March 19, 2019
Yesterday, the man standing next to me at the crosswalk turned and said, “Have you ever thought about how many people you’ve stood next to waiting for the light to change at crosswalks? Thousands, probably. Thousands!”
I think about it all the time, actually. How in cities, we’re mere ants, passing unbearably close to brilliant or bruised lives, never stopping to figure out why the woman with the scarf is smiling SO WIDELY, or why the important looking man is walking so quickly, or what the bum repeatedly shouting “Mother Nature wants you dead!” went through to get, well, there. We learn to bare the fleeting nearness of it all; there’s something beautiful in the almost-touched. It’s the way you feel right before the first bite of meal after an exhaustive day, or your last blink before a first kiss— the long, beautiful, anticipatory seconds you never get back. But here in the streets of San Francisco, the feeling goes on forever, if we let it.