The Layers of My City

For today's #30DayWritingChallenge I pulled together a short piece that came to me as I was walking around my neighborhood. Thanks for reading!

This is home. For 20 years, I inhabited spaces that were called “home,” but they never felt like it. Six years in one spot, a decade in another, four more below the Mason-Dixon. Numerous trips to locales near and far.

Wherever I went, I carried the elements of home deep in my soul. This city is a core part of who I am – my personality, tenacity, stubbornness. This is the only place I have ever been able to breathe deeply and feel like my true self. Now that I have been back for a few years, I breathe in all that makes this home.

I wander my city either on foot and through the tunnels carved deep into the bedrock. A city where you are never alone, but that can feel so painfully lonely at times.

I am surrounded by faces everywhere I go. Each face I see has a story to tell. Sometimes it is plain as day. The struggles of work, family, life sitting right on the surface. Other times, the stories are deep in the eyes of my brothers and sisters of this grand city. Eyes hidden behind sunglasses when there is no sun. The shades a wall set up to protect us from revealing too much.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city …”

Some are deep and complex, others pass in the blink of an eye. I wander the neighborhoods ever the observer, often hidden behind my own set of sunglasses. I take in all the layers that make my city go. The desire of its residents to succeed, to start new lives, to merely survive. It all drives the carefully choreographed chaos that is day-to-day life here. And I cannot get enough.

The daily ballet of the movers and shakers on Wall Street and the doormen in buildings scattered across the boroughs. Each dressed in the uniforms of their trade, but occupying vastly different spaces in this city. Around the next corner are those working multiple jobs just to survive and the delivery men and women who make our lives more comfortable and convenient.

Walking my city, I see the players performing their parts in our multi-act play. Some are new to their roles; perhaps they were understudies yesterday. Others mastered their craft long ago.

A doorman stands outside his building just as I and a delivery man converge. The delivery man's cart is filled with boxes, headphones firmly planted in his ears. As he passes the older gentleman, the young delivery man reaches out and they shake hands. A greeting follows, and the doorman sings out, “Good to see you, Papi! Be good.”

The young man never slows his pace. The show must go on.