The City

The city is quiet at night. It’s always quiet at night, mostly around nine o’clock when everyone is either heading out or coming in. It sounds loud, sometimes, but that’s just the silence blanketed by noise.

It’s still quiet.

Just not a still quiet.

Somewhere in the city there’s a student sitting at his desk, the light on over his head,hunched over a textbook and notebook with a pencil in his hands, a cup of coffee sitting next to him, the contents dwindling as the minutes on the clock begin to slip away into the early hours ofthe morning. His roommate is asleep already, and it’s quiet, the buzz of the city drowned out bythe concentration and stress looming over him.

Somewhere in the city there’s a woman walking home at one in the morning, getting catcalled as she walks, even though she’s bundled up so tightly in the cold that no skin or curvescan be distinguished from scarves. She walks quickly, keeps her head down, arms wrapped tightly around her, trying to block out the world. She thinks of her two children, asleep in bednow, the children that she didn’t get to say goodnight to. The children that someone else tuckedin, that someone else made dinner for, that she’ll only get to see for so long in the morningbefore they go to school.

Somewhere in the city there’s a musician, looking over his music and counting thenumber of gigs he has booked for the week. The radio is playing in the background, drowning out the silence of the world outside. He looks around his small apartment, his roommate asleep on the couch and the tiny unmade bed pressed against the wall. The kitchen in the other roomthat’s barely big enough to fit two people. He sighs, and adds up the money he’ll get from the gigs, calculating how much he’ll have to work outside of them to be able to pay another month’s rent, and how much food he can buy and how much electricity he can use. He turns the music off and climbs into the bed, tomorrow he’ll sleep on the couch, and he tries to forget the world in thesilence of it. His life is music, filled with sound, but it is in the rests between the notes that he finds peace with what he does, with the world he lives in, with the life he chose.

Somewhere in the city there’s a girl, maybe in her twenties, with her window open,letting the cold air in. The noises of the city at night mix with the quiet ticking of her clock, and the sound of typing. She sits back in her chair and looks at her work, running her hands through her hair. The page is full of words, good words, but she takes a breath, selects them, and hits delete. The page is blank again. The only light in the room is her tiny desk lamp and the light of the computer screen. The rest of the apartment is dark, her girlfriend pretending to be asleep inthe next room, but she knows that she doesn’t go to sleep until she climbs into bed next to her, and knows that she’s sleeping. The clock hits three a.m., and she looks outside.

The city lights are bright, bright but dull in the presence of the darkness. Bright but dampened by the world. The city at night is a completely different place than the city in the day.In the day, everyone gets a snapshot of everyone else’s life, just a snapshot, a film thrown under the light to be developed. But sometimes the image gets blurred or disparaged, and that is the only image that remains at the end of the day. Everyone takes the snapshot, tucks it away into their pocket, and carries it away, and that’s all they have of everyone else’s lives. Outside of the snapshot, their life doesn’t exist.

The city in the day is busy, noisy, everyone going somewhere or doing something, no one ever just takes a second to stand in one place and take in the world around them. A city life is a crazy one, chaotic, busy, frantic.

A city life is a life built out of snapshots.

At night, the city goes to sleep. Everything stands still, but keeps moving. The snapshots come out of pockets as they are emptied. At night secrets come out. Hidden lives appear behind closed doors and darkened windows. People come out. People show their faces to mirrors in rooms with locked doors. The snapshot of their life unfolds. Underneath dulling street lights in the empty streets of the city crawling with nightlife, a world of silence comes into existence in one breath, and will go out with the exhale that extinguishes the candle light in the morning.

In the daylight, the snapshot freezes in the lens of the world. Stuck in one place on display for everyone else to see, pick up, observe, assess, judge, and leave with. One judgement of a person they have and will only see once in the busy streets of the city in the day. The noise of the city under the sun drowning out the truth behind all the snapshots. The truth hidden in the faded and beaten up polaroid dropped from pockets and out of subway cars.

Somewhere in the city someone has the snapshot of the student sitting at their desk, except now it’s a guy walking down the street in nice jeans and a suit jacket, coffee cup grippedtightly in his hands, head buried in a pile of papers, eyebrows knit together, muttering apologies as he bumps into people. Somewhere in the city someone has picked up the snapshot, the snapshot that shows him as a careless, inconsiderate guy too enveloped in his work and himself to bother to look up. A snapshot, and in the background people shoot him irritated looks, raise their eyebrows, shake their heads. No one knows the story behind the snapshot.

Somewhere in the city someone has the snapshot of the woman walking home at one inthe morning, except now it’s a young woman wearing ratty clothes, hat pulled down over hertired face, and when she walks into a store to buy food they give her a strange look and ask her to leave, eyeing her big coat wearily. Even after she pulls out her money and tells them that she can afford it, they ask her to leave. As she leaves the store everyone avoids her, eyeing her scuffed boots and messy hair. She sighs, rubbing her face in her gloveless hands, and heads downtown to work, pulling her coat closer around her to block out the wind. People used to recognize her, they used to talk to her and ask how she was doing, they used to come up to her asking to hear stories and how the kids were and how her husband was. Now they pass her as if she was anotherfaceless person on the street. Even if they knew her, they act like they don’t, now. No one knows the story behind the snapshot.

Somewhere in the city someone has the snapshot of the musician, carrying his guitar over his shoulder, jostling people with it by accident as he pushes his way onto the subway. He keeps to himself, looking down at the ground, his foot tapping relentlessly at the floor of the subway until finally it stops and he pushes his way out first, rushing up the steps to the street. He ignores the shouts, the insults, pulling his fedora down further on his head. His phone rings, and he swears as he answers it, still pushing through the busy crowds of Time Square. It’s hisroommate, and he swears again as he hangs up his phone, and a woman covers the ears of her children, telling him off for using such foul language in public. He glares at her as he stops and sets up his guitar on the street corner between 45th and Broadway, opening the case and starting to play. His music is lost in the noise of the city in the daylight. There are no rests between notes, no pockets of silence with which he can find validation for the life that he chose. In that moment, he becomes just another one of the musicians playing on street corners, a picture of desperationin the eyes of those who don’t know the story behind the snapshot.

Somewhere in the city there’s the girl, except all anyone sees is a girl in her twentiessitting on a bench in Central Park, watching the world around her roll by. There’s a notebook sitting on her lap, open to a blank page, and she’s fiddling with the pencil between her fingers, tapping it against the page, making little marks appear wherever it makes contact with the paper. Her phone buzzes in her pocket, but she ignores it. She doesn’t want to answer it right now. She just wants to be alone, to forget everything. She isn’t wearing a jacket, and lets the cold air wrapitself around her, reminding her of everything she doesn’t want to remember. She watches people walk and run past her, not giving her a second glance. She goes unnoticed, and she’s okay withthat. She blends into the world around her, just another faceless figure in a sea of faceless figures. But she watches, she notices everything around her. All the people, the animals, the trees, even planes that go by above her head.

Nothing escapes her observation.

She watches an elderly couple walk past her, hands held tightly, bundled up in the cold air, talking about their grandchildren and reminiscing about younger days when they would go skating in Central Park, and how not enough young people do that these days.

She watches a group of friends make their way noisily through the park, laughing andshrieking, shoving each other and gossiping, and she can’t help but smile to herself,remembering days so long ago in her past.

She never turns her head, but her eyes and her ears follow people as they pass her, going in different directions, carrying different things, listening to different music, walking alone or with someone else, talking or lost in thought.

She watches a young man trip carrying a stack of papers, noticing the bags under his eyes and his anxious expression. One of his books, The Practicality Behind Philosophy, slips out of his hands, and he crouches to pick it up, pausing for a second. He closes his eyes, runs his hands over his face, and takes a deep breath, then he picks up the book and hurries on his way again.

She watches a woman wrapping her coat tighter around her, a worried look on her face, muttering to herself about “the kids” and “food”.

She watches a man, maybe in his thirties, struggling with a guitar case on his back,talking on the phone, swearing periodically and gripping his hair in one hand, saying “I can get the money ... No tell them we’ll get it to them ... They can’t shut it off, what are gonna do if they shut it off? Shit ... Look, I’ll sell my guitar if I have to ... I can do that. Look I have to pullmy weight here ... I’ll find something else ... I’ll get a real job”.

She watches the world go by, picking up snapshots and collecting them, laying them out on a canvas and putting pieces together, taking in details and letting her mind wander, wondering what is going on in their lives. She pieces together the stories behind the snapshots, taking them out of careless hands and judgmental pockets, stealing them from the eyes of the world until they can reemerge, unbroken in the daylight.

At night, the pages in front of her slowly fill with words as each story unfolds, hidden by the quiet of the city at night. Sometimes illuminated by a streetlight or the light of the moon, but nothing more. In the little glow of her desk lamp, she pieces the pictures together, ties them to solidities, actualities instead of skepticism.

She remains in the shadows, unnoticed by the world, a story remaining untold, but she likes it that way.

And once the words filling the pages are written, she closes the window, shuts off the light, and takes a deep breath. Then she climbs into the bed alone, feeling the emptiness aroundher. A story she doesn’t want to tell, but one she wishes had a different ending. She stares at theceiling, thankful that she is hidden in darkness, so that no one can get a snapshot of her in this moment, as she breaks. Her phone lies silent on the bedside table. The room is quiet, but not a good quiet. Not a quiet like the city at night. There is no life in this quiet. It is not a silence blanketed by noise. It is a dead silence. A silence in which she lets herself fall apart, because in the morning, in the daylight, she will remain in the shadows. She will not show her tearstained face in daylight, she will not show her darkened face, her empty eyes, her broken pieces. She will not show the world anything other than a blank snapshot, a face that no one notices, that no one wonders at, jumps to conclusions about, judges, and walks away with in their pockets. If no one notices her, they don’t take a snapshot. She remains invisible in the lens of the world. She tells the stories of everyone else, so that they don’t have to walk around knowing that there is a snapshot of all the things they don’t want to remember, so that the snapshots that have been collected of them are not misconstrued in daylight. In the light of darkness, she tapes together the things that have been broken and scattered in the daylight, so that in the morning so one sees that they were once in pieces. She sews them into words so that the world can understand why theywere once in pieces.

But no one has to understand why she’s in pieces, why she was broken, why she was misconstrued and scattered. No one has to know that she’s in pieces, or that she’s broken, ormisconstrued and scattered.

With no snapshot, she has nothing to tape back together. So she remains in pieces. She remains broken, misconstrued, and scattered.

Somewhere in the city, someone picks up the books the student drops, giving him a smile and a nod as he mutters “thanks”, and reminding him to take a break once in a while. The studentwatches them as they walk away, tucking the snapshots that have been taped together into their pocket.

Somewhere in the city, someone buys a loaf of bread, cheese, and various snacks, and rushes out to catch the woman before she gets lost in the sea of people. They ignore herreluctance to accept the food, and stop her from pulling money out of her coat. “I’m just helping an old friend,” they say, and then hurry off to catch a subway to work, folding the snapshots that have been carefully stitched together and tucking them away from the eyes of the world.

Somewhere in the city, someone stops to watch the musician playing on the street corner, eyeing the guitar case open next to him, scattered with a few lonely bills and coins. The musician keeps playing, staring off into the distance, his mind back in the cold, dark apartment. The observer pulls a card out of their pocket, scribbles a note on it, and carefully places it into the case. They share a glance with the musician, who watches as they walk away, then reaches into the case and looks at the card. He looks back up in astonishment, but they have already disappeared around the corner, taking the meticulously arranged pile of snapshots with them.

Somewhere in the city, the page once devoid of life sits open on a desk, full of words, stories that others will pick up and carry with them in place of the snapshots that were once misconstrued and scattered. The pieces that were once broken in the daylight will be set carefully upon shelves in the quiet of the city at night.

The city is quiet at night.