i can't sleep.

i spent my whole day yesterday just walking around new york city. immersing in the sea of anonymity and diversity and exuberant, uncompromising life. i saw people i knew from my old life  who have come up in the world, others who have stayed the same. i saw myself in a mirror and slipped back into my old skin, remembering who i was, re inhabiting her, yet with the consciousness of being someone older, perhaps wiser, slightly different. 

i longed to live there again and feel the pulse of the city beneath my own, to wrap my awareness in its infinite microcosm. i longed to become again a citizen of a place that held so much of my history - but i have cut loose, and who knows if i will be able to come back again. no; i will come back. i love this city. i love the grittiness of it and the acceptance and the cynicism and the harsh love you can only grasp if you claw hard and and give more than all of yourself. i love getting lost and being alone in it, the endless possibilities of being alone and of becoming something new, someone new. it makes anything seem possible because there, anything is.

i saw so many beautiful people. everyone was beautiful: not just the model walking in front of me at union square, or the meticulously groomed men entering the cake shop by bryant park, but also the workers gathered round the poster board by the theater up at 146th, the rickshaw cyclist who stopped for the sea of impatient pedestrians, the hundreds of people whose gaze i met for a brief second, then lost forever. the woman on the subway whose lost mind frightened the men across the aisle, who rolled in her seat as though she was at sea, groaning and cursing, the yellow band around her wrist labeled "-all risk" (i couldn't read it all), her eyes unceasingly shut, her mouth, body, mind downturned - she too was tragically beautiful. glassy-eyed tourists entranced by their first time seeing the city, the feeling of overwhelmedness and excitement radiating from faces and voices. the mothers,  easy natives, making play dates on a street corner. the babies swaddled like bears, the careless barista,  the self-absorbed financiers meeting in the middle of a busy sidewalk, the old women and the differently abled  temporarily putting everyone's brakes on, forcing us to take it all in at a different pace for just a fleeting moment. the construction workers putting up a scaffold by st marks, patiently reminding all passersby not to walk directly under the unstable frame, and the mindless students who would try to walk under it anyway. the traffic cop holding up two red seas with a whistle and white gloves. the man in the transformers costume by times square. the panhandler who gave up, holding his face in defeat behind his cardboard sign. the laughing bookstore clerk who filled the basement of homeless books with the sound of sunshine. the young queers just learning to express themselves - shades of my own young self, cropped and brightly, terribly colored hair and unrepentant outfits. so many of us, of humanity of every color and kind, peacefully coexisting.

briefly, or perhaps not so briefly, i read the poems of rumi between the towering shelves. the words of  a man from the 13th century, filtered by scholars from the centuries in between, echoed some kind of constance from that ancient era. he spoke of peace and love and kindness, of offering his heart as a gentle sacrifice to an unnamed woman. a simple love that transcended time, language, culture, religion, gender. i thought briefly, if all people read such poetry, there might no longer be any need for war.

there on those shelves, in that city, are so many voices waiting patiently to speak.