Runner.

Every day in this city I meet someone new - every morning, every minute. Because walking the streets of this city you pass the lives of so many people in one moment, so absurdly and closely encounter them brief and blindingly fast like the beams of the headlights that buzz by - and then poof! They’re gone.

They’re all wondering (aren’t they?) the same things as they walk. All worried about bills (too many) and promotions (not enough) and success (too much?) and love (not enough?) and whether or not they turned off the coffee pot or the curling iron in their rush to get on with their days, to get on with their lives.

We rush here because we have to, because we sleep listening to the cars and cabs outside our windows, the echoing voices in the distance of people we hear clearly but will never meet. There is something comfortingly lonely about a place where every day, every moment, every block you experience a little piece of someone else’s life. You look them in the eyes, you smile at them, overhear the piece of a phone call, catch a glimpse of their happiness through their laugh, or see the sadness of their tears.

The more time I spend here the more I feel like we’re all the same. Like the man who I see every morning when I wait for the bus. He’s there waiting too, a familiar but nameless face in the crowd who then sits a few seats away as we speed across town. We pretend not to notice each other when we stand together on the sidewalk waiting to cross at 72nd and Broadway and then both wait for the same downtown 2/3 express train. We pretend not to notice again when we see each other at the gym, or when we find ourselves in the cereal aisle together at the corner market. We look straight ahead as we pass on the street when I’m walking towards Central Park for a jog, and he’s just on his way back.

So strange that we’re all here co-habitants of a place so small that we want so desperately to be our own. We all of us see each other and think: if it was me on that side of that street going in that direction, that could be me. The person crossing that street or hailing a cab or walking the dog or kissing that person on the corner in a passionate embrace - I could be them, we think, and them, and them and them....

But like everything in this city, these moments of clarity of our existence in a place so crazy come and go quickly. They pass with regret, with lost opportunity, with the realization that we only are who we are because that’s who we’ve chosen to be. So we keep passing each other like clockwork (bus and gym and grocery store...) day after day, morning after morning, moment after moment, running away from each other and pretending that we’re the only ones who exist - and then poof! They’re gone.