"Cold out?" he asked, concerned. Seemed like a rather obvious question to me, what with the tip of my nose bright red and my teeth in the early stages of uncontrollable chattering. "Quite," I said.
I know that in this city we’re constantly surrounded by nameless faces, strangers and unrecognizable shapes in thickly insulated jackets, that on cold nights sometimes all we need to know is that we’re not alone. When the air dips below unable-to-walk-ten-blocks-without-hypothermia, we need reach out to a fellow New Yorker just to make sure that we’re not the only ones who are hurting, not the only ones who can feel the cold that aches like unrequited love on the sidewalks, (if only they could just feel how I feel then they would know how it feels...).
We need to know (tough as we are) that someone else, one of these nameless faces who so intimately share our seats on the subway (legs touching) and stand beside us at crosswalks (shoulders brushing) and in elevators (is that your hand on my...?) every day of our lives, are real too.
"Well I hope you get home ok," he said. See, we’re not as mean here as people think we are. We’re just as lost and scared and confused and lonely and hopeful and concerned and desperate as everyone else is on cold nights where you can’t feel your nose and all you want to do is get home to something or someone (whether you have them or not) whose face doesn’t seem quite so foreign.
Feel that? Yeah, me too.
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