I’ve never been as alone as I am in New York. I am sure that is true for most of its occupants—I know it’s true actually, I hear the story all the time in crusty dank bars by men who think their solitude is special and poetic. In between lines and shots, he sits across from me and looks at my chest and tries to make me love him for his sadness. It’s a curious thing that the more people there are, the lonelier they become. I tell him he says the same things to me every week and so do four other guys in the same bar. Never does he hear me. I am aesthetic and inanimate. I may as well be a cardboard cutout. I get up. I go outside. I smoke a cigarette and go home because I have work in the morning. The morning arrives and I am at 149th Street Station, watching the rats do their dance in the stillness between trains. Air gusts from the chamber as the number-four train approaches the platform. The rats flee in violent fury to safety as if surprised by this phenomenon that occurs every five minutes. Two rats remain on the tracks, one slowly and clumsily dragging its wounded backside and another next to it watching, paralyzed in its resignation, the arrival of their final fate. It does not leave the side of its wounded friend. A screech and clinks and clanks. They are rancid angels now. But me? I have places to go. I can’t be late. I board the train and I actually have somewhere to sit this time. I look across from me and, in one spectacular moment, time stands still and the angels shine through the windows of the train as if the underground network of tracks has suddenly erupted in a blaze of solar whimsey. You sit across from me. Your skin is covered in drywall dust but it looks soft as the breath of God, and with mournful eyes you look at me and then look away. You remind me of something I only know exists when it hurts. You are running out of places to look, so you pretend to go to sleep. We both know the rules here. I look across your face and I can’t tell if you are ugly or beautiful. At this moment you are perfect to me. I almost don’t want you to talk to me in case doing so breaks the spell and you start saying the sorts of things I hear in bars, but I need you to talk to me. You are my everything. My stop is approaching and I rise, stalling to give you the chance and the courage to look me in the eyes, but you don’t—You really are asleep. It’s okay, tomorrow I will fall in love again and forget all about you. I get my coffee from the same place I always do and I am elated to hear the shopkeeper call me “Mami” for the first time because I suppose it means I am accepted at my favorite bodega. The jubilation sweeps past to make room for the reality of the next eight hours. I wonder if what I’m doing is a real job in a real city or if I am hallucinating the whole thing from a padded room. I muse on how strange it is to be an arbitrary existence and at the same time have so many responsibilities. My mind gloomily wanders to the two rats I saw earlier who died in each other’s arms as if one were not perfectly capable of fleeing from incoming death. It is reminiscent of something terrible—the inanimate facade of the mysterious white sheet and its contents. Please, let me explain. Suddenly her eyes the size and color of beets sketch their likeness into my memory so sharply as to slit my veil of presence. Poor thirteen-year-old Rebecca crying to her dead winged-babies cradled in her arms, surrounded by packing tape and boxes, encapsulated by her broken dreams in the vast infinity of my emerging recollection—forever in my mind a puffy, sweating pubescent girl who ate cheese and crackers for dinner. The last vestige of a promised normalcy cruelly taken away. She thought this place would stick, that’s what her mother told her. She had a new dad and everything. The budgies were there to prove it. She held the bodies against her chest, it was like she thought if she held them tight enough, she could cram the things inside herself and then nobody could make her go away. She put them back in their cage and draped the white sheet overtop. I marveled at how that sheet always had the power to obscure reality with the mirage of lifelessness, except that time it was true, those hearts would never beat again. She told me “Budgies always die together.” She wanted to be like them. She said “At least love means something to them.” Oh God—thirteen is too young for thoughts like that. I didn’t know what to tell her so I just said “I know, a human is a crappy animal to be.” I told her things will get better and—yes—I was lying to her. Now it is night and there is nothing to distract me because I have grown so accustomed to the noise that it has become quieter than silence. Insomnia is my one embrace. No wonder people hate the rats and pigeons here. Evidently, love is reserved for those closest to heaven and those closest to hell, not in the greyscale that paints a starless sky. This place certainly is no heaven, so let it be hell. Maybe that would mean you were awake after all or, if nothing else, Rebecca has place to go where they call her “Mami.”

I’ve never been as alone as I am in New York. I am sure that is true for most of its occupants—I know it’s true actually, I hear the story all the time in crusty dank bars by men who think their solitude is special and poetic. In between lines and shots, he sits across from me and looks at my chest and tries to make me love him for his sadness. It’s a curious thing that the more people there are, the lonelier they become. I tell him he says the same things to me every week and so do four other guys in the same bar. Never does he hear me. I am aesthetic and inanimate. I may as well be a cardboard cutout. I get up. I go outside. I smoke a cigarette and go home because I have work in the morning.

The morning arrives and I am at 149th Street Station, watching the rats do their dance in the stillness between trains. Air gusts from the chamber as the number-four train approaches the platform. The rats flee in violent fury to safety as if surprised by this phenomenon that occurs every five minutes. Two rats remain on the tracks, one slowly and clumsily dragging its wounded backside and another next to it watching, paralyzed in its resignation, the arrival of their final fate. It does not leave the side of its wounded friend. A screech and clinks and clanks. They are rancid angels now. But me? I have places to go. I can’t be late.

I board the train and I actually have somewhere to sit this time. I look across from me and, in one spectacular moment, time stands still and the angels shine through the windows of the train as if the underground network of tracks has suddenly erupted in a blaze of solar whimsey. You sit across from me. Your skin is covered in drywall dust but it looks soft as the breath of God, and with mournful eyes you look at me and then look away. You remind me of something I only know exists when it hurts. You are running out of places to look, so you pretend to go to sleep. We both know the rules here. I look across your face and I can’t tell if you are ugly or beautiful. At this moment you are perfect to me. I almost don’t want you to talk to me in case doing so breaks the spell and you start saying the sorts of things I hear in bars, but I need you to talk to me. You are my everything. My stop is approaching and I rise, stalling to give you the chance and the courage to look me in the eyes, but you don’t—You really are asleep. It’s okay, tomorrow I will fall in love again and forget all about you.

I get my coffee from the same place I always do and I am elated to hear the shopkeeper call me “Mami” for the first time because I suppose it means I am accepted at my favorite bodega. The jubilation sweeps past to make room for the reality of the next eight hours. I wonder if what I’m doing is a real job in a real city or if I am hallucinating the whole thing from a padded room. I muse on how strange it is to be an arbitrary existence and at the same time have so many responsibilities. My mind gloomily wanders to the two rats I saw earlier who died in each other’s arms as if one were not perfectly capable of fleeing from incoming death. It is reminiscent of something terrible—the inanimate facade of the mysterious white sheet and its contents. Please, let me explain.

Suddenly her eyes the size and color of beets sketch their likeness into my memory so sharply as to slit my veil of presence. Poor thirteen-year-old Rebecca crying to her dead winged-babies cradled in her arms, surrounded by packing tape and boxes, encapsulated by her broken dreams in the vast infinity of my emerging recollection—forever in my mind a puffy, sweating pubescent girl who ate cheese and crackers for dinner. The last vestige of a promised normalcy cruelly taken away. She thought this place would stick, that’s what her mother told her. She had a new dad and everything. The budgies were there to prove it. She held the bodies against her chest, it was like she thought if she held them tight enough, she could cram the things inside herself and then nobody could make her go away. She put them back in their cage and draped the white sheet overtop. I marveled at how that sheet always had the power to obscure reality with the mirage of lifelessness, except that time it was true, those hearts would never beat again. She told me “Budgies always die together.” She wanted to be like them. She said “At least love means something to them.” Oh God—thirteen is too young for thoughts like that. I didn’t know what to tell her so I just said “I know, a human is a crappy animal to be.” I told her things will get better and—yes—I was lying to her.

Now it is night and there is nothing to distract me because I have grown so accustomed to the noise that it has become quieter than silence. Insomnia is my one embrace. No wonder people hate the rats and pigeons here. Evidently, love is reserved for those closest to heaven and those closest to hell, not in the greyscale that paints a starless sky. This place certainly is no heaven, so let it be hell. Maybe that would mean you were awake after all or, if nothing else, Rebecca has place to go where they call her “Mami.”