“Our City” by Jamie Paradis
My feet bump into the edge of the sidewalk
as I narrowly avoid the blackened-gum in the
shape of a smiley face,
I smile at the busy street sounds that remind me
of that time I picked my little sister up
at the train station to take her on a tour of
NYU. We bought matching purple sweatshirts
and didn’t care that the polluted air was touching
our dripping ice cream cones, mine was melted
strawberry, hers midnight chocolate.
Midnight is my favorite time in this city–the streets
aren’t empty, they’re never empty, but they’re
a different kind of full.
The street lights have a new kind of presence
that seems suddenly mandatory and longed for.
The waves of heat no longer bounce off of the
dark pavement in a way that makes your ankles
hurt and makes you think “Maybe I shouldn’t
live in this city built for walkers”.
Most people who live here don’t own cars, yet the
streets are always painfully saturated with congestion,
except at this time of night when the cars are
fewer in numbers but more filled with stories.
And the people on the streets at midnight are
all either people who care more about having a
fun night than worrying about the future
at this point in their lives, or people that have
lost and are trapped and stuck in this urban
Universe.
Sometimes, you can still see the clouds at night during
summer when the moon is bright. They look
like a painting recreation of a version of the place
that you think you’re standing in.
My shoelaces bounce and bang with every step, and the
small knots loosen gradually until I need to
hold up traffic in the middle of a crosswalk and retie them.