Your life can be summed up as all that you touch and all the insatiable curiosities you saw through to leave behind. A phone lies in your hand, and a stranger sits next to you on the subway. A notification-buzz shakes in your clammy palm and you ask the stranger for her name. You turn the word ‘Christine’ over in your mind, shucking off memories of a high school gym class partner for this new energizing possibility: plain-faced, reading The Tipping Point in a peacoat, ‘Christine’. Your knees bump into hers at an increasing rate of return. She leaves at the next stop without looking back. The knee-bumps become another curiosity branching out in fractals ahead of you.
Your legs shake as you lift your body up concrete steps, your eyes turned up to a night sky bleached by streetlight. You’re happy to trade the flickering subway platform for neon shop signs and windows as opaque as black ink, wondering if you look better in the harsh lighting. Your hands pat your pockets for wallet-keys-phone, then you lurch briskly down 32nd, threading yourself around the slow and the stopped. A little red hand lights up across the street, so you halt with your feet at the curb’s edge and your little heart chugging it’s engine off the flywheel at full steam. Breath rises out of you in vapors. Your gaze is fixed across the street. Your life can be summed up as all that you touch and all the insatiable curiosities you saw through to leave behind.
