at home in the city

I used to work up on 92nd street, near Broadway, and after work, 2 hours to kill before school, I couldn’t always walk, and I couldn’t always go to the gym, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit in a pre-school classroom cutting and tracing and preparing shit for the next day. So I’d head down to Riverside Park; benches and kids and dogs and the water. Wind and boats, and man, fucking cold in the winter. But outdoors, and somewhere for me to sit, watch myself exhale in puffs of steam, my notebook open and all the thoughts I can never get away from.

Now I work on Wall Street, there’s Battery Park, again water, people, rollerblades. But tourists and scruffy men trying to sell me watches and lonely at night. That place dies after 5:00 p.m. And Sundays, where to go on Sundays: Times Square is all about lights and commercialism and throngs and traffic, and anyway, there’s nowhere to sit.

So I found Union Square, I don’t know where it’s been until now. The big wide steps and stores for warmth and the smoking wall. No water, but people and space and God, that’s pretty much enough for me on a Sunday when I can’t stay at home with the walls constricting and the thoughts crowding in, it’s easier to write when I’m outdoors; my mind doesn’t ease up but the space and freezing fingers and always something to watch, they distract me and splinter the thoughts into thousands of fragments, tangents to follow and pick and choose. I can get lost here and it’s okay.

I can feel invisible and present and that’s more than okay, that’s pretty much all I want on a Sunday afternoon, invisible presence and somewhere to sit in this city.