[Reader-list] re: saturday in new york

[VinitaNYC at aol.com]

Last night I wrote a sad story but it has been lost in a computer hazard. My 
friend Baber tells me it is good I lost that sad story. What a fine way to 
blow it away. 

Instead of staying sad we toast together to the ghosts that the fbi will find 
in his apartment this evening instead of him, or Saniya or Rehan. We make 
plans to meet in Colombo, Mumbai or lahoreinaugust--maybe a new world in 
south asia?

This morning my eyes open to a different world. The lost story is still in 
the cage of my chest. I am thinking about witnessess and how Saniya and Baber 
have been mine, how they made this tough and angular city gentle and round. 
And how, according to new INS registration laws, they have two weeks to cross 
the circles around the house, around the brownsugarnewyourkcity nation in 
which they lived and dreamed and played in (with me). I feel they will enter 
their own vortex. I will enter mine. 

This is different than saying goodbye to friends in other places. This 
carries a sense of injustice and ache. This was a fast re-wiring of dreams. 
This was goodbye bush, usa, fbi, ins.

And now I have had my last night with them in their apartment - the end of 
Bergen street in Carrol Gardens. It was packed in a day and the cd's, jewels, 
books, clothes have been distributed between a sister in law and a brother's 
ex-girlfriend and we will spend the next two weeks talking like this: 
freedom, travel, movement, no way usa and meet you in an air-conditioned 
cinema in july in colaba, or for hash in peshawar.

Still, i feel lonely. I feel so lonely it hurts. And I am trying not to. I am 
trying to get my winter jacket on so that I can go to that protest.

On the subway platform a woman wearing a white fur vest hands out flyers, 
"one million people protest the war." I get on the brooklyn bound Q subway 
without taking one. I am on the way home and as I get closer, passing 
graffiti on concrete walls, to Cortelyou, that street I cannot wait to get 
to, I start to cry. 

I am hoping to embrace this in the way my friends Saniya and Baber have, 
excited and open to their brave new world. And maybe I'll go to that protest 
now and shake myself a little. Shed a little? Find some new skin? See the 
wonders of protest in New York City and gear up for that trip to Lahore.