It’s been six months in New York which is genuinely startling. I remember how we – Cindy and I – desperately counted the days until she would match into a medical residency. For that final year in Miami we lived in a limbo, completely blind to where this journey would take us. I would say stuff like, “a year from today we will know where you match!” or “three months until Match Day!” Things like that. The pace of these final days were brutal. There was an “X” on the calendar, March 21st, and every single day prior was marked by its distance to that date.
This is not to say that our final year in Miami was not beautiful. In fact, it was the best year that we had in that strange city. Friendships solidified into crystals. I learned about the city from those who were born and raised there. They took me fishing in backyard canals and taught us where the best live music would be played on any given weekend. I’ll never forget my time in Miami and I still text my friends down there and they tease me about the cold up here.
Suddenly, however, it was over. Cindy matched into her residency. On March 21st we learned that we would be moving to New York, she would be working at Mt. Sinai Hospital on the Upper East Side. I’m not sure how else to explain the joy of that moment besides that it felt like the huge first breath after a long hold down. It’s dopamine mixed with relief. Mt. Sinai was her top choice. Mine too. We hugged and kissed and celebrated with both of our families. In just two months we were gone. You wait and wait and wait and then it’s over and then it’s a memory.
Six months in New York. Who would have thought? I do think about this often, actually; what childhood Oliver would think about all this. I know that he would assume that I’d be back home in Hawai`i by now, having done my time in California for those four years of college. But I think he’d be stoked. I’d just have to talk some sense into him. Tell him that there are direct flights from JFK to HNL (something that was NOT available in Miami).
So I’m here now in this city that is so tight and dense that it’s bursting. I pile onto subway cars with standing room only, flip off taxis that run red lights, buy groceries from bodegas – you know, stuff New Yorkers do, I guess. I’ve been here for summer, and then fall, and now winter, which means that I’ve sweat my ass off and froze my ears off in just a matter of months. I’ve been scammed into buying baby formula – “soft robbed” as I like to say – and have paid for $80 Ubers to get home from Brooklyn at 2:00AM. All these things are happening, always, it seems. It makes me feel alive to be a part of it. Even to leave my apartment for a coffee is a strange and new joy. I find myself strolling around the neighborhood in the morning frost, searching for the low sun that pours from the cracks between the buildings, sunning my icy face like a cat. This skin on my body is real and it feels things.
I haven’t even gotten into the scoring part, either. As you may remember from my last post, Missing Out, which, in summary, is a frantic and dread-filled stream of consciousness regarding my fear of picking the wrong day to mob down to Rockaway to catch the notorious Hurricane Erin Swell. I feel horrible to have left y’all hanging for so long, so I’ll keep it brief: I scored. The decision that I had made to wait until the following morning was the right one. My hours on the computer, bouncing between forecasting web platforms, wind maps, and webcams was successful. Venture Capitalists have nothing on my ability to forecast.
I started my morning at 4:00AM, catching the 4:20AM (blaze it) train. Take the 6 to the 4 to the A to the S and an hour and a half later you’re five blocks from the beach. That’s not so bad, right? Frankly, I’d double that commute to get the waves we got that day. Right away it was clear that the day was going to be special, purely based on the way that people on the beach were acting. Dudes were straight up jumping around. A group of guys, of which I had made friends on the subway, made it very clear that this was the best day they had seen at Rockaway in years.
“It’s never like this. I swear,” one said.
The air was seventy five degrees, the water the exact same temperature. Warm offshore wind howelled through the avenues and out to see. Overhead to overhead in a half sets rolled through with the cadence of windswell but the power of long period swell. Gotta love those hurricanes. All in all, it was four hours of non-stop offshore beachbreak barrels. Packing closeouts, doggy doors, A-frames, four turns to the beach, you name it, it was all there, over and over again. I spent so long in the water that morning, facing the rising sun, that I got one of the worst sunburns of my life. I didn’t even know that was possible this far north. It was a warm welcome (literally) to surf in New York.
I’ve surfed since. It was a bit colder and half the size. Still, so much fun. It reminded me of those days in college, taking day trips to Half Moon Bay with my buddies. We’d pull up to Kellys and it would be shoulder-high and offshore and we’d skip and run like little kids back to the car to change. I’ll never not be stoked for offshore beach break. That is my beige flag.
Now it’s actually messed-up cold. Like sub-freezing, cold. This is slightly concerning. You know, surfing 45 degree water in 35 degree air. Luckily for me, I haven’t had to make that sacrifice just yet. The surf has been flat and the conditions have been wonky. I am still waiting for the day when a big, long period winter swell heads towards Long Beach with freezing wind straight off the American tundra, grooming perfect, offshore barrels. When that day comes, I’ll be ready. But for now I’m just thankful for the excuse to stay warm.
There has been some traveling too. I’ve been to Hawai`i twice. Spend a week in the Bay. Scored Ma’ili before my buddy’s wedding. Surfed some onshore outerbar Ocean Beach with Duncan – psychotic stuff, truly. So much is happening these days that it’s hard to keep up. I think that’s good for me. It makes me feel alive. Even through all of this, and despite the lack of posting to BambooBlister, I’ve been writing more than ever. This feels good. I’m writing poems again. Trying to submit them where I can but the writing is the fun part. I’ve whipped up a strange short story that I kind of love. I also started writing a novel – something that I always knew I would do but deeply feared actually doing. Kind of in the same way that I looked at college as a child who was too afraid to even spend the night at my friends’ houses. I knew it would happen, but the thought of doing it made me want to throw up.
But now I am doing it. I don’t know if New York is to blame but these feelings that were once those of unease and uncertainty have shifted to excitement and possibility. I’m roughly 120 pages into this book and the story is budding into something I didn’t see coming when I got started on it a few months ago. Writing has been slow going, but consistent. That’s all I can really ask for right now. It feels good to create things again. Bring things to the world that were not there prior. It feels good to be excited again and to feel small again. It feels good to spend cold winter nights at home with my love and to look out of the window and see all the lights of other people that share this world with us.
BambooBlister isn’t going anywhere, but other things are on the horizon. I’m still thinking of ways to share my other writings and work with you all. I deeply appreciate those who have been on this journey with me the whole time. Here is a poem that I wrote on one of our last visits to New York before Cindy and I moved here. It was Cindy’s birthday and we spent much of that warm afternoon in a bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn:
—
On Your Birthday
You are glowing today with a Jack and
Coke in one of those plastic diner cups,
with the edges smoothed over the years.
We sit at the bar up against the window,
the one that faces the cross streets
between a vintage store and a park.
This is where the hipsters live, you remind me,
pointing your long finger, smiling like it’s hot goss.
Your sister said the residents here are “young,”
but what is young to a twenty-eight year old?
The freaky Generation Z that’s replacing us?
The pregnant couple that walks in matching Sambas?
We aren’t old yet, we know that much, but our
youth is melting into the sky and turning blue.
We order Tecate and a shot, reapply sunscreen
at the bar, compare prices on Lyft – adult stuff.
It’s your birthday after all, we can’t help but act our age.
I can smell that whiskey on your lips, lips that move
this way and that, lips I desperately need to kiss.
You keep pointing and you keep talking, it’s perfect.
We grew up together, twenty and twenty-one,
listening to the moon landing on vinyl,
you see, now those people were young!
BAMBOOBLISTER 
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