The Grown Up Kids

New York can be an impossible city. It can feel like wheels under your feet spun out of control, unwilling to wait while you regain your footing and catch a breath, even for just a second. If you don’t put up a fight, it’ll swallow you in it’s roaring streets and thick breasted sky scrapers that you look at with your head pulled straight back and mouth gaping open, and it’ll spit you out a carcass with hardly a beating pulse. Sometimes I feel like I’m the loneliest person on earth. Well, it’s a funny thing walking down a street with herds of people to your right, your left, cutting off your stride straight ahead and on your heels directly behind, yet feeling alone. Really alone. The suffocating feeling of knowing that you could slowly melt into the mass of numb bodies and become lost under their shuffle without a second thought. You could be hit by a subway car, and somewhere a few stops down the line there’ll be hundreds of people dismayed at the delays at the hands of another undisclosed “police investigation,” sighing in, sighing out, scoffing as they stare at the hands go round and round their ticking watches. There’s no time. No one’s got time. No time to drag your feet, no time to be indecisive, no time to explain, no time to take your time. And what I still can’t figure out is what is this hustle for? Where do I need to be that I can’t wait for the next train? No, I need to have that woman’s butt smashed on my thighs cuz I don’t have time to wait for that train. So I’ll get on this train, I’ll touch that woman’s butt, I’ll smell that guy’s breath, I’ll get hit in the face with that book, as long as it’s this train and not the next.