I like walking around the city late at night. Characters enter and leave and occasionally my mind follows them. I like hitching a ride on a skateboard the wrong way down the bike lane on First Avenue in an XL Black Supreme long-sleeve T-shirt. I take pleasure in yelling through an IPhone while Ferragamo soles clunk back and forth across the gray sidewalk. I float with pungent mellow smoke back to the lungs it came from. I wheel around a shopping cart full to the brim with returnable cans that stink like the sweet syrupy mix of alcohol and Coca-Cola, America’s relief. There are lives I will never live all around me. Yorkville– my neighborhood–is nice to walk around. I also like walking up and down Broadway from 72nd up, and sometimes I use my feet to think my way around Union Square and Washington Square Park. I guess midtown is a fine place to walk, really anywhere but Times Square. I will go, but I don’t like it. It’s loud, bright, full of people, and lots of questionable men pretending to be Marvel characters. It’s like a McDonald’s double cheeseburger– after the first bite you regret it.
One unfortunate night, I did end up in Times Square. After the party. After the thumping of the speakers. After the girl I was sure I could never get. So, before I found my way onto the shuttle, I was standing underneath the CNN jumbotron. I looked up. White uniform letters swam across the black: Saturday March 15th 2014 1:37 am: US Officials Lean Toward “Those in the Cockpit” Behind Missing Flight. I looked hard at the letters. This was built. Constructed. Planned out. Millions of people have been here. The lights were harsh on my eyes, but I was aware that electricity and ingenuity fed them. They didn’t just happen. The concrete I stood on didn’t just appear. Electricity seemed to flow like the rivers that ran where the asphalt streets now covered– even those didn’t just happen. Something made them. Time, energy, matter, gravity, was it God? What made time, matter, gravity and God–man? My synapses fired. Language, letters, what made them and what did they make? My cells aren’t aware of their existence, yet they exist inside a body, inside a city on a planet in a solar system, part of a universe much too large to comprehend. Atom, Element, Chemical, Cell, System, Body, Planet, System, Universe. I am the atom– no, the universe I know is the atom. I am being put in a petri dish somewhere and under a microscope. If I am merely the sum of chemical reactions, then chemistry is beauty. I am a miracle.
Someone across the street drunkenly slurred, “Hey Fuckface, HURRY UP!” Yes, Times Square was a miracle. I walked down to 42nd and descended into the station. The low thumping of an upright bass fell behind a trill horn; “this is la vie en rose.” I leaned against the subway pole. The train lurched, I lost my balance, and the floor greeted me. I guess gravity isn’t a human construct.
At Grand Central I walked through the tunnel from the shuttle, following the signs for the 4,5,6. They all ran local at that time of night, but I waited for a six train anyway. I like them better. The one I stepped into was headed for Pelham Bay Park. I stared at the subway map on the wall. Fours, fives and sixes are green and ones, twos and threes are red. I remembered that I can’t be a pilot– oh yeah I’m colorblind. Because of the rods and cones, you and I see different worlds. I got off at 77th Street. My thighs were dull as I climbed out of that hole in the ground. I walked under the scaffolding on the north side of the street that seemed to have been there forever, and headed east. A slender figure swaggered her way toward me. She wore a fur coat that glowed softly. Her hair was thick and dark and bounced slowly as she floated past me. Deep brown eyes swallowed me and spit my vulnerable self out onto the cement. As my friend says, “I think I love Love too much to have had so little of it with a girl, it’s just sad.” It was cold.
I was on 79th Street, passing Saint Monica’s Church. Cardboard mattresses supported bodies. Cells that the body of humanity had rejected, lying at the knees of an altar to the ubiquitous and omnipresent. I wondered if they were dreaming. I wondered if they were living. I wondered if I was.
My doorman was reading The Bhagavad Gita when I wandered past him. I leaned against the faux wooden wall of the elevator, hit 4, and sighed. My heels pushed slowly into the soles of my shoes as the metal box hurtled upward. I wondered if reincarnation was real. I hoped it was. There are too many lives to live for one life, and it would seem unfair of the universe to deny me that. I slid between my sheets and looked out of the two windows that rose to my left. There were stars in the New York sky. It was a miracle.