haunting hell's kitchen

hey — oh my god, are you — ? i thought so! how are you? yes, long time. a student! haha, no, not anymore. i'm nearly thirty. i work around here so. sometimes i walk by. the bodega’s exactly the same. there was that pizza spot around here, when did they close? they were so good. yeah, the rest is the same. not a lot of places left you can walk around and see someone you knew twenty years ago. no, i don’t mind getting older. i love how it sounds when that number goes up. believe it or not, there are even some people i’ve known for twenty-five years. how lucky are we, to count that high?

here, you’re drenched, come stand under here— a guy was selling them outside the subway. it’ll be broken by tomorrow. i can’t believe you recognized me. i didn’t recognize you, at first. i thought you were someone else, but someone older, so i won’t say who. you look great though. especially for your age, which i cannot remember.

a lot of people are looking at me today, actually. i don’t think i look particularly good, so i must look especially haunted. you ever have a day like that? when all the ghosts come out at once? even just now, when it started coming down, i ducked under an awning. turned out it was the flower shop my friend used to order from before she died. i’d never actually seen the place. is it obvious i’ve been crying? sometimes it starts and i can’t stop. one time i heard the wrong song at the wrong time and it set me off for, no exaggeration, nine hours. an entire workday at the crying factory. the next morning i looked like i’d doused my eyes in snake venom. and that was after i got sober. no, nothing dramatic. if anything i was too good at it. i was drinking on expert mode—hit my lifetime achievements sooner than most; had to retire the jersey.

why do i feel like you got divorced? it would be wildly inappropriate to ask. instead i ask about work, skipping rocks across the surface of our conversation. i wonder if you’ve been in love again. since you last saw me i have fallen in love, or at least in like, several times over, with varying degrees of insanity. the kind where a glimpse of hair sends you chasing the wrong person down the street, where your sneeze resurfaces the smell of their bed and in an instant you devolve thousands of years into an animal. a terrible illness. wouldn’t wish it on anyone. unfortunately it’s one of the only things that makes life worth living. falling as hard, as often, and as unluckily as i do is like being allergic to sunlight. probably even harder. not a lot of people know this, but in all of recorded time, my suffering is actually unprecedented.

this would all be less embarrassing if it had ever been reciprocated. that goes both ways, though. sometimes i’ve been the one who loves less. maybe my doppelgängers are getting chased too. i doubt it though. nobody ever thinks of us as much as we do. anyway, ideally i’d like to be loved in a way that doesn’t end in being chased down the street years later. i was thinking more like “now”. because i’ve been here a long time, and i’ve built a beautiful life, one where people are happy to see me on the street, even after twenty years. and so have you. a life like that deserves to be shared.

it’s so nice to run into you. you’ve been an incredibly convenient existential mirror for me—i was starting to feel like the ghost. i needed to be contextualized, anchored in time and place, and then you turned up! i hope i’ve done the same for you. because you’re different, and i’m different, and the bodega is still the same. we are the variables in a city increasingly bled of controls. so one of the greatest things two old strangers can do for one another is prove each other real.

of course, i’d love to get lunch. that would be great. yes, i know you’re sincere. i think you’re sincere. i’ll spend the next few months debating whether or not you’re sincere. but i’m always in the neighborhood. i’ll see you around.