May in the City

There is something so romantic about walking through the city on a warm, blustery day in May, with your shoulder bag lightly thumping against your leg and loose strands of your hair teasing your face, having unleashed their long pent-up energy. Due to the wind rushing through the screen in your bedroom this morning, throwing about your gauzy white curtains in mad and wild raptures, and due as well to the thick gray blanket of cloud that has rolled itself out between sun and earth, it is a day that you expected to carry with it a certain chill, and so you layered yourself in a light jacket before heading out, uncertain if that even would be enough. But now, as you walk up and down the busy avenues, you pause and step to the side, not wishing to invoke the important fury of the tourists and businessfolk and homeless people around you, and you gladly free youself of your jacket, peeling it off and slinging it over one arm. There is a humidity in the air, and the balmy breeze evokes a sense of excitement and mystery, and the gothic buildings, only just speckled throughout the city, are now accentuated and seem to have multiplied, and the presence of their dark facades seems to spill onto the streets a sense of foreboding – delightful foreboding – romantic foreboding, with those tourists and businessfolk and homeless people apparently oblivious, rushing about with their briefcases, plummeting through intersections at red lights as cars and buses hurtle towards them, or lolling about with heads tilted upwards, bumping into each other and stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to raise a fancy black telescopic lens to their eye. Oblivious they may be, but they are part of the scene, clopping along at an amazing rate in heels that cannot be classified as “high” but rather monumental, sitting on the corner and rattling a coffee cup with a thin layer of change at the bottom, chatting away animatedly on a cell phone in languages you should have been able to understand if you had retained anything from school, arguing with each other in languages you never knew existed, nursing $5.00 cups of coffee, swinging monstrous bags that read “Saks” and “Macy’s,” calling to their beaming children who stumble along with monstrous boxes that read “Build-A-Bear.” And you are part of the scene too, and you wonder if anyone observes your actions as you wander into the park with your romantic cup of tea and your romantic apple with the sticker still on it, and, either ignoring the mild spitting of the sky or welcoming it as another bit of romance, you select a table and chair and pull out your journal and begin to write.