coming into the city

The quicker the pace of my heart, the more blood that rushes to every inch of my body, the more I begin to feel that surge which forces me to think about every waking second that passes through time, to think about their intricacies and their value in my mind and life. It’s a dance that happens between my heart and mind, a tango fueled by the beat of emotions that resound effortlessly from nothingness. There is nothing until we feel we are close to another human being. I’ve come to the point now where I don’t even have to be physically close to anybody to realize my humanity and consequently my connection to 7 billion other living breathing souls, electrically charged entities feeling and thinking much the same as I do.

This is where the necessity to move is created. Our minds evolved so that we could move more fluidly through the perils of this world, so that struggling to survive would later simply be a fact of life from times passed. Now our common survival depends on how well we can work as one intellectual entity. The need to move closer towards our center, to create a glowing, massive core where we can fuse together all the possibilities of the human machine, is etched inside our intuition whether we like it or not.

It was no surprise to me when I learned that our brain’s produce more energy when we are interacting closely with other human beings. Our mind’s areas of language and emotion flare while, rather conspicuously, our part of the brain which is the placement for our own image which we project into the physical world dims itself down.

I’m now closing in on the top of the bridge and my heart reaches a climax, it’s that first morning rush of energy and its crescendo is welcomed everyday by a skyline that seemingly massages the blue sky behind it. The buildings begin to expand before me and all of the sudden I’m in the middle of that surging tangle of life created from our necessity to be as close as possible to each other. Perhaps this is why I’m still in love with this job, it allows me the freedom to navigate quickly through it all. I ingest more of the human visage in twenty minutes of riding than most people do in an entire day.

An old woman crosses a busy street alone, barely making it from curb to curb, confidently inches along the painted asphalt. A man in rags is slumped against a building, unmoving, unconscious, a sign next to him pleads for help while a veritable river of people pass rapidly by him pretending he doesn’t exist. Two women dressed in the height of fashion roar back laughing and gabbing away as if the world could feel no pain all the while crossing through the stopped sea completely oblivious to the other traffic that continues even when the two ton beasts are still. Jazz tickles the air of the corner of 6^th avenue and 14^th street, the man with the horn has his eyes closed but can feel every person walking by, the others around him either stop to take it in, pass on by with a quick nod and drop of change or continue on unphased. Some youngster with a flashy fixie and no bag on speeds next to me, looks at me, then begins to accelerate. Five men in well cut suits all stand four feet from the curb while waiting for a light, all five have black glowing boxes pressed to their ears. A Spanish woman in the upper east side pushes a stroller with a small, palm sized dog wearing a knit sweater strapped to its cushioned seat. A collection of people living in tents in a downtown protest wake up to a mild November morning waiting for the community coffee to be served. Thirty cops congregate near Wall Street.

There is a story being written every second of every day in every place that we inhabit. It is our story. It reads whichever way you want it too. It can seem complicated and in need of your full attention and flashes of unnerving dedication. It can be a playful set up of words that make your eyes want to dance gracefully across its lines. Sometimes the conflict is so unbearably apparent you feel you cannot lift your gaze for fear of losing something invaluable to you. There is also the ugliness that you wish to never appear again, but it always does and forever will. Then, every so often, the story consumes you and you have to make a choice, do you begin to write it for yourself or do you continue to only live your life according to the words of others’.

This story, all stories, continue on to the end regardless of the beginnings. This is a constant I have learned to count on and it has brought me a lot of comfort because in between the covers of this collection of stories is an infinite amount of blank pages. I've always wondered since I first started putting ink to page just how many marks I could make in a lifetime. I guess I'll find out soon enough.