Lilit in Stereo

I think I have had enough of fire.

The thing I love most and least about my apartment is my bedroom window, which overlooks the frantic, noisy, sleepless Metropolitan Avenue. I’ve always been a sound sleeper, and I can drift off peacefully to the sound of car horns and skidding tires. At my parents’ house, when the planes from RDU airport are required to stop flying after a certain hour so that everybody in the nearby neighborhoods can get their rest, I have to leave the TV or radio on just so I’m not overwhelmed by the silence of it all.

Sometimes, though - I wake up. One day last summer, my room started filling with smoke from a fire across the street. Yesterday, there was another fire - a cement truck, the middle of the afternoon, chemicals belching out into the sky. It gets so hot in my little room in the summer. And this summer I’ll be spending three weeks in Israel on a fellowship - how silly am I to get a free vacation, something nice to put on my CV, a chance to meet and work with someone in my field, make new friends who I can hang out with back in New York, etc, etc - only to be obsessed with how I’ll survive in the heat? Almost all the poems I wrote in Spain were about the heat, about sleeping in a little square dorm room with no ventilation. Maybe we are not as far from home as we think we are, he said to her. Maybe it is this hot everywhere.

I am turning in the STA book on Monday. The most surprising part is that I’m not spending the weekend frantically upping my word count or panicking about structure - it’s done, basically. I’m writing Acknowledgements. I’ve already done edits on four of the five chapters with my editor because I was ahead of schedule. It is nice to get to spend a few unencumbered months doing that thing you’ve always wantes to do, getting up every morning and settling into a routine of tea and writing and email and more writing. Even if I get a desk job tomorrow and start working 60 hour weeks, I’ll always be grateful for having had that.

After this, the book won’t be so much mine anymore. It’s off to be edited and printed and illustrated. Of course the words will be mine, and the name on the cover will be mine. But I feel as if I’ve given birth to something that won’t be born until next April. Once the little bundle of mine is sent away, I’ll still get up and look at that empty screen every morning, and the words will come, because they always have, because they don’t know how not to, because I don’t know how to live without them burning out of my fingertips.