Held, Steady  

I’d like to be buried in the bass line of The Weekenders. That’s not a morbid request — it just feels like home. It feels like someone taking me by the hand and leading me into the Bowery Ballroom, once the openers have gone and finished their sets. And in that moment, it’s just me, and this reverberation that’s rippling through the floorboards until it meets my shoes — my peeling, cherry-colored Chelsea boots that I bought on Spring Street. When I cue that song, it’s simply me and The Hold Steady, selling me this intoxicating blend of grit and loneliness and tighten-your-helmet strap type of love.

 That was my New York. This place of magical oddities in which I woke up every morning wondering if I was going to survive the city I lived in. I’d barely been in New York a month before Hurricane Sandy hit; I spent my first Halloween not in the sheer darkness of a bar or house party, but in that utter stillness created by power outages and fear.

I watched Com Ed trucks pour into the city in the weeks that followed —yes Com Ed, as in Commonwealth Edison, the power utility from my native Chicago. Not to be confused with New York’s own Con Ed, short for Consolidated Edison. Apparently, Edison got the leg up on abbreviations too. Who knew. With a little extra power, the city caulked its holes. The tireless denizens of all five boroughs boarded their trains, bikes, and buses each morning, and I watched.  I tried to take up only the space I needed. I had not earned my place yet, but I was trying to cut my teeth — to tame the anxiety and rigor into routines like the generations before me.

The subway was the most constant part of my life for five years: the networks of pipe cleaner train lines cutting through the underbelly of the city brought me to the people who would become my people. If every MTA platform was purgatory, well by God it was worth the wait for where I was heading. I surrendered myself to the darkness, and within months, I’d grown to love it. The train was an omnipotent way to know that should there be some pin drop within the city, I could get there, leave there, or simply exist there, if I wanted to.

I always made my mother ride the train when she visited. I grew frustrated — disheartened — when she would cab. I needed her to understand what this network had taught me, not just about cartography and cardinal directions, but about where I figured into them. I learned more about empathy watching people on the train than I did in all the years before I ever set foot on one. Because no one ever tells you that sometimes when you’re not looking for love’s austere and lonely offices, you simply walk right into them. Every day. On an Astoria bound Q train. On the Brooklyn Bridge bound 6. When the L reaches 8th Avenue.

 And that’s why New York is the utopia you must defer to: because after the doors would hiss open, and I’d walk out and up the stairs back into the world, those tiny lessons in compassion would remain fused to my thumbprints.

 The record The Weekenders sits pressed into is titled, Heaven is Whenever. And just like the train, or stepping out onto the Bowery as the winter wind whipped through, I was surrounded at every angle I craned my head towards: a chaotic peace steady as a hand at the small of your back. Held, steady.

Mackenzie Moore is a writer and illustrator based in Los Angeles who currently writes for television and podcasting. Her chapbooks are forthcoming in September 2020 and Winter 2021 with Variant Lit and Kelsay Books. Twitter: @mxkmoore, Instagram @mxkmoore_prints