Dear Diary:
I sat down on the uptown B for a change. This spring I’d stopped looking for seats after a homeless man, asleep, soiled himself on one of those hard, cornflower blue benches. Homelessness in the city is so sad â€" how do you bear it? I stand during my commute.
But this day, more tired than usual after a grinding 2 a.m. night at work, I took advantage of a vacancy and squeezed between two humans.
I like feeling others’ body heat. That’s something I love about cities. A million or more people collecting their energy into something more powerful than we’re meant to be. Like how honeybees can cook a hornet to death in their hive by vibrating their bodies to a temperature intolerable to the invader, but that’s livable for the bees.
There I sat, just living, and before me appeared a couple too happy for New York. I instantly wanted to be them. How lucky, I thought â€" not only do they share a commute, but they smile at each other, too. Each lover had one arm around their boo and the other on the pole. They talked and touched, a pair of flotsam content to sway with the train’s uneven motion, and God, they kept smiling!
And then, as we all approached Bryant Park, they started their goodbye kiss, and everybody in the car (and especially the bodies of those two) began melting toward the front. It was slow at first. Then fast, and before they or anyone could stop them, the dreamy couple were swung around their fulcrum and delivered into the lap of a businessman who didn’t seem to notice, which made me all the more jealous of their warmth.
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