city redux.
This is a city, not a village.
There is no dusty, pigeon-filled square where the same faces meet and acknowledge one another each day, no single road through town, no solitary stoplight, no small cafe where people come and go like waves reaching a common shore.
There are a million of us, and we travel and work and eat and talk and do what we do just inches from one another. But I may see you once and then never again, even if we only live a mile apart.
There is endless potential to be anonymous in a crowd.
And I can disappear, even as I am pressed against other bodies on a bus, even as I am smelling the jumble of colognes and lotions scenting the people around me in the elevator, even as I am picking through the tomatoes next to a Spanish girl who knows how to find the perfect Roma, even as I am standing in line and smiling at the barista and saying what I want and getting my change and feeling his hand touch mine for an electric moment.
I am a flash of light or a shadow out of the corner of your eye. And though I was there, you’ll forget me like the seconds-long dream just before you wake.
That’s just how it is.
Or is it?
Because I haven’t forgotten you.
***
I remember you, standing in line in front of me, appraising the croissants and strudel, in your perfectly pressed suit worth more than a half-year of my rent, investment watch gleaming imperiously at your wrist, hair and skin as smooth as burled wood and lacquer.
Then you glanced back, and I was struck by the very saddest eyes carved into your Michaelangelo face, as broken and bleary and bleak as the sooty windows in an Eastside rooming house. They didn’t match your posture, your presence. They spoke of panic and loneliness and the sharp edge of something I couldn’t possibly understand.
In that single moment, I absorbed a taste of your fear and so I smiled with all the reassurance I could muster, knowing I had less money and less beauty and less poise but perhaps more hope.
You didn’t smile back. You patted my shoulder in an almost fatherly way and sighed to yourself. Then you bought my coffee, wordlessly indicating that this was your plan. I accepted it.
I felt like such a cliche, smiling into your grief. But we gave one another what we had to give. And then you were gone.
Do you know I pray for you when I buy coffee there now?
***
I remember you — inches shorter than me, years beyond my age, curls whitish-yellow like the ivory handle of my grandfather’s jackknife, skirt carefully hemmed at the knee — perched on your bus seat with a mixture of tenacity and fatigue. I don’t know why the driver was driving the way he was, but I saw you clinging to the smudged steel pole next to you with rope-veined arms and exasperation.
Finally, you said something. You had to.
In all your years of taking the bus, you’d never been tossed around so much. There was no rudeness in your words, no indignant tone, just incredulity combined with an unspoken request.
It was obvious that your voice had once been music and, though time had added sandpaper and crackle, that you could still sing a fair tune if the mood struck.
But there would be no song just then.
The driver turned to you and asked if you’d ever driven a bus, and you shook your head. No, you’d been an accountant in the tax building on Pender just about forever. You’d taken transit downtown every day for three decades, though, and that counted for something, didn’t it?
He explained to you that he’d worked a split shift and that the pedals were stiff and that all the odds were against him that day, what with all the idiot customers thinking they were the only person on the bus, the only person trying to get anywhere. You sympathized with him, but you still insisted that perhaps he could slow down.
Then he said words to you then that were at once startling and dismissive, the kind of thing you’d never say to anyone’s grandmother, let alone another human being who hadn’t just run over your cat or burned down your house.
And no one even blinked.
Except you.
You absorbed his vitriol with ashen, wet-eyed silence, turning to stare out the window and pick at lint on your sleeve and wonder if you even recognized the world anymore.
It’s okay… I don’t either, sometimes.
***
This is a city, not a village. There is endless potential to be anonymous in a crowd.
Still, whether I know you or not, we share these sidewalks and skies.
I might never see you again, but sometimes I can’t forget you.
This only happens when I let it happen.
And I should really let it happen more.
