Sap

            SEPTA has the kind of smell that you’d never want to experience on a daily basis. I remember my first day getting down into the caverns of 34^th Street terminal and the smell of piss just about hit me in the face. I can’t recall the number of times I’ve had to dress up in a suit or even dress nicely and get on a mud-crusted and scratched SEPTA train floor.

            But there’s the special kind of love I remember when I think of SEPTA. Taking it into Center City to get my racquets strung at Everyone’s Racquet. Taking it to go to the Apple store to get my Macbook looked at. I remember taking it to 15^th street on a Friday afternoon, ordering a latte at a Starbucks, and editing the novel I’ve yet to finish. To Chinatown, for eats and Tea Do, that venerable pantheon of late-night Asian gatherings.

            It’s odd the nostalgia that sometimes hits me when I think of Philadelphia, the city where I lost a sense of idealism. Yet I only spent a total of a little more than three years there. So I do wonder what exactly I have to be nostalgic about. Perhaps my best memories funnily enough are Feb Club in 2012. I remember drinking a lot. I probably had more alcohol that month than in all of the other months of my life put together.

            Perhaps it’s the relationships. I remember drinking martinis at the Franklin after the first Feb Club event. Getting ice cream at Franklin fountain with a lady friend. Getting a friend drunk on wine in Rodin. Having fun at Plough and the Stars. Sticking to my drink of choice, a Seven & Seven (whiskey and 7-up). I remember class as an afterthought; I had to bring my racquets to Chaucer and Milton so that I’d be able to play tennis in the afternoon. Nothing beats reading dry medieval literature like beating yellow felt balls while running on asphalt.

            Not going to lie, these past few days at home have been filled with solitude. There’s days on the weekend where I wake up and have maybe two conversations with other people. It’s not that I can’t stand being alone. I like silence and time to hear my own thoughts. I like to read (or so I try to tell myself these days) and I like to write. It’s that I’ve realized there’s kind of an emptiness that I haven’t been able to fill. And so I think I’ve become more reserved and shyer since I’ve come back home.

            I’m working on a novel and it’s not going well. I’ve tried to put together an outline but whenever I get into plot and characters I get stuck. It’s not that I don’t have themes to write about—I do, about morality and religion and love—it’s that in Gertrude Stein’s words, I had the ‘syrup but it wouldn’t pour.’ So I’m stuck, in a kind of writers’ block. I’m hoping it’s a temporary phase, that a drop of solvent in the viscosity of my imagination will render my sap into a liquid.