Cleveland starts at JFK in New York City with the Baywatch posters in the hallways which I think will be the same as the ones in Cleveland. They're here for people coming from Cleveland, for people going to Cleveland, for people who want to be somewhere other than where they are.. The Baywatch posters are here for me.
I am ready to fall in love with Cleveland. I am ready to fall in love period. I have always been ready to fall in love. Even when i'm in love I'm ready to fall in love. Cleveland is for lovers and Cleveland is for me. I’ve never been to Ohio but I’ve liked so many people from there who left.
I am going to Cleveland after the worst depression of my life, a time when I woke up every morning to a feeling of expansive blankness in all directions, when I convinced myself I had never known love, never seen the sky blue, nor felt the sun on my skin, where even when there was blue sky and sun on my skin I didn’t, couldn't, feel it.
These days passed mostly in New York City—a place near and dear to my heart where I’ve felt great joy in the past but which, in the winter of 2017, felt like a hell of freezing rain and black sneakers. I’m not from New York but everybody I’ve ever fallen in love with is, or at least lived there at some point, or at least I've pictured them there, even if they've never been. I don’t know anyone in Cleveland. So in that sense Cleveland is a fresh start.
I get a text at the airport from the coordinator of the artist residency I’ll be attending. Its a shared contact of somebody named Jeff in whose cottage I'll be staying. Now I know they have cottages in Cleveland and not much more. Paul Simon gets stuck in my head, "they've all come to look for America."