Classic NYC Story

It was just some days ago that I was walking along Broadway (don’t even remember where I was going, frankly) and I caught my reflection in a shop window and thought “when did you get so unglamorous?” Granted, I’ve been through more than one unglamorous phase (including but not limited to the aforementioned two weeks of homelessness), but that is a time past, and today is today. What excuse do I have to be shabby and flabby? Certainly not depression. I am not depressed.

Of course I quickly realized why that was a bad idea when the drunk Friday-night-in-South-Jamaica crowd started hassling me. So I headed back to the station. It made me wonder though not so much why I left the station, but why I went back to it so quickly. Why would I be any safer in the station than outside of it? What was really the difference?

What does it mean when a man claims to love you who never bothered to ask your last name… and has kept up this claim for a number of years? What does it mean when he keeps word-vomiting his fantasies about marrying you and buying a house on a farm and raising chickens when you and everyone who knows you knows you’d rather be in the Union Square farmer’s market than on a farm? What does it mean when he insists that he is the one who loves you but then almost unwittingly condemns everything that you say and do and have done?

Am I being dramatic or emphatic? Why do those words rhyme? Why am I undermining my point with useless digressions? Because it’s 3am. Oh. I should sleep. But I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep until I figure out what I’m going to do…

That notwithstanding… I do hide. I was hiding. I don’t take up space… although maybe I want to. I’m told that I leave pieces of myself everywhere, as though in some way I am still in every place where I’ve left my scent. Like a dog marking his territory. Classic was here. That’s what I’m told. As I understand it, I just lose pieces of myself every time I move…

He closed his eyes and sang with his whole body; he took hold of the mic stand and pressed into it, gyrating his hips rhythmically and bending his head forward such that his hair fell just slightly over his eyes. I stared into his eyes… into his eyelids… wondering what would happen if I buried my fingers in those nappy dreadlocks…