Night on the Town

A little girl no more than nine years old tastes the snow on top of a pillar and spits it out in immediate regret. Three Japanese ramen restaurants, an Indian Chinese bistro, and four Italian restaurants line the crowded street, doors blocked by passersby walking quickly to escape the cold.

The car hums in bitter protest against the harsh winter chill, the temperature on my glowing phone screen reading 18 degrees. The app insists it feels like 13 degrees, but our CR-V has never felt warmer, and my heart feels light.

We pass the Marriot Marquis, the Bonbon 95, the Scientology building. We get stuck in a pedestrian walkway and some hundreds of people swarm around our car, some latched onto each other’s hoods to fight separation.

The theater is filled with sounds and colors and applause and people and an experience I never thought I’d have. We race through the New York City streets lined with food carts and trinket vendors, a collective one-track mind aiming for solace (our warmed car). I get sick again (I need a better coat) and the car ride home is full of sniffles and dry coughs, a small price to pay for a slice of heaven—a perfect evening away from the clamor of my regular life.

I see the rows and levels of filled seats behind my shut eyelids, hear the applause and cheers through the podcast blaring out of my Airpods.

I wonder if it’s like having cataracts. Heart and mind glazed over, blurry and unusable.

I wonder if it’s like a slow processing computer, loading screen flashing that stupid spinner over and over and over and over and over and

I wonder if it’s anything like deafness, relying on your other senses to function. You sure seem to rely on other people to function.

I wonder if it’s like being congested during a bad cold, senses cut off by pressure (peer and personal) and blocked off by outside perspectives.

What is it like, being unaware? What is it like not knowing? How is it possible for every single answer to be “I don’t know”?

I wonder if its like losing your sense of taste, a covid-induced ageusia, unable to distinguish flavors or consequences.

I wonder if it’s like an overwhelming sense of dread, perpetually missing something.

I wonder if it’s anything like getting lost in a corner maze, familiar immediate surroundings but an overall aimlessness that blinds you.

How do you live like this? Don’t you crave more?

Don’t you want to know?

-lack thereof