It's here again. The time for ice cream bowls and bare breasts. I flash my shins and pretend I don't notice the men on the metro who stare at my ship-shape hips. Listen to a woman's laugh over the speaker and pretend I'm not. That I'm not curious by nature, that I don't long for more than I can own.
But I rush and I'm here. Trying to outstare again my own native impatience. It takes a long time, learning to take time. Techincally, I'm supposed to be back there, except there's not anyone coming for another 30 minutes or so. I've tucked in those I'm meant to tuck. I'm banking on people being busy, late, rushing without knowing that I, too, am here. On top of the world, looking over old Bucharest blending shamelessly, almost obscenely, with the new. That I am sitting up here in the sun, taking ny peace.
It takes great craftiness sometimes, sitting down. Listening to the pigeons on the roof above me creak. Guide a bug off my leg bare and devil-may-care. Shaving my Father Time beard in the reflection of storm-clouds. I listen to it begging and it's scary, the build-up of my own desire as I invite careless thunder. There's rage building above and to the east, and yet I'm here. This place is my secret. At least for the next 25 minutes.
Finding peace cross-legged never properly worked for me. I find it in the early morning quiet, when the dogs are out. Leaning out my window past midnight, listening to the choir drunks bellow and cuss up my street.
I find it here, wherever here is, in this moment of forced stop. I am giving my time, but nobody asks what I'm taking in return. Nothing is gratis, least of all peace. And there's so much that needs doing before I'm gone, and there's new things to learn and old stories to finish telling. Taking heart and stocking the cupboard. Making movies, catching planes, taking names.
Sitting on top of the city, powerful and forgotten, dormant little warriror-queen from inside a turn-to-stone tribe, I get this certainty, the sense that what I must and what must me can wait.
My trouble with peace is that they came up with ways to tame it. You've seen the way I cook, how I like to play it by ear. Apply the same basic principle to my gut as my freedom. If I cross my legs, I become a worry-harangued lotus. So instead, I stretch out my legs where I find sun and room, and carve out my quiet.
It's coming, but it's not here yet. I'm afraid it is going to end, but more so, that it might not come here. That I could wait on this little hideaway balcony forever, that it might pass me by, that my mouth will go dry with all this happess wanting. That I will be turned into salt if I keep worrying about it.
But whoever she is, she's down below. Suspended mid-frame. I'm up here looking down on her, chasing my high, light up foreign pipe. Peace. Transient. Right now, mine for the taking.
