Rotten bone from the opening in my hand is starting to drive me wild with indescribable smells. I've been picking at my skin and the infectious red pulsing from my wrist for the latter half of the day now. The surrounding skin is turning brown, three hues lower than what I normally see it as. I’m abhorred. Frightened. My face is running white. 

I’ve already reassured myself that it wasn’t tanning. It's slowly dying.

I haven’t considered the detriment of losing this part of my body yet.  As the idea is almost unfathomable. So many things would cease in my life, so many things just gone. 

My right arm, severed from my body, would be an unmeasurable loss.

I've had a make-shift cast around my arm since my taxi cab collision. The whole fucking thing wasn’t my fault. He was drunk, I was drunk, and the turn of events just ended up being a wicked mess. 

Brooklyn

I’d landed only a few weeks ago to stay with the girl I’d been mailing postcards to. She promised some lavish stay on the south-side of 9th Street. I heard stories of my old country, New York. Stories that grant red tomato sauce conceptions upon my tongue and through my brain, of glorious two story submarine sandwiches for nickels on the dollar. All nine yards. The fastical night-walk paradise of New York now my playground and a dime of a woman I’ve seemed to have scored. 

I played in the day and dreamed in the night. Collecting stones and pennies along the roadways to gather scrap-booking evidence for a time completely unforgettable. I looked like a mess and a junkie, asking names, asking for historical significance, asking for pictures. I viewed myself as this nagging little thing with a devoted attachment to a small town far away from here. Like this was some sort of heaven for me, like I was doing this with no intention to return. 

I’d note the tourists I've seen around my parts. Smearing sun-tan lotions ‘cross their noses and hiking swimming pants high above the waist linings. Desperate to enjoy ninety-six some odd hours with precious gold that has been piling for a lifetime. I know for sure that I looked like that, I know for sure my weekly New York lay was getting sick of it. 

“You know, you’ll be back next summer to see it again. Won’t you?”

We’d gotten breakfast on Third Avenue when I finally came to some conclusion on my trip. 

She’d ordered the breakfast paella and I’d gotten the benedict with jam toast. She smoked cigarettes before and after her meals like some french girl and I’d sit and watch her cheekbones catch morning light. Checking the contrast between her face and the scaling brick buildings behind her, squaring the thirds, quartering the picture in my mind. 

I’d thought that we should break up for the remainder of my trip to New York. 

Deeply, I wanted the exact opposite, but I had to shake her before Thursday evening, which was my last day amongst the city. There were too many things I hadn’t done, too many little pictures I couldn’t take with the presence of this woman at my side. Numbers began crunching, puzzling pieces, and solemn heartbreaking schematics began. 

At first, on my walk away, I pictured her dead to ease my soul. But I immediately began missing her as I turned the corner on Second Avenue. The insides of my psyche began bringing me to the shallow waters of weird, then the deeper unromantic ones. The lost and alone floatation along a desperate sea of people I had to dig myself through, just to get where I needed to go. Hands no longer held, guidance throughout this big city was upon myself.

Immediately began the search for the New York woman. The one with the golden apple centerpiece and the cherry wine suede couch. All in reaction, all in repair to the shock of breaking the heart of someone so much less desirable.

Cornering shopfronts, cornering delis and parlors, I took extravagant pictures and bought crummy knick-knacks. A wild and fast-paced journey around New York’s center that I would have never been able to brace. I didn’t want to act local, I wanted to act strange. I wanted my desperation to spew from my eye sockets and out of my ears all over the bustling New York pavement and along the trousers of the passing businessmen. 

The sun fell out of the sky and I felt the brisk air of modernity strike me. I was ending this day with a drink in my hand and the sounds of street performers in my ears. Scarf and sweater donned, boots laced high, imagining that my life couldn’t be any better than it clearly wasn’t. 

From this view atop the Empire State building, another tourist looks down on me. I imagine. He looks down to see some modern man with a desperate sense of exploration, a taste for the world, and a savings no longer. He doesn’t see me like I see me. He notices the Nikon, the backpack, the little rituals. He thinks;

“Well there goes just another Floridian up for the autumn.” 

Yet I see, looking up, with bad decisions included, the spirit of adventure and a man with no attachment. A tourist of not just the city, of life itself. A man who busted his ass for this, a man who can do whatever he wants. This clarity is now upon me. 

He, up in the rafters is like me, a revenant of the new world. Except I sit on a cornerstone, low below, with thirty-six more hours of experience. 

When I look up towards the night sky, towards the silhouette of this couple standing in elegant grace before a sea of stars, I see the crash and burn of the man. I see him throwing the magazines from atop the table, shouting in hallowing selfishness at his unnecessary attachment. 

I hailed the yellow cab, and I have to admit, I did so in a drunken way. 

I sloppily stumbled into the back seat and poured a little bit of my booze along the ridges of the weather pads. I thought to myself about the great extent of this idea of manhood rivaling a world so contingent on taking it. As my eyes rock back behind my head, with every bump to this journey, I couldn’t help but think of home.