P—W V° 04:04
Clock of the Heart
by Mike Fu
You travel back in time by plane, train, and automobile.
You fly out across Tokyo Bay one April afternoon when scattered boats are drifting across the slate-colored expanse of water, the sky above a turbid gray. You stretch your legs as the Boeing 777 steadily ascends, eventually revealing a sliver of blue on the horizon. Within the hour, you reach cruising altitude and that realm of sapphire and pearl, a realm that exists always in spite of the storms that scour the mortal world below.
The word journey comes from the Middle English journe, from the Old French jornee, from the Vulgar Latin diurnāta, from the Late Latin diurnum, and from the Latin diurnus, meaning “of the day.” In modern English, journey functions as both a noun and a verb, and can denote a literal movement from place to place or a figurative process of becoming.
You think of these things in the week that you spend in New York: the movements that have brought you here, the processes that are endlessly unfolding in and around you. New York City itself was a journey, twelve years of ecstasy and anguish that wrought and tested your being. You are now thousands of miles and almost half a decade away from it. All things feel smaller from a distance, dwindling in influence, a memory turned fiction. But then you’re plunged right back into the implacable, inimitable metropolis, with its infinite grime and grace.
A week to remember. A week to rekindle. A week to revise, to reevaluate, to restore. It is a week frozen in time even as it assumes a shape, the act of remembering stopping you dead in your tracks. You muse on the ghosts of your past, your past selves, as you traipse through Chinatown, East Village, and Greenpoint, while simultaneously recognizing how these days in New York will be committed, are already committed, to your future memory. You revisit people and places, stories and things, yearning for the way they once made you feel.
Inevitably it’s also a week of reckoning. You trundle back and forth across the Manhattan Bridge each day, walk more than 100,000 steps as you trawl old haunts and strike out into new territories. You poke around every bookstore you can find. You meet up for coffee in Union Square, dinner in Crown Heights, coffee in Hudson Yards, lunch in Tribeca, coffee in West Village. Step after step, day after day, there’s not a moment for pause on this journey—you must go through it all, the happy reunions, the flashes of heartache a decade past, the reassuring sameness, the tender newness, celebrating friendship and love, a steaming bowlful of sauerkraut fish, shakshuka and Peking duck, margaritas and vodka spritzes and chocolate martinis, beers upon beers, old and new, new and old, time won’t give me time, and you’re coasting across the bridge again in a car at half past three, head spinning with the everythingness of it, this city that could have gone on forever and perhaps, in another life, did go on, while in your reality it has now been assigned firmly to a place of the past, and time makes lovers feel—
You wake up at dawn and take the D train one last time. New York is a working-class city at this hour on weekday mornings, the subway filled with stoic brown faces catching some last-minute shuteye before shifts begin in downtown Brooklyn, or perhaps Midtown. You’d considered taking a cab, but no, you rationalized with yourself, you’ve never shied away from this journey, and why not? One last foray across the bridge, into the city, wheeling your suitcase the few blocks from Herald Square into Penn Station, down escalators, up and down stairs, onto the platform, aboard the NJ Transit, through the gate, onto the AirTrain, into the departure hall. You check your bag, rifle through your backpack, throw away your water bottle, pass through security.
Day has barely begun, and you’re sleepwalking through the concourse at the end of this trip. Soon you’ll take to the skies again and bid goodbye to the Atlantic Coast, flying northward and westward toward the place you call home. It will be another journey that marks the end of this one, a compact half-day during which you cross meridians and breach space-time and arrive where you started less than ten days after you left. You will look down at the land below and think about how it resembles circuitry, the blocks of housing and industry and urban development suddenly sensible from a distance.
On this day, within this day, you’ll return whence you came and skip forward in time, a single day spanning more hours than should be allowed, thrusting you relentlessly into the future. You’ll move back into yourself, the self of the present, the only self you can know, and remember how you journeyed to that place of memory and, for a while, became mired in the myths of another time.
You fly out across Tokyo Bay one April afternoon when scattered boats are drifting across the slate-colored expanse of water, the sky above a turbid gray. You stretch your legs as the Boeing 777 steadily ascends, eventually revealing a sliver of blue on the horizon. Within the hour, you reach cruising altitude and that realm of sapphire and pearl, a realm that exists always in spite of the storms that scour the mortal world below.
The word journey comes from the Middle English journe, from the Old French jornee, from the Vulgar Latin diurnāta, from the Late Latin diurnum, and from the Latin diurnus, meaning “of the day.” In modern English, journey functions as both a noun and a verb, and can denote a literal movement from place to place or a figurative process of becoming.
You think of these things in the week that you spend in New York: the movements that have brought you here, the processes that are endlessly unfolding in and around you. New York City itself was a journey, twelve years of ecstasy and anguish that wrought and tested your being. You are now thousands of miles and almost half a decade away from it. All things feel smaller from a distance, dwindling in influence, a memory turned fiction. But then you’re plunged right back into the implacable, inimitable metropolis, with its infinite grime and grace.
A week to remember. A week to rekindle. A week to revise, to reevaluate, to restore. It is a week frozen in time even as it assumes a shape, the act of remembering stopping you dead in your tracks. You muse on the ghosts of your past, your past selves, as you traipse through Chinatown, East Village, and Greenpoint, while simultaneously recognizing how these days in New York will be committed, are already committed, to your future memory. You revisit people and places, stories and things, yearning for the way they once made you feel.
Inevitably it’s also a week of reckoning. You trundle back and forth across the Manhattan Bridge each day, walk more than 100,000 steps as you trawl old haunts and strike out into new territories. You poke around every bookstore you can find. You meet up for coffee in Union Square, dinner in Crown Heights, coffee in Hudson Yards, lunch in Tribeca, coffee in West Village. Step after step, day after day, there’s not a moment for pause on this journey—you must go through it all, the happy reunions, the flashes of heartache a decade past, the reassuring sameness, the tender newness, celebrating friendship and love, a steaming bowlful of sauerkraut fish, shakshuka and Peking duck, margaritas and vodka spritzes and chocolate martinis, beers upon beers, old and new, new and old, time won’t give me time, and you’re coasting across the bridge again in a car at half past three, head spinning with the everythingness of it, this city that could have gone on forever and perhaps, in another life, did go on, while in your reality it has now been assigned firmly to a place of the past, and time makes lovers feel—
You wake up at dawn and take the D train one last time. New York is a working-class city at this hour on weekday mornings, the subway filled with stoic brown faces catching some last-minute shuteye before shifts begin in downtown Brooklyn, or perhaps Midtown. You’d considered taking a cab, but no, you rationalized with yourself, you’ve never shied away from this journey, and why not? One last foray across the bridge, into the city, wheeling your suitcase the few blocks from Herald Square into Penn Station, down escalators, up and down stairs, onto the platform, aboard the NJ Transit, through the gate, onto the AirTrain, into the departure hall. You check your bag, rifle through your backpack, throw away your water bottle, pass through security.
Day has barely begun, and you’re sleepwalking through the concourse at the end of this trip. Soon you’ll take to the skies again and bid goodbye to the Atlantic Coast, flying northward and westward toward the place you call home. It will be another journey that marks the end of this one, a compact half-day during which you cross meridians and breach space-time and arrive where you started less than ten days after you left. You will look down at the land below and think about how it resembles circuitry, the blocks of housing and industry and urban development suddenly sensible from a distance.
On this day, within this day, you’ll return whence you came and skip forward in time, a single day spanning more hours than should be allowed, thrusting you relentlessly into the future. You’ll move back into yourself, the self of the present, the only self you can know, and remember how you journeyed to that place of memory and, for a while, became mired in the myths of another time.
2024 © M.Fu