saltines and soup

At square in tribeca with the lentil soup. The boys in the booth in front of me get a tuna melt and start going on about the pickle. “So what’s with it? When do you eat it, do you just take bites, do you eat it all at once? Well at what point of the sandwich?” I crush one packet of saltines and pour it into the soup in a heap. Eat it in spoonfuls. New York is at its best- dark, cold, not exactly frozen. Yesterday it was—I will stop saying right and wrong, there is no such thing when it comes to places; they cannot achieve rightness or wrongness and sureness is a fraud. Still, it was the most beautiful, completely buzzing, and I loved every person I laid eyes on, even the working women in trench coats, Romaine with his crazy eyes, the men singing on the streets, cracked and on the edge of sanity. I hadn’t felt so affectionately about the city in months. The only place that holds the future and the past and rolls it all into one, a big bursting burrito dripping with juice. I have a roll of cash in my pocket that I will pay for my soup with, that I bought beer with last night, that I hope to buy a pack of nails, a new sink plug, and fly traps with later, but ultimately expect to lose. Yesterday I walked and walked. I walked from bushwick to greenpoint and then my phone died. I sat down at a bar to charge it, drank, and read a book through to the end of lost men wandering in search of God In America, in women, in experience, of hunger and thirst and eating and drinking to no avail. And so I thought of my father and walked all the way to astoria... I crush another bag of crackers, pour it into the soup, eat more spoonfuls. Now the boys are going through their letterboxds, sorted by date released, oldest to newest. Today I transcribed an interview, a grand one. The subject went on and on about wonderful far out ideas. One of them being about how men, between their adolescent relationship with their mother and romantic or spousal relationships with women (who inspire the same kind of feeling, relationship, love?), are lost. Doomed forever to debate the pickle on the side of their plate. Who knows, really, but I dig it. Especially after reading Kerouac. Men roam and roam and latch onto the recognizable boob, something that comforts, quells. But women do the same, of course. In that quelling though are we not further lost? In reversion we are surely not found… is that where searching leads, back where you started? I guess a relationship in theory, by providing what men seek (comfort, security, warmth), frees its members to do more, but that is far too healthy a model for most people... My mother kept a journal when she found out she was pregnant. She was 23 years old and was told to keep track of what she ate. She gave it to me last weekend and I read it in front of her. Most of it was her apologizing for not eating better, for her anger and bouts of depression, when she threw water at “your father, papa, etc,” and telling me that she feared passing it all on. She spoke of how in love she was, though, and how afraid she was of everything falling apart, especially due to her habit of throwing things. And of course a year after I was born, it did. I thanked her and went into my room. We hadn’t seen each other in awhile, but I’m trying to be a better daughter. I finish the four packets of saltines with some soup left to go. The waiter asks if I want more. No, I say. Thanks. The boys in front of me have left. I leave cash under the plastic water glass and go.