sometimes I like where it’s quiet, someplace where the city noise can’t find me and all you hear is...

sometimes I like where it’s quiet, someplace where the city noise can’t find me and all you hear is concrete surrendering the day’s heat.  There are a few places I know, little corners here and there, in the alley next to the Lebanese deli, or the park at night, or the ferry terminal at four in the morning.  Still.  Unpeopled.  Late night on a fire escape, the whole borough is like the surface of the moon.  Cold.  Clean.  The kind of silence that can leach at your insides if you let it.  I’ve never understood the flocking instinct:  Times Square on New Year’s Eve.  The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade— like every man, woman, and child is just the receptor of some larger organism.  A individuated sucker on the waving arm of some collective sea star.  Sometimes I see people and I try to figure out how that life had gotten past me.  I think about specific moments.  A day in middle school.  A road I didn’t take home.  And there in the crowd, there he emerges— my Parallel.  I look at his clothes, his face.  All the minutiae of his life.  How does this all work?  I wish someone would tell me.  That, to me is the great question of our time.  How to be both together and alone.