Today we were coming out of work, riding in and driving taxis, going in and out of the coffee shop, up and down the stairs, at the corner of 8th Avenue and 15th Street. And we had stopped pushing the shopping cart into the intersection, a little bit onto the street, and we were down on our knees, crying, our tears on the pavement, crying out in a language that might have been Spanish, or Portuguese, or even French or Vietnamese.
We stopped to ask if we could help, a small young woman with a skateboard, a large hobbit-like man with a backpack, a dark-skinned white-haired man in shorts. But we were too sad, a thin brown-skinned man, not young or old, with white earbuds in our ears and everything we owned in the shopping cart (in a few plastic grocery bags and a broken suitcase), and we just cried out more, and beat our fists on the sidewalk.
We flagged down a police car, and we pulled over to the curb and got out, and came over and said “get up, get up!”. And we finally looked up from the ground, and saw us standing there with our uniform and our nightstick and gun, and we stood up unsteadily. “Get up,” we said again, and then we said something that might have been “Go home” in very bad Spanish. And we rolled our eyes and looked angry, tears on our cheeks, and we beat our hands on the crossbar of our shopping cart, and pushed it across the intersection and with a furious energy off down the avenue.
And we looked at each other and said “hard day” and shook our heads, we went back to our police car, we walked on down the street, hitching our backpacks up on our backs, carrying our skateboard down into the subway, poking in the patches of earth around the trees for spare change or deposit cans, feeling the air. And we made our way home.
And we hope that whatever was wrong, we can be less sad soon.
ceoln 