When the center is a hole
It's been a cold few months and that's not just about the weather.
I am sitting on the gate around the Gandhi statue, all 13 degrees of the early morning air feel like fewer, and the pigeons care neither that it is cold nor that I am there. One pigeon spots a piece of bagel a few feet from me and when he turns toward it, the rest of the flock follows. They fly together, neatly parting to pass on either side of my skull, only barely registering what amounts to a mere obstacle on their flight path between the tree branch and breakfast.
Only two or three pigeons can get at the inch and a half of bagel at a time, but the 30 or so surrounding them don’t seem to realize that. I wonder if they even know why they’re there, huddling toward a general idea of center, pushing in toward each other, beaking their way forward, flapping and flocking and hoping for a turn at whatever’s in the middle. Trusting that there’s something there.
Another pigeon notices some other point of interest and leads the flock skyward. I can’t see what the score is this time, but they mostly leave together. A single pigeon stays on the ground with the bagel, pushing it across the sidewalk, pecking as much as it can out of the center.
In a tent down at the far end of the farmer’s market, a woman yelled at me. I was standing back to back with another shopper, each of us bent over the low tables before us and lost in our own worlds, taking our time combing through the meager winter Wednesday haul, looking for a nugget of something that might warm us from the inside.
To my right, this woman finished paying and I felt her coming toward me. I turned to make room, navigating around the shopper at my back, moving through shared space deliberately. But I wasn’t moving fast enough for her. She yelled “excuse me” about six times, right in my ear, breathing down my neck, she was so close to me. She didn’t take a break. She barely breathed. Her bearing down on me made it harder for me to get out of her way, not easier.
I wish I had turned around right where I stood and looked her in the eye. “Hello, I am a person.” I don’t believe she would have met my gaze. I don’t believe she would have engaged. But I wish I had tried. Instead, she got closer and louder and I got smaller and ducked to get out of range. As she passed I muttered something about how she was an asshole. I whispered something about how I had been moving, actually, shifting around other people in space to get out of her way for everyone’s sake. But she didn’t hear me. And I didn’t say anything about being human.
Usually on the subway at a certain hour, there is at the very least some low level chatter. Often there’s a whole lot more than that. But my subway home from the market that day was entirely, eerily silent. No one said a word, no one made a sound. There was no singular loud voice ringing out for me to hunt down in the crowd and glare at, because there was no voice at all. No commuter playing TikTok videos on full volume without headphones. No coatless man repacking his garbage bag inside a shopping cart inside another shopping cart preaching about bestiality and murder and how we’re all just sheep, can’t we see.
In the perfect quiet, I watched a woman offer her seat to someone who had been standing. I’m not sure why she stood up. They both looked young and healthy and full of energy. They didn’t know each other. She wasn’t getting off at the next stop. I stood next to this suddenly upright woman, alternately reading a sentence of my book at a time and attempting to decipher the silent social exchange I had just witnessed. I stole glances at their faces. Honestly, they both looked confused. What just happened here?
We rode in silence, the three of us and everyone else. Subways are loud machines. They’re musical, if you’re in the mood. But for many stops, no one said a word and the subway sounds seemed to fade a little more at each passing station. Just before I got off the train, the woman who had offered her seat spoke. She wasn’t on a call, I clocked her phone screen when she checked it reflexively to cover for what she let slip. I don’t think she meant to make a sound at all; it seemed like she startled herself when she did. Who said that?
Maybe the thought was too much for her body to contain. Maybe she’d thought it too many times in too few days. Maybe it just needed to come out.
“I was too vulnerable.”
Beautiful and evocative.