The Chaperone

I find myself sitting in a Starbucks (I know) on the corner of Columbus Avenue, and all the indigent lyrics of the city are tantalizingly within reach. The storefronts are missing letters from their signage and give no indication of trying to accommodate anyone offended by it, arresting the pedants among us with their advertorial pidgin. I don't need these letters or your spelling, they say; my business supersedes their absence. And so my thoughts wander to what else remains missing...

I took the train back to Manhattan tonight, listening to music as I sat back in the familiar two-toned, red and blue seats of my childhood. These lumbering relics still run the old routes for now, the MTA otherwise selling them off or sinking them into the sea (reason enough to get an oceanography degree if you ask me). The outer boroughs are becalmed in the early November night, and the vast industrial ecosystem of Fitzgerald is wreathed in the unwarming light of sodium vapor lamps as far as the eye can see. With the surgically lit train cars, that's not far at all, keeping the cabin safe for crosswords and Kindles at some great cost.

And then like that the train elides the physical necessity of electricity- we change tracks on the trunk line that bisects the wealthier parts of Queens like a septum and for once we slip the bonds of our postwar commuter civilization. The lights cut out and the slack fabric of the city unfurls. It ripples with the tempo of the staccato track switches, as if a city could tremble at the sudden awareness of itself.

It is at times like that when I could swear that the dust and fog have the best deal on rent in this entire place. I yearn to stand on rooftops, quietly, soaking the cold into my bones, the marrow and the joints, that the parts of my body that can feel might yet be reduced to my head and my heart. When no one is looking on these wintry nights, this brash and vulgar city is a debutante in search of a ball, brushing out its hair in the collective mirror - the car windows and the still water of Newtown Creek; the Midtown facades and the Mylar of old candy wrappers; the iPhone screens and, yes, the doors of trains that run blissfully unaware but for 20 seconds, when it can't help but shake with wonder.

I am still sitting at Starbucks, and I'm staring at the shifting tones of light in the windows of strangers, wondering who else is brushing their hair at this moment. Perhaps it's just to get the knots out from a long day, just maintenance, but I'd like to think it's in anticipation of something dear and unpromised. That a city can remember the pain and still aspire, that it might not forget how to be beautiful when no one is looking. 

The cold air that raps at our windows is cut from the self-same cloth, molecules exchanging a scarcity of motion across oceans and continents, an emissary of shared loss and purpose. Our warmth is meant to be shared. The light is faint, and maybe no one is looking, but everyone is always there. I am at a Starbucks on Columbus Avenue.

I don't know if I have a wish for my former students more sincere than that.