A park bench from dawn til dusk will be covered by the grime and the glamour of us, New York. It feels the weight of our shame and the lightness of our pride; don’t kid yourself into thinking your monologues have no effect. The creaking wood absorbs sound as it emanates it’s own under the force of it’s friend the wind, and it knows all your secrets but rest your head in to the pillow a little more, because it’ll never tell.

First kisses and the end of wishes that started with a coin in a fountain by the stairs. Plastic bags filled with things that cost a dollar and five hundred dollar bags filled with the air of a designer.

An asshole and a business woman (which is not to say that he cannot conduct business and she cannot be an ass) brought together and still together by the shallow fact that they each display an image that the magazines and the models and the windows on fifth ave have taught us is superior. She’s dumb and he’s rich and though it will never be admitted, she only wants to make him knock her up to lock the money down.

Roses in papers held between the sweating palms of a man whose lips, set above a jaw made solid by pugnacity, now soundlessly and selflessly practice an apology so that he might win back the affection of the lines and soft curves that outline the heart of the woman whose warmth he never wants to miss again.

Teenagers chatting while the whiskey bottle’s spilling and the smell of cigarettes and the glow of their light are all signals, to beckon the night. They’re making sense of the world while some surrender to confusion and it might take hours and they might find there’s more than just darkness in an absence of light, and they’re growing together and becoming something different from a child and something closer to a man.

Torn jeans and pleated trousers, frilled skirts and cargo shorts. Broken hearts and soaring daydreams, shackled conversations and cerulean laughter. A dozen planks of wood and a handful of bolts. A couple poles and maybe a wrought iron arm or two. A story teller and a dream collector and a staple of this city which acts, at times, as the frame for the canvas we paint our lives across. One can look at something so simple and see the backdrop for a hundred complex moments of wonder.

I love the hushed stories you tell me in the reprieve between adventures in the endless, limitless labyrinth of possibility, New York.