Between Worlds — Far Away Is Here

I write to you from the world between worlds. Where thought meets dream, and day meets endlessness. It is the mildest winter I remember--ever, ever, ever... Sunny afternoons where I notice some people hanging out in sweaters, in flip-flops, in beanies, in short skirts, shift into temperate evenings, where the rain begins and it's warm, gross rain, the kind that sticks to your skin. One afternoon I remember recently explains it perfectly--I had rushed somewhere to get to a subway platform that was silent, still, only to find out from the digital display that the next train would be coming in ten minutes. As I caught my breath I began to sweat and I noticed all the people standing silently around me were sweating too, standing in their heavy coats in the mild air, like children not getting the season we expected. Occasionally, a cold wind picks up and we are reminded that it is February. February 2020 to be exact. At the yoga studio the other day, I heard two women talking about how it makes no sense that it's only February, that it feels like it's already been a year, already 2021. Hold up, hold up, I say. I didn't do much that I can report as a far-away adventure. Slowly, we are bringing a new semester to life at NYU. Mostly I have been staying in, at my new-home-finally-feeling-real-and-so-good home, at the edge of two neighborhoods. We are in New York but there is the coronavirus growing, growing in China, and so many of my students' think of their families back home, staying indoors with cards, with the internet, with whiskey, and we wonder about masks how and if and why the virus is way here now too. I am writing a story about Lebanon. (Always Lebanon.) A big election for us Americans is happened last week in Iowa, and nothing real came from it. And where am I? I am here, in my apartment, here at my computer, here, at the coffee table, playing with watercolors. And I have been reading and watching stories, and suddenly so many of these stories are about fantasies and ghosts and superpowers and other lands and language as material. I am here and everywhere. Far away. We are miracles and magic, we are memory and history brought to life, we are...