city offers me this gift: dissolution.

And I, being what I am, thirsty, too thirsty, accept. Somewhere in this liquid distortion, the city becomes beautiful. Becomes bearable. Becomes possible.

Sitting in the backseat, I am both the passenger and the luggage, checked, fragile, marked with warning labels no one bothers to read. Handle with care. This side up. Unfit for carry-on. They should have written: Contains damaged things. Contains a girl who once believed in destinations. Contains the sediment of every goodbye that masqueraded as hello.

The driver taps the wheel in rhythm with the wipers.

Thump. Pause. Thump.

A metronome for displacement. A pulse that is not my pulse but borrows my blood to keep time. I study the back of his head, the way his shoulders curve toward the steering wheel like a question mark that gave up waiting for its answer. What does he carry? What small griefs does he pack into the trunk of each shift, each fare, each mechanical smile? I wonder what he sees reflected in this moving mirror, this rearview confession booth, how many lives pass through his night shift and never turn back. How many arrivals that were really departures in disguise. How many goodbyes dressed up as hellos, lipsticked and perfumed and lying through their teeth.

The city flickers past in tableaux.

A restaurant already full of laughter, its windows fogged with the breath of people who belong to each other, even temporarily. They eat and they laugh and they do not know I am watching, that I am pressing my hunger against the glass like a child at a candy store window. That I would trade everything. The suitcase, the ticket stub, the address I gave twice, for one moment of that warm, carnal belonging. A man with a bouquet crossing against the light, his flowers bright and reckless as a dare. The red of the roses cuts through the gray like a scream. Like proof that someone, somewhere, still believes in gestures. A child chasing her own reflection in a puddle, her small hands reaching for the girl who lives beneath the surface, the one who has never to go anywhere, who can stay in the same place forever, untouched by time or travel or the terrible knowledge that we are all of us exiles from some country we can't name.

I press my palm against the cold window, cold as a gravestone, cold as realization, and commit them to some chamber of myself that might need them later. The way a child copies handwriting before understanding what the words mean, hoping fluency will come. Hoping that repetition will eventually sound like truth, that if I perform arrival long enough, convincingly enough, I might one day wake up and find I have, against all odds, arrived.

I want to weep for everything that welcomes me without knowing my name.

I want to weep for the restaurant, for the man, for the child. For the driver who drives and drives and never arrives anywhere that matters. For the city itself, exhausted from welcoming, from opening its arms, from pretending it has room for one more stranger, one more hunger, one more wound seeking a place to finally close.

We keep inventing destinations to escape the one place that asks for nothing.

The thought arrives unbidden, heavy with its own weight, sinking through me like a stone through water. Perhaps no arrival is real. Only the slow, bittersweet erasure of where we were before now. Only the amnesia that allows us to say "I am here" without adding "but I am also there, and there, and there, scattered across a dozen cities like ash, like evidence, like the breadcrumbs of a girl who thought she knew the way home". Only the way distance turns memory into mythology, turns the past into a place that might never have existed at all, that exists only in the salt-taste of recall, in the way certain light slants and suddenly you are eight years old again and your mother is calling you in for dinner and you haven't yet learned that leaving is the only thing you will ever be good at.

The driver glances in the mirror, catching my eye in the silver sliver of reflection.

"First time here?" he asks.

His voice is kinder than it needs to be. Kind in the way that suggests he knows something about arrivals, about the particular loneliness of a first night in a strange city, about how the buildings press in and the streets twist and you realize, with a cold that settles in your bones, that no one in this entire city knows you are alive. That you could vanish and it would take months for anyone to notice. That you are, in the most literal sense, nowhere.

"Yes", I say, though I suspect I have been arriving all my life…that every place I've ever been was just another version of this backseat, this rain-streaked window, this slow procession through streets that don't recognize me yet and perhaps never will.

That I am condemned, by some defect of spirit or architecture of self, to be always arriving, never arrived. To be always between, always in the pause, always in the held breath before the door opens and you step out into your new life and discover it is just your old life in different lighting, with different props, with the same exhausted actress playing the same exhausted role.

Outside, the world stops pretending to move.

We hang suspended in the intersection, caught in amber, caught in the terrible clarity of stasis, while the rain continues its patient work of washing everything away. This is what rain knows that we do not: that erasure is a kindness. That sometimes the most merciful thing is to blur the edges, to soften the hard lines, to make everything run together until you can't tell where the city ends and you begin, where the past ends and this present moment, poised on the knife-edge of now, makes its cut.

Somewhere beyond the glass, a siren threads through the air. Rising, urgent, pulling the night taut like a wire about to snap. Like a nerve. Like the last thread holding the world together. Ambulance or police or fire, it does not matter. Someone's emergency becomes everyone's background noise, a reminder that the city never sleeps because it's too busy dreaming other people's disasters. Too busy attending to its wounds. Too busy counting its dead.

When the siren fades, the silence that rushes in to fill its absence feels earned.

Sacred, almost.

Such silence is a room I could live in. The silence has furniture. Has windows. Has a small bed where I could finally rest. Though already the light is changing, already the driver is moving his foot, already we are being thrust back into the machinery of arrival, and the silence closes its door, and I am outside again, watching.

The light turns green. The driver shifts his foot from brake to gas, and we continue our slow pilgrimage toward whatever address I gave him, whatever fiction of belonging I've convinced myself waits at the end of this ride. Toward the place where I will unpack my suitcase and hang my dresses and arrange my books and pretend, pretend, pretend that arrival is possible, that arrival is real, that one day I will wake up and not taste departure in my mouth like blood, like rain, like the copper-bright truth of it: that I am the girl in the taxi, always, forever, driving through rain toward an address that doesn't exist, toward a belonging that recedes like horizon, like promise, like every beautiful lie the city whispers when it wants something from you.

The meter climbs. The rain falls. The city swallows us whole, one intersection at a time. And I go on arriving.

For what it’s worth,

-Charlene Iris

One thought at a time.

One truth at a time. 

Because some epiphanies stay with you.