Door in the Floor.

There was a door, painted white, chipped, fading, lying on the corner of 74th and 3rd. There it was resting flat against the wet pavement near the dark green Do Your Part garbage can that was nearly overflowing, illuminated by the stark street light in the Manhattan night. People kept passing by without even noticing, walking fast, heads straight up, their eyes on a fixed mark in the distance (everyone here with a place to go, someone to go home to...). But I walk around a lot with my eyes on the ground because sometimes I’m too tired to look up at everything around me in fear that I might not like what I see. Don’t you ever ask yourself: what has become my home? People pass and look me in the eye and I wonder if I should know them (want to know them, can’t I know them?) and I know that I never will. Strange, isn’t it, so many of us and all of us strangers.

As I looked at the door, painted white, chipped, fading, and lying on the corner of 74th and 3rd I wanted to reach down and grip tightly the black shiny handle and pull it open, walk down the steps beneath the descending depths of the sidewalk that would take me somewhere else, far away to a world where I could get what I wanted when I wanted it, where I could control time and love and people and fate. Those steps, (I wanted so badly for) those steps to be there, like the hope I have in those split seconds every morning after I wake up from a dream where everything is OK, where the world is just as it should be. Those steps, (I wanted so much for) those steps to be there, so that I wouldn’t have to keep walking into that feeling the comes after those split seconds dissipate into realization of the truth and the painful remembrance (yet again, stinging disbelief every morning before coffee) of all that’s been lost.

But I Did My Part and left it behind, kept walking (like everyone else) with my eyes on the ground wondering why someone would leave behind something with so many possibilities (we never take the time to look), wondering why some of us (no matter how much we hate it) can’t seem to help but be the ones who are always left (chipped and fading...) behind.