Everyone Leaves New York

 So I admitted I was desperate, (his dreams didn’t help,— apparently we were divorced over a misunderstanding and I was remarried and pregnant, and he was on his knees, begging me to take him back)  hoping that this would mollify his sense of being rushed out of bed so that the day could proceed with our plans to switch off— meaning after his morning library visit with b. while j. slept, he would steal away with both and then I would be left with perhaps one precise thought or motive in a quiet bungalow. Though I do get claustrophobic in this little office, or room, if one could call it that. I must be simply delirious to have a room with yellow walls, which we suppose was once a pantry as it jaunts off of the kitchen which is in disarray with salad and lemon cake and tea left from his birthday, in which I used ten lemons from the tree.  The ants, I’m certain aren’t happy with me, which is perhaps why they like to invade the laundry and the bath.  j. talks to them saying “ooo” and pointing.  b. talks to them too, but mostly he’s yelling to appease a bee or a spider which I keep telling him has no effect whatsoever, except once on San Juan Island I saw a spider big enough to frighten me on the edge of one of the beds, and when b. saw it and yelled (only a baby then) the spider lifted one of it’s legs in alarm, and that is how they listen. I keep thinking that the curtain in the house next door is actually an arm reaching out to signal me.   I’m not sure how people register that they are listening, especially when it comes to the movement of the familial unit.  This house is large if you are someone who doesn’t pay attention to the kind of things like the cost of a toddler bed, or the notion that somehow, we are all in the same room, in terms of the way sound travels and so there aren’t really secrets except if someone is sleeping, and even then.  If someone wanted to break in we could certainly hear it.  When the neighbors come home, or when their phones ring or when they do the dishes I can hear that too, which alarmed me at first but not anymore, like those last neighbors whose voices traveled through the heating vents and the little drummer boy, somehow our relation to the closeness of other beings is heightened here. Though not like New York. Everyone wants to suddenly leave New York, which I understand, to the same degree that I’d like to arrive there.   The degree of the magnet pulls in both directions.  As soon as I left there, the myth of the city became bankrupt, as if stepping off of an indoor roller coaster to get a breath of fresh air after six years captivity.  It isn’t that I don’t believe it, but myths sometimes fit and sometimes they are relegated for costume practicality.