I realize that you can stay in one place long enough that you start to forget that your life is actually happening to you. Tonight I was standing on the street corner in the rain, the one that I cross every day to get home, and as the rain poured down I could barely see through the flood that passed in front of beaming cab headlights and bounced off the pavement. As my coat officially became soaked through (and I cursed myself for not having an umbrella), I actually had to remind myself that I was standing there.
I got lost in the city (it’s easy to), waiting for lights to change and cars to stop passing and for the white walk sign to flash telling me it was okay to proceed. I got lost in the sea of black umbrellas (they’re all black in New York) and the white fog the escaped everyone’s mouths from the cold and seeped up through the sewer drains and took hold of our feet.
That’s the thing: living here becomes automatic, just like breathing, and sometimes we can forget that we’re doing it. On the uptown E train coming home from work (give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...) I stood holding the handle under the yellow-fading lights and I saw the distant faces and recognized myself in them. Here we are, every day all breathing the same air, looking into the same nothingness, waiting, waiting, waiting for something (I still don’t know), and forgetting why we’re doing it.
Because even static things can spin fast beside you, spitting you out as it did me on the corner of 72nd street wondering for a moment how I got there. The familiar can become foreign sometimes, creatures of habit who crave repetition and routine for a sense of comfort in an overwhelmingly off-kilter world, we are sometimes jolted by something (the sound of an early March downpour?) that forces us to open our eyes.
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