My Golden Birthday

Scrawled by streetlamp light (can we still call them sodium lamps?),
1:05am EST, March 23rd, 2005,
restless in a queen sized bed uncomfortable like a marshmallow trough, sinking in the middle, but at least I have a place of privacy and my period of bodily and emotional trauma from the sickness and the moving are making a graceful exit.

One of those nights when I again feel like adventuring out on strange streets in my maroon nightgown [those familiar with my "Freddy" story from Poland will understand this more intimately] -- instead I venture out onto my gritty "balcony" -- a fire escape -- and feel an unthreatening chill ... spring is finally, finally here.

Returned to my room and seated before my expanse of glass, beneath the iron spirals I catch a panorama of ungodly-hour street life: an old hunched man systematically rummaging through the sidewalk trash mounds awaiting weekly pickup, collecting bottles?, or something that clinks into his little rolling shopping cart. He looks around anxiously for possible observing eyes -- little could he suspect a girl on the fourth floor sleepless in her transition to womanhood.

It is my birthday, and when I draw the blinds there is close to a full moon in the sky, high in the sky that I spy between brick arch and iron ladder -- this is a great present to me. Brings me to thoughts of wilderness and wildness and the fact that I think random roamings in one's pyjamas is romantic.

I really enjoy my room, with high ceilings and double windows framed by a brick arch outside protecting the escape ladder at a diagonal. I feel like I am before a stage -- or perhaps on one? When I lean out, I can see the Hudson river, and the lights from the Jersey high rise apartments opposite reflect in its blackness, making me think of carnival when I walk home to a hardy woman selling "CHHUUURRRROOOOOSSS" outside the subway station and the lime green gated front steps of my walk-up.

I still hear the bottle man in the distance -- I last saw his stooped shadow walking along my side of 136th, but reflected in the facing side's second floor windows.

***

When was the last time an audience has had to become strangers to themselves in watching something entirely new, something they could not recognize, something they had to decipher?

What is the eventual purpose of outsidership, what kind of value can we put upon moments of watching, such as my secreted short of life's continual struggle?

What is Otherness? Can we not train our societies to marvel at it -- whatever it is -- rather than fear and seek to obliterate it?

***

From Bill Young's modern dance class today:

Sometimes you move; sometimes the movement moves you.

Where am I moving next? How am I getting there?