As I am walking to the bus stop at Lexington and 57, I am trying to understand why I am feeling lonely. I am still working at the same place and I still have great friends around me.
The only difference in my life was moving to a new place in New Jersey. I thought it would make no difference moving from one apartment complex to another - you don't know your neighbors anyway . What I did not take into account was the change in my commute route.
For four years I took the Roosevelt Island Tram to work. RI is a small community - and in the packed tram you see the same faces over and over again. There is the sharp dressed woman - I can't call her ugly but she is not beautiful either and she always dresses sharp. She likes red shoes and she seems to draw much required self-esteem from those shoes. There is the loud fat guy in the wheel chair. He likes to talk with the operator. He does not talk really, he shouts so that everyone in the tram listen to their dialogue. I think he is very lonely. There is the Japanese guy who skates to the tram - and sometimes he has his morning smoke on the way. I tend to avoid him because I hate the bitter after-smoke smell. There is the short guy -tall girl couple. It is cruel and base but I enjoy watching them struggle as they kiss goodbye. There is another couple or rather an ex-couple. Now they avoid each other -another rub for my amygdala. I have my own persona non grata as well. Every time I notice her silhouette I carefully position myself towards one of the corners so that I can pretend that I did not notice her.
I know them - my brain is filled with countless details about them. Like a sponge,it absorbs all these little things, their relationships, their habits, their voices. As I am walking to the bus stop at Lexington and 57, it struggles- looking for their familiar faces. They are still alive for me, living in my brain. Those memories, however,will fade, those connections will become dysfunctional. Forgetting someone is not very different than losing someone.
It fills me with sadness. I feel like I have uprooted a plant. It is still alive, grasping struggling for life. I can choose to replant it and it will continue doing what is was doing until now, or it will wither to death. In my whole life, like a farmer plowing his land, I chose the latter -- without thinking, over and over and over again. I take it as a part of life. At the same time I can not help but think - how many brains are there in the Roosevelt Island Tram where my caricatured imprints are dying a slow death?
