Listening

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.  
~Berthold Auerbach

Because when everyday life becomes everynight life becomes everymoment life, you're spinning so quickly that no one can talk you down. Because when minutes and hours and days become blurs and indistinct suggestions, you shut your eyes and cover your ears and try not to tip over. Because when the list of books for you to memorize reads from Haraway to Kafka to anthropological obscurity,  you don't have time for 'who broke up with how'. 

But music doesn't ask for the permission to cut in. It's raw and rude and barges in at the most inopportune moments. It flips you over and turns you inside out until you can't ignore it. It demands autonomy over the instant of its inception. And then it heals you.

I submit. 

Waking Up

Dear New York City, 

I think I've mastered the art of objectively experiencing self. I watched adrenaline pump into my hearstrings until they throbbed. I watched myself fall deaf and mute, and then learn to work again. I watched myself walk down a long corridor with my contemporary reality waiting in front of me and my desired history lagging behind. I watched my feet stutter in confusion  - do I pitter, patter, or saunter in heel-clicks? I watched myself decided to take the subway solo.

You see, there was this man the other day who made me rethink things. He was clad in an oversized sweater, the drabby grey kind, and hadn't seen a bed or comb in quite some time. He looked hungry and distraught, but confident in his right to walk down my block and envelop himself in warm New York City soot. I watched him sit down on the stoop across from my apartment building and pull out a scrap of something white and folded. Slowly, he bent corner away from corner until a circular plate materialized in his hands. He smoothed out the edges with care and set it beside his empty can of soda. He didn't have any food. He didn't have any money. He didn't have any prospects for the impending night. But I watched him look up at the sky and grin.  He did have a plate.

That's when I began to think about human dignity.

Because we, the young 20 year olds, with our abounding entitlement and limited responsibility, have over indulged in the notion of 'self'. How many of us pause to help the elderly lady living on the third floor bring up her groceries? How many of us talk to the man with the newspaper on the park bench? Or realize that his arm isn't around that lady anymore? And that he was missing for seven days? And that he could have used a visit? And that because you sit across from him every week you are no longer a stranger - that the intersection of your lives makes your responsible?

How many of us notice that other people's worlds change too?

This isn't about getting older or wiser or anything. It's about being aware.

The Start of Things

Good Evening, New York City. 

I've decided to start my venture into conscious reality by sending my thoughts into the endless void of cyberspace. From now on it will be you and me. The unidentifiable, intangible "you" without bounds, and me, the twenty year old almost college graduate with big hopes and definable limits. 

Yes, that's who I am, a girl living in a fourth floor walk-up apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a colorful Matisse dancing on my walls and a dramatic firescape clinging to my window. If I close my eyes and dim the lights to just above rosy, I can travel back in time and taste the evening seeping from behind speak easy doors. I can pretend that bobs are in style, and that I smoke long cigarettes, and that the latest craze is something classier than hiphop and ripped jeans. I can play Daisy, but smarter, and yearn for Gatsby, but deeper, and know that all the books on my shelves have been read twice. 

But even without pretense and illusion, you never fail me, New York. Your streets are the same, and your parks are the same.  Your trees whisper to me as I pour over papers in Washington Square Park, and you let me love you just like Henry James and Bob Dylan loved you. 

And, in turn, you teach me about humanity.

So good evening, New York. I extend my hand to you in friendship. I open myself to your possibilities.