but in the end, I missed what it meant

(and smoke away the night) (prelude: I'm sorry to link to MySpace but I could find the song Ariel Ramirez nowhere online...)
I've hunkered down in my living room for the night, armed with tea and bundles of fleece blankets to ward off the cold that has somehow seeped into this New York City spring full of guitar players in Central Park and rolling in fallen cherry blossom petals and waiting with bated breath for summer. Because then! Then best friends from all over the world will be here and we will sit in corners of bars and they will tell me about hikes in Spain and grad school in Argentina and farming in Colorado and all will be right again. Tonight, after another deadline had passed, I watched the moon's reflection in a puddle and wanted so much to tell someone everything because I could see no stars. This light, tonight, this bright moon in a sky with no stars, it is stripping away all that is safe for me. Promises have become the seed head of a dandelion.

tonight you're on my mind

I'm getting sick, which gives me an excuse to sit in my faded red t-shirt , read, and listen to Jeff Buckley:

lover, you should've come over

and of course hallelujah

lived in bars and danced on tables

because deadline is over and i want to hang out with chan marshall

with no lodestar in sight

(music to read by)
I escape sometimes, when the city becomes its darkest, when some of the lights finally dim, when light bulbs flicker, exhausted, crinkling before they become something to trip over in corners of apartments overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. After talking about Melbourne to our waitress who hopes to make it big in film here in New York City, I retreated, for just a minute, to the darkest part of the bar to breathe and search in vain for a juke box. How many times have the stories I watched play out happened before? The numbers being asked for, the girls in their red skirts and tall boots crying on the sidewalks, the musicians heaving their drum sets off blue truck beds, all the lonely hope.