coarse

summer blares via sunlight and heat but i'm quite frankly shocked at how quiet a street in the middle of new york city can be. it's saturday evening and all over the five boroughs people are getting dressed, patting their trousers to make sure they've remembered their keys, locking doors, pressing elevator buttons, coasting through toll booths.

i am sitting on a stoop on eckford street and there isn't a single sound--literal silence. a firefly floats upwards towards the swaying treetops, a shirtless teenage boy leans out of his window reading a magazine. the cars are parked as if abandoned forever, the sky is the lavender of a woman's silk slip, impossibly high up and pierced here and there with slowly moving pin pricks of light from the jfk or laguardia approach paths.

it's evening and i'm apprehensive about night. what else is new?

on occasion my thoughts will be so incongruent with what is happening around me that it really bothers me. i will be one second away from collision in a hydroplaning car and i will wonder if i need to pick up cereal from the supermarket. we will be bounding out of the metropolitan avenue bus in a flurry of emotion, ready to just let the words spill out as the sun begins to rise, and i'll wonder if i remembered to leave a check for my rent on the fridge door.

sometimes i'll sit and you'll talk for minutes and i haven't heard a thing. sometimes i'll sit on the train by myself. as it passes the dull, smudged skyline and you're off somewhere, i'll wonder just how far i will run for you, if it's bright there, if it's quiet there.