Once More to the Park

It’s warm enough today to sit outside and be almost comfortable. Six years ago, I used to come here and write when the weather was nice. Before that, this place was a parking lot. It’s been restored to something resembling nature: a wide-open lawn, some hedges and trees and rocks.  But it’s also been modified with restaurants, restrooms, a carousel, and most recently a bar. Nature done right.

I’m thinking about how badly I could use a cigarette. I’m quitting for the third time this week, trying to put off giving another seven dollars to something that wants to kill me. I’ve already accepted the fact that cigarettes will likely take my father one day, and maybe mom too, and yet we keep smoking like a family trying to curse itself. My favorite thing to do all those years ago was to come out here in the sun with an iced coffee and a pack of Marlboro Lights and write until the heat became too much. No chance of that today—there’s not enough heat to go around and I’m sixteen hours hours nicotine-free.

It’s January and the park’s lawn is tan and green. Blades of grass alternate colors, still damp from the disappearing snow. The lawn is roped off, probably to keep it from getting churned into winter mud. The only things allowed on it today are sticks and some dead leaves. The sky is gray. The bare trees are gray. The buildings rising around the park are gray, as are the sidewalks that divide lawn from street (which is also gray).

I’m taking notes in a black journal that I’ve had since college. I used to write in this very notebook at these very tables in this very park, and the scattered dates are weighty reminders of my start-stop relationship with writing. The earliest entries in this notebook are from 2007 and it’s still only half-full. Reading through those first few pages, I see a passage (one of many) about a girl I used to be torn up over. I hardly recognize myself in those entries. The voice sounds familiar and the handwriting is mine, but whoever wrote it didn’t think he’d ever make it out alive, let alone come back to this place with an old notebook and a new perspective. At a party a few days ago my best friend told me he slept with that girl while I was still tortured by her. I thought I should have felt angry or betrayed, but the way my friend closed the door behind him and looked at me so seriously, as if it would kill him if he couldn’t just tell me this one thing before I left, I didn’t feel any of that. I was just glad to have an honest friend, even if it took him a while.

“That was six years ago,” I said, and smiled.

“You’re my brother,” he said.

In the park there’s the rising/falling rumble of passing cars, the tinny leftovers of music dripping from distant headphones, and a man laughing like he’s not entirely sold on the concept, as if he’s laughing just to try it out, you know, to see if it’s something that might one day suit him.