xoxoANP!

I woke up today before my timer flicked my globe light on.

This weekend I finished installing ceiling-to-floor curtains in my bedroom, allowing me to keep the blinds rolled up and let natural light weave its way through the white linen fibers without worrying about the sixty-something single guy across the way seeing me.

I puttered out to my foyer, checked a watch on my desk, and decided getting up before seven is insane. I made my way back to my bed, my right foot meowing as she pushed her way off my fuzzy white throw rug. I slid under my fluffy down comforter, a move made easier by the low coefficient of friction courtesy my silk slip.  My bed was still warm.

I rolled onto my side and looked at the diffuse light through the curtains. I could go for a run, I thought, thinking of how nice another bar would look on my nikeplus graph. Then I worried about my blood sugar, thought back to the 5 a.m. Wednesday morning crew bus, gnawing on a zone bar as we bounced out to Derby. We never got on the water before 5:45 so I could nosh on a bar now and get back up in forty minutes, I thought.

I drifted back into sleep, arms hugging the soft folds of my blanket, skin smiling against the high thread count of my freshly-washed-albeit-slightly-grimy white sheets.

* * *

In my dreams I was in a home with dimmer lighting. I am folding clothes in a bedroom without windows, laying some skinny jeans into a pile, sifting through some business casual. These are clothes I am parting with, donating, otherwise shedding from my life. I can hear the voice of a man I’ve been getting to know but I can’t see him, just the clothes, my arms folding them. And piles of other stuff, too: in this dream it seems I am getting rid of things, transitioning, possibly moving. I see myself for a moment, in my new short haircut, a striped light blue button-down, light heathered grey dress pants, long and wide and crisp crease down the front.

I see a cardboard box, hear the clanging of dishes in the nearby kitchen. There is a door to the outside in this kitchen, a door that lets in sunlight. The screen door is closed but the door is open. I can feel the breeze, smell the chlorophyll.

It is the rich kind of dream that seems to span days. I wake up worried that I’ve missed my first conference call, but no. I immediately think, of my dream: I am walking away from that which I no longer need. And also, I want a pair of pants like that.

I roll towards my bedroom window and notice that a round prism I’ve hung is playing cat’s cradle with the sunlight. There are tiny dots of rainbows sprinkled onto the surface of the curtains, as if the prism was a salt shaker and these rainbows, smaller than a pencil eraser, were adding some flavor to these folds of white.

* * *

A class of young students gets on the F train at the 2nd Avenue stop. There are perhaps a dozen of them, I’m guessing seven or eight years old. They have necklaces of string and paper; the cards-as-pendants read PS something or other, something Ridge Street, New York, NY, with a phone number. They’ve written their names on these cards, I imagine their chubby finger stumps gripping a number two pencil, carefully kissing the lead to paper. Jorge. Asha. Tyrell.

The train surges forward from Broadway Lafayette and the seven tykes holding on to the bar next to me squeal in delight as they lose their footing and all rush towards me. I instinctively put my arm out. They are giddy, their eyes moist with excitement regarding whatever today’s adventure might be. I cannot help but smile, love. I think of a teenager in Brooklyn informing me, “You got deep dimples,” and the memory makes my eyes smile too.

I notice the moist dark brown eyes of a black boy who is jabbering with an Indian girl with a shiny long ponytail. His lashes are like hands reaching out and flapping over his eyes, which dart around, taking it all in, and his big smile reveals the snaggled teeth of someone who’s had many visits from the Tooth Fairy in the past year. His lips move rapidly, his eyes grow large every ten words or so, and all the while his right hand grips mightily to the metal bar.

This sea of life is surrounded by seated commuters, sagging older folks, cynical twenty-somethings. We are on our way to jobs, jobs we go to at least five days a week. Most of us know exactly what today’s non-adventure will bring. I see the warmth in the eyes of a few other folks letting the energy of these kids pour over them. They are grateful for these kids on a field trip. I wonder what thoughts are coursing through the brains of these grown-ups.

The chatter of these sprites sounds like primary colors, rainbows sprinkled onto a sea of mute adults trapped in khakis, trench coats, dreams on snooze.

Nietzsche once wrote something about giving birth to dancing stars.

This is a lie, I think as I settle my headset onto my head and get ready for the third call of the day. From my desk I can see the McGraw Hill building at 11:00, the Carter Hotel right at noon, and the top of the RENT billboard at 1:00. It is midtown New York City and according to popular media it is fabulous.

The lie being this: that every day cannot be a field trip, that life must be like a subway line with a fixed track and regular stops and a known, measurable, predictable route and destination.

* * *

Last night, probably to cheer me up, a colleague took me to a Literacy Partners benefit, where after readings by A. J. Jacobs, Ann Patchett, and others, two adults learning to read took the stage. As a thirty-something man read his speech, voice hesitant and flat and jerking like a subway, I welled with emotion and awe at the fears he must have overcome to head into a classroom and admit I do not know how to read, to work to learn the alphabet, to close the book on his past of being whipped by his mother, shuttled around foster homes, marijuana by age six and cocaine by age twelve.

For my daughter, he said. He wanted to be able to be a good man for his daughter, and was grateful for his wife. “My beacon,” he said, after sharing that he is five and a half years sober. “You know, I wanted to learn how to read so I could help my daughter with her homework. And now she says, ‘Daddy, did you do your homework?’”

The crowd laughs.  I look up to the jewel-like lights of the New York State Theatre at Lincoln Center, trying to keep the tears balanced.  They spill.  I am glad that my mascara is waterproof.

A thirty-five year old woman, a bit further along in her reading, shares her story of being a child in St. Lucia, missing school in order to help her family pick bananas. She would miss every other day and fell further and further behind, until, what is the point? She says this word several times, bananas, and it is rich and round the way she says it, her voice a rubied amber. Bananas. Her voice becomes trimmed with ruffles and waves, like the edge of a crepe, when she speaks of being able to read books to her children at night.

Can you imagine taking a dive into a world so new as a full grown adult? Unlocking this frontier, these reading rainbows, and making sense of what before had been white noise, unintelligible, invisible? They had set aside their fears, they said to themselves, Yes I can, Yes I will, A B C D E F G.

All of this is to say that I’ve decided to leave the corporate world, that I made my intentions known to my employer yesterday, that after having had a six-figure base salary for the past year and my very own apartment in Manhattan for the past several months, I’ve realized they are not quite the rainbows that I thought they’d be, or that I once thought they were.

I see them now, like blobs shifting into words for an adult learning to read. I see the breadcrumbs I’ve been leaving for myself all along, they’re like rainbows on white curtains, sparkling with brilliant brisance. Before clouded by noise — but this is what Dad did / show those econ majors and frat boys and football players that you can beat them / wouldn’t it be nice to make a big donation to your hometown high school — they now cut through and sing to me in Technicolor.

This is what you are meant to do, ANP. You have spent your entire life doing it, furtively, and now you can do it out in the open. There is nothing to fear.

I hear, I see, I get it.  I’m with you.

And so begins my journey, I am that excited snaggle-toothed black boy on the subway, eyes moist with the anticipation of what will today bring.

And tomorrow.

And the day after that.

And the next forty years.