the guez

But of course, there is Brooklyn. And then, there is summer in Brooklyn.      I was sitting in the sunbeam on the armchair, muddling in a friday heaviness; sleepy with sad. Katerina was sitting on the couch, dejected from her job search. “Bah,” I said, legs over the side of the chair, a scrooge in the sunshine.      “Hmm,” she said.      “Boo,” was my response. We sat there a while longer in the thick heat, not saying much else. Katerina looking at something on her laptop, I looking at nothing.      “You know what we ought to do?” she said after a while of this, after I had sighed twice and scowled out the window.      “Burn some sage?” I said without looking up, my eyes closing a little at some new pessimism.      “Burn some sage? I was going to say go to the beach.”      “Oh…” I rolled over like a cat to the other side of the chair. “We could do that too.”      “No, let’s burn some sage,” Katerina said in the way that makes me love her. “I like that idea.”      “

We could have left it alone. A pearl. But we were human, and so instead chose to follow to see where it led us, muddying up the story, hurting ourselves.

We finished shooting at midnight on Adam’s last night in the Barcelona. It was a Sunday and all the stores had closed, so we huddled around the lone avocado that I had purchased the day before and split it three ways for our dinner. Adam rounded up all his gear and fell asleep exhausted, Chris stepped into the garden to call his girlfriend, and I dragged a chair into the hallway and tried to understand why I suddenly felt like crying. I wrote out a postcard to Sarah: I don’t want to go back to Brooklyn.         Finally Chris emerged. “Is Adam asleep?”         “Yeah,” I said, wiping at my eyes.         “Do you want to go out and try to find some food?”         So Chris and I set out into the deserted streets in search of food. Through the ghostly, empty labyrinth of the Goti, weaving our way past the building shaped like a boat, across the road by the sea where the late night skater teens eyed each other, then we sat awhile, singing songs by the harbor while the boats twinkled in

The number one thing we all spoke about afterwards was how present we were. All our past and future heavinesses stayed behind in the states, making us as light as air and quick to laughter.         “You know what’s so great?” Adam said, midway between a your-mom joke and an instruction to take a left at yet another breathlessly beautiful building. “Not once have we… you know what-- never mind.” There was no point in drawing attention to it.         “No, YOUR mom has junk that is also heavy,” I chimed in. They were still laughing at my terrible delivery as we rounded the corner and made our way to breakfast.