WROTE THIS FOR A CLASS. PROMPT WAS MEMORY. ENJOY THIS I DONT CARE. I ONLY KNOW ONE PERSON WHO READS THIS. THAT SOUNDED LIKE SELF PITY. JUST READ. I'M SORRY.

I boarded the 7:20, the Metro North—a vessel disguised as a train. It bore no promise but forward motion, and that was enough. I carried next to nothing. A ticket, thin as a whisper. My clothes, reluctant, hanging off me like they hadn’t agreed to the trip. A leather jacket that wasn’t mine—it belonged to Fazzy, soul brother in chaos, saint of nonchalance. Two yellow lighters, unnecessary but talismanic. Camel Blues—old rites, old ghosts.

The train was a church with no parishioners. Empty. Hollow. Beautiful in its vacancy. I found a window and pressed my face to the glass. Outside, the world smudged into abstraction—like sorrow turned watercolor. It would be a good trip. I lied to myself, but gently. Sleep came not as rest, but as surrender. A kindness from the body to the mind. When I woke, it was to the sound of fists, impatient and juvenile, beating a door with toddler rage. An old man—older than seventy, or maybe just seventy years tired—was summoning me with a pointed finger and that ancient look of entitlement that men are born with like birthmarks. I obeyed. Not out of kindness. Not out of duty. Just movement. Just momentum. He took the seat across from mine. Claimed it like land. I returned to mine like a woman returning to herself.

Then came the unraveling. His voice—boozy and bursting—railing into a cell phone about hockey and heartbreak. Something about a collapse. His grief was enormous and ridiculous and familiar. We all mourn in strange tongues. He cursed like each goddamn was a flare shot into the indifferent sky. I listened, not to understand, but to mark the moment. We are all absurd performers in the cracked theatre of public transit.

The city rose to meet me with rain. Cold, insistent. Baptismal. I let it have me. I drifted, Chinatown-bound, faithless and open to anything. A man with the eyes of an uncle and the voice of an old record pointed me toward a theater—half arthouse, half ruin. Inside: hipsters and ghosts, all wearing the same expression of ironic exhaustion. Jacques Rivette on their tongues. Smugness on their collars. I stood in the bathroom line like a penitent. Graffiti screamed from the stall walls in zinespeak. When I finally entered, I was met by the scent of something that had once been hope, now just mildew and nostalgia. A German voice yelled from a mistaken exit. I apologized to the universe.

The film was Weekend at Bernie’s. A joke inside a memory, playing on a flickering reel. In front of me, a woman chewed Raisinettes with ecclesiastical fervor. To my left, a boy tried too hard to woo a girl who had already left the building, in spirit if not in body. I barely watched the screen. I watched the space around it. The memories inside it. There was a man who looked like my father, if memory could wear corduroy. He had a pocket watch. An anachronism. A wound. I hadn’t called my father in weeks. Guilt, like a rusted blade, slid into my side.

Afterward, I found myself at a chess table outside. Poured concrete. Painted red. A parody of civic hope. It smelled like syrup and loneliness. I sat with my own silence, which had become a habit, not a symptom. Not loneliness. Not quite. Just Alone. With a capital A. That echoing singularity of self. Then came the women—my age, more or less. Linen-wrapped, precise, curated like playlists. One laughed—sharp and metallic. One held a dog that knew it was better than me. And behind them: Natascha. Sunlight trapped in freckles. A girl from a different book. A different time. My shame rose like floodwater. I ducked. I knocked over a chair. Time laughed at me.

I wandered to a bar. Midday bars are honest. No lighting tricks. Just truth and fermented sorrow. I drank. Not because I needed to, but because ritual needs no reason. I remembered Fazzy. Birthday orphans, cake-topped figurines, declarations of best-friendship like vows whispered to the gods. We had named ourselves orphans, not from tragedy, but from truth. A truth shaped like absence. We grew apart. Like vines on opposite walls. And memory got lazy. Now I was afraid to meet the real him. Not because I feared the new, but because I loved the old too much. I reached for my phone. His number faltered in my memory. That scared me more than the meeting ever could.

I tried. That sacred loophole. The act of trying. I called. He didn’t answer. Voicemail. A fossilized version of his voice. I cried like someone who wasn’t ready to admit it. I held his jacket. It still smelled like him. Like 2009 and recklessness and a boy who once asked me to be his best friend. I returned to the bar, not for the beer, but the gesture. Thought about buying a drink for an old man beside me, then didn’t. The intention was there. That had to count for something.

And then, the Game. Cigarette-in-the-mouth. Become-a-character. I picked Clint Eastwood. Walked like I owned the silence. It wasn’t as good without Fazzy. Nothing was. The phone rang. It broke me. It was his mother. Her voice had the grief-scraped edges of a prayer too often repeated. “Stop calling him,” she said. “You remind us of it.”

She hung up. Grief has no manners. I stood on the subway platform, still. Like a statue built from memory and exhaustion. The train came. I got on. No destination. Just forward.

Tomorrow is four years. Since. The word is too heavy to write. Too sacred to say. Tonight, I say nothing. Let silence do what language can’t.

The train pulled me forward like a question no one wanted to answer. I sat in a corner seat, wrapped in that old leather jacket like a hymn. It had absorbed rain, cigarette smoke, and something else—something faint, something like the past exhaling. I didn’t look around. Didn’t count the stops. Just pressed my forehead to the window again and let the city slip by like discarded film reels. Everything looked like memory if I squinted hard enough.

The car was dim and almost warm, like the breath of something sleeping. Someone across from me opened a bag of chips and the crinkle of the plastic cut through my reverie like a snare drum in a funeral procession. I hated him for it. Or maybe I envied his mundanity. The ability to snack, to exist without existential weight pressing on his temples like headphones wired to grief.

There was this woman—maybe thirty, maybe timeless—she got on around Fordham and sat two rows down. She was reading Baldwin, spine cracked, underlining in red pen like the words might otherwise escape her. I watched her, not out of desire, but reverence. She held the book like scripture. When she turned the page, it felt ceremonial. I wanted to ask what she was looking for. I wanted to tell her I was looking too. But I didn’t. I never do.

Outside, the sky bruised itself into dusk. Lights blinked on. Streetlamps like lonely stars. The world kept going. I wondered if Fazzy’s mom cried like this every night. If her body got used to the weight of it. If her voice ever felt like hers anymore, or just a vessel for memory’s overflow. Grief doesn’t age gracefully. It frays. It smells like old water and stale breath. You learn to carry it, but it carries you, too. My phone buzzed again. Not him. A group text from work. Someone's birthday. Cake in the break room. I stared at the screen until the light dimmed and went black. The idea of singing “Happy Birthday” felt obscene. I closed my eyes and listened to the rhythm of the train. A dull lullaby of steel and inertia.

At Grand Central, I got off. Not because I had somewhere to be, but because I didn’t. The station echoed like a cathedral between services. Tourists meandered like pilgrims, necks craned to the constellations painted above them. I used to come here with Fazzy. We’d stare up at the ceiling and invent stories about the stars. He’d name them after obscure punk bands. I gave them Latin names I made up on the spot. We were dumb and sacred.

Now, I just walked.

I passed a man playing a cello in the corridor near the 4/5/6 trains. His case was open, a few ones and coins scattered inside like alms. He wore a sweater that looked like it had been stolen from someone more optimistic. His eyes were closed as he played, and the notes hung in the air like incense. I stopped. Just for a second. The song—some nameless hymn—wrapped itself around my ribcage and pressed. Hard. I felt my throat close up. Not crying. Just pressure. Like something under the surface rising to meet me.

I dropped a five in his case. I didn’t have change. I didn’t want it. He never opened his eyes.

Outside, the night had arrived in full. Not the soft kind of night—no. This was one of those New York nights that feels like it’s got a blade tucked into its waistband. Cold, unapologetic, humming with the breath of every person trying not to unravel. I lit another cigarette. It tasted metallic, like blood and old dreams. I kept walking.

By the time I got to 10th and Avenue B, my boots were soaked through. My feet hurt. My hands were shaking—not from cold, not from nerves, just from the sheer act of holding on to this day. I found another bar. No name, just a cracked red awning and a neon sign that said OPEN in half-lit letters. It smelled like mop water and lost arguments. I went in.

There was one man at the end of the bar. Another behind it. Both looked like they’d seen the inside of too many hospital rooms. I ordered a whiskey. No ice. The bartender didn’t ask questions. Just poured. I appreciated that. There’s a holiness in not being asked to explain yourself.

I didn’t toast to anything. Didn’t sip slow. Just drank it like a dose of something necessary.

And I remembered the last thing Fazzy ever said to me. Not a movie line or a piece of borrowed philosophy. Just: “You’re not broken, you’re just... honest.”

At the time, I thought he meant it as comfort. Now, I think it was a diagnosis.

I ordered another.

Then I wrote his name on a napkin. Over and over. Not to remember. Just to see it. As if writing it could will him back, Lazarus-style. I knew it couldn’t. But sometimes the act is enough. Sometimes the ritual is the resurrection. Somewhere, a song played. Something old. Something slow. I didn’t recognize it, but it felt familiar. Like the background music to a memory I hadn’t lived yet.

I pulled his jacket tighter. Closed my eyes.

It still smelled like him.

Tomorrow, I’ll lie. I’ll say I’m fine. I’ll say I’m moving on. I’ll say grief is a teacher.

But tonight—tonight, I’m just a girl on a barstool, writing a ghost’s name on a napkin and pretending it’s a spell.

Around drink three or maybe four, the kind of math you stop keeping track of when the point isn’t numbers but silence, the door creaked open behind me. That old bar door sound, like a horror movie cue or the beginning of something unscripted. I didn’t turn around at first. You don’t, in places like that. You let arrivals settle like dust. But something in the air shifted—a stillness, like the second before a power outage.

It was a man. Tall, wrong coat for the weather. You could tell a lot by how someone dressed for the cold. He looked like he hadn’t planned to be outside long, which either meant he was meeting someone or had nowhere to go and didn’t care if he froze. Both were bad options.

He sat two stools down. Not close. Not far. Just within the gravitational pull of shared solitude. He ordered gin. Straight. No tonic, no flourish. Just that bitter clarity in a glass.

For a while, we said nothing. The jukebox had switched to a Velvet Underground track—Pale Blue Eyes, of course, because the night had a sense of irony. I laughed, a quiet, closed-mouth kind of laugh, the kind you don't offer to anyone. But he heard. Or felt it.

“Good song,” he said. Voice like a busted radio. Static and low.

“Too good,” I replied.

That was it. That’s all we needed. We weren’t here to talk. Just to recognize someone else circling the same abyss.

I thought about Fazzy again. How he used to insist music could resurrect the dead, if played loud enough, or right enough, or at the exact moment memory and melody overlapped. “You gotta catch it mid-swell,” he’d say. “Like a wave. Or grief.”

This song swelled. But it didn’t bring him back.

I took out the napkin. The one with his name. Folded it once. Then again. Made a tiny square I could keep in my pocket. Like a relic. Or a wound. The man two stools down looked at me once, not long enough to be rude, just enough to register.

“You losing someone?” he asked.

“Not losing,” I said. “Already lost.”

He nodded, as if to say: That’s the worse one.

I didn’t ask who he lost. You don’t do that in the Church of the Lonely. You just light your candles, raise your glasses, and don’t ask names.

At some point, I stood. My bones hurt. Grief ages you in places medicine can’t reach.

I nodded to the bartender. Left a tip that made no financial sense but felt cosmically balanced. Then I walked out, jacket clutched close, the night colder now, the streets emptied of people but swollen with the stories they left behind.

Wandered down 2nd Avenue. Past closed shops, shuttered bodegas, the occasional 24-hour deli glowing like a lifeboat on a dark sea. I passed a bookstore with its lights still on, despite the hour. A cat sat in the window. No sign of a human. Just the cat, regal and disinterested. I waved. It blinked.

I turned onto 11th and started walking west. No plan. Just that instinctual pull toward something quieter. Maybe the river. Maybe a rooftop. Maybe nowhere.

That’s when the text came.

“You still wear my jacket?”

I stopped cold.

It wasn’t Fazzy. Couldn’t be.

But that phrasing. That particular phrasing. It was how he used to text when he was feeling clever. Or nostalgic. Or high.

I stared at the screen for a full minute. Heart flinching.

I typed back:

“Who is this?”

Three dots appeared.

Then nothing.

Then they disappeared.

I stood there, phone in hand, heart somewhere between fury and hope.

No answer.

Just the sound of the wind pushing trash around the sidewalk like broken promises.

I should’ve ignored it. I should’ve deleted the number.

Instead, I texted:

“You’re not funny.”

Still nothing.

So I lit another cigarette, finished it slow, and headed west.

Maybe it was a prank. Maybe it was just the ghost in the machine. Or maybe—just maybe—some part of him was still out there, frayed and flickering, caught between frequencies.

And I was still listening.

Still waiting for the next line.

I wandered. Didn’t know where. Didn’t care.

The city unspooled beneath me, vein by vein. I was just another static-riddled pilgrim in thrift-store boots, moving through the neon womb of Manhattan, where the ghosts aren’t ghosts, they’re baristas, or ex-lovers, or song lyrics half-remembered at crosswalks.

My boots made no sound. Or maybe they did and the street just swallowed it whole.

There was a man playing saxophone outside a shuttered laundromat on East 4th—each note like a vowel torn from the throat of God. He had one eye. The other, glassy, blinked back at me with the full weight of the Upper West Side. I gave him a dollar and he gave me a look like we were both born from the same cigarette ash.

Kept walking.

A poet in Tompkins Square tried to sell me a haiku written on the back of a flattened Marlboro pack.
“Snow eats the city / like a woman with no name / chew me down to bone.”

I told him I was already full. Lied, obviously.

Hit Broadway. Floodlights and adspace. LED entrails blinking promises no one believed. It all smelled like soy sauce and money. Passed an old man in a Mets cap muttering about Eisenhower and jellyfish. I nodded. Sometimes you nod to history even when you don’t understand it.

I caught my reflection in a liquor store window—thin as ever, jaw locked, eyes twitchy from too many truths and not enough protein. Fazzy’s jacket hung on me. Heavy with the weight of undelivered apologies and corner-store confessions.

Stopped on Prince Street. A child in a tutu was screaming at a rat. Her mother, eyes dulled by capitalism or caffeine, just sipped from a cup labeled “Lana.” I thought of Lana Turner. Of fluorescent death. Of how some people are born to be myth and others are just born.

Kept moving.

The wind changed near Canal. It always does. Something about the river there feels more aggressive. Less poetic. Like it’s done pretending to be romantic.

I ducked into a 24-hour Vietnamese joint where the lights hummed with the sound of forgotten birthdays. Ordered pho, no meat. The man behind the counter gave me a look like he knew I wasn’t really there for the soup.

Sat at a back table beneath a clock that no longer ticked. A couple kissed three tables down—too loudly. Tongue-first. The kind of kiss you’d expect in a Bukowski poem written during a blackout.

I wrote Fazzy’s name on the napkin. Over and over. All caps. All fury. Then folded it into a swan and drowned it in hoisin.

A man walked in wearing a silver suit and no shirt. He looked like the future we were all promised in the '80s but never got. He winked at me. I felt nothing. Or maybe everything, it’s hard to tell anymore.

I paid with a crumpled twenty I found in a book I hadn’t opened in six months. T.S. Eliot, I think. Left before the noodles could get cold.

Back out. Into the opera of garbage trucks and sirens. Into the groin-throb of traffic and piss-steam. A city not built for the living, but for the desperate. And I was somewhere in between.

Crossed Houston, eyes blurry from the sodium glow. A boy on a skateboard shouted something at me. Maybe a name. Maybe a warning. Didn't stop to translate.

Somewhere around Avenue B, I realized I was still clutching the chopsticks. Like weapons. Like prayer.

Stopped in front of a record shop. They had Marquee Moon in the window. Fazzy once called it “the only thing worth surviving a breakup for.” I wanted to steal it. Smash the glass and run. But instead I just stared. Let the chords play in my head.

“I remember / how the darkness doubled…”
Yeah, I remember. Still do.

The rain started around 3 a.m. Not a downpour. A drizzle. The kind that soaks you out of spite. The kind that ruins cigarettes but not metaphors.

I walked until the street signs blurred into vowels. Until the grid gave way to impulse. Until the only god left was momentum.

And somewhere near the Bowery, under a rust-pink sky and a flickering Arby’s sign, I started to hum.

A tune Fazzy used to play on the Casio. Didn’t have a name. Didn’t need one.

It was mine now.
Or maybe his.
Or maybe the city's.

Didn’t matter.

I kept walking.

It happened somewhere near Grand Street.
The sky had the color of a cigarette filter after rain—gray, collapsing into itself, sun barely making it through the layers of urban breath. My body was humming that post-all-nighter vibration, where everything feels ten seconds too slow or too fast.

And then—I turned a corner and collided.
Not metaphor. Not emotion.
Real collision.
Shoulder-to-shoulder, jolt-down-the-spine kind of thing.

The guy stumbled back, cursed in that flat, surprised way.
“Jesus Christ—watch it.”
He wore a coat like a poem: too long, too lived-in, frayed at the seams. Eyes the color of TV static.

I blinked. Stepped back.
“Sorry.”
My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.

But he looked at me again—this time longer. Squinting, like he was reading something carved on the back of my skull.
And then: “Hey. Wait—don’t I know you?”

Classic line. Except it didn’t feel like a line.
It felt like déjà vu with dirt under its fingernails.

I looked at him—really looked.
There was something in his face, yes. Not recognition, not quite. More like parallel damage. Like we’d both been burned by the same small fire somewhere around 2016 and carried the smell of it ever since.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
But I didn’t walk away.
And neither did he.

He shifted his weight, scratched at the back of his neck. The street behind him was waking up—delivery trucks groaning, a pigeon doing laps around a bagel.
“I’m Jonah,” he said finally. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to ask for your number. Or your star chart. Or whatever the hell people do now.”

I smiled. Couldn’t help it. It cracked my face in a way that felt dangerous.
“Kennedy,” I said.
And he nodded like it was a name he’d already heard in a song once.

We stood there. Not talking. Not moving. Just letting the silence hang like fog on a river.

“You okay?” he asked. Simple. Direct. Like a guitar strum.

“No,” I said. “But that’s not new.”

He laughed. God, it was a strange sound—like a record that skips but still plays the tune.
“Well. You hungry? There’s this diner up on Chrystie. Place smells like dead dreams and hash browns. In a good way.”

I should’ve said no. I don’t do breakfast with strangers.
But something about the day—this new, broken, morning-day—made me nod.
“Okay. But I’m not talking about the news. Or jobs. Or anything with a five-year plan.”

“Deal,” he said.
And we started walking.

He kept pace with me without trying. That’s rare. Usually people are either racing ahead or dragging behind. Jonah just... walked like he’d been walking next to me for years.

As we moved, he pointed things out like they were holy:
A tree growing sideways through a brick wall.
A sticker on a crosswalk button that said “I forgive you.”
A woman dancing with her reflection in a shop window.

“Don’t you think,” he said, “the city is just one big nervous breakdown pretending to be a love letter?”

I didn’t answer. Just looked at him like he might be the next song I memorize without meaning to.

At the diner, we sat in a booth that had carved initials like the walls of a teenage bedroom. 

He ordered pancakes. I got black coffee, toast, and silence.
It felt like communion. Like two people doing their best not to disappear.

At one point he said, “You ever feel like you’re auditioning for your own life?”
And I said, “Constantly.”
And neither of us laughed.

We left the diner when the light got sharp. When the heat of the day started melting the poetry off the sidewalks.

He said, “I’m gonna keep walking.”
I said, “Yeah. Me too.”
But neither of us moved.

“Hey,” he said, “if I run into you again, will you pretend not to know me?”

I smiled.
“No. I think next time I’ll just say: finally.”

He grinned like a bruise healing. Then turned, hands in coat pockets, and walked off down the street. The coat flapped behind him like a hymn.

And me?

I kept walking. Different now. A little more stitched together. A little more open. Not fast, not slow. Just that in-between rhythm of someone trying not to fall back into themselves. But the thing about walking alone in a city like this is—your footsteps start to echo. And sometimes that echo isn’t yours. Sometimes it’s someone else’s.

Fazzy.

He was there again. Not really. But yeah—really.
Memory’s a haunt. A graffiti tag that never gets painted over, just fades into a new kind of ruin.

I passed a bike chain looped like a dead snake around a stop sign and thought about Fazzy’s fixie. Gold frame. No brakes. “Trust the legs, Kennedy,” he’d say, popping a wheelie down 1st Ave like he had something to prove to gravity. I remember watching him once, light cutting through the buildings just so, and thinking: this is the kind of boy who’ll never die because the world’s too interested in watching him burn.

He had this way of laughing when he got hurt.
Like it proved he was alive.
Like pain was a joke that no one else had figured out yet.

We used to lie on the roof of his shitty sublet, four stories up and cracked with moss. The tar smelled like cooked dreams and rust. He’d bring up half-empty bottles from someone’s party—PBR, Malört, whatever—and he’d play his bootleg mixtapes on an old cassette player shaped like a brick. Suicide. Daniel Johnston. That one time he added Taylor Swift and told me, dead serious, “Even gods need bubblegum.”

I loved him.

Not in the clean way. Not in the way you send birthday cards or meet the parents.
But in the kind of way that hollows you out with a spoon and still leaves you hungry.

Fazzy used to say things like:

“Don’t ever let them make you quiet.”
“Poets are just junkies with better excuses.”
“Kiss the wound. Always kiss the wound.”

And when we were seventeen, he carved a lightning bolt into his thigh with a house key and told me it was “a reminder.”
I didn’t ask what of.
I just kissed it.

The city back then was younger. Or maybe we were.
Even the broken glass on the sidewalk looked like stars when he was next to me.
Even sirens sounded like songs.

God, he had that leather jacket.
The one I still wear like a second spine.
He said he stole it from a thrift store in Topeka. Said it used to belong to “a woman who definitely killed a man for looking at her wrong.”
He’d wear it in summer, in sweat, in storms. Said jackets were “less clothing, more armor.”
I didn’t get it then. I get it now.

I turned the corner and leaned against a wall. The bricks were cold. My spine felt made of wire.

The last time I saw him—truly saw him—he was backlit by headlights, drenched in rain, holding a pack of Camel Blues like a promise he wasn’t going to keep. He said,

“I’m leaving. I need a bigger fall.”

And I let him go.
Because sometimes love is letting the ghost walk into the dark.
And sometimes it’s chasing after him.
I did neither.

The city was yawning into morning now. A woman passed with a child on a scooter. A pigeon looked at me with contempt. A bus groaned past, coughing up oil and regret.

I pulled the jacket tighter around me. Still his. Always.

I lit a cigarette and whispered his name into the smoke like a spell.

Fazzy.

Not an apology. Not a prayer.
Just a tether.

Somewhere, he’s in a song. Or a box. Or someone else’s memory.
But here—now—he’s mine again.

And I kept walking.
Because that’s what grief does:
Gives you legs.
Takes your destination.
And makes every step feel like both a beginning and an ending.

The building wasn’t locked. Never is, if you walk like you own the place. I slide past the pharmacy, already dead for the night, the hum of fridges buzzing in the dark, their yellow lights spilling over the sidewalk like nothing is ever really finished here. Rusted metal stairs. Fingers clinging to the rail like they know where they’re going. Up. Up. Up.

The rooftop’s empty. Except for the wind and whatever leftover dreams are scattered around. I can’t remember the last time I was up here. Probably before the whole mess. Or maybe I’ve been up here more than I think. I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s just concrete and tar and sky. Something about being up here makes everything feel like it’s far away. Like it’s not real. The kind of place that doesn’t ask questions. I sit down, legs stretched out in front of me, a few boards under me that someone else probably sat on once. The ghosts of their graffiti still hang in the air: Jay + Mads 2019 in bright purple, a mushroom with a knife sticking out of it, a big WHY in thick black marker. The city’s flickering below me, all the lights twinkling like a thousand stories being written without me. Not mine. But someone else’s.

I feel heavy. My skin feels too tight. There’s a word for it, but I can’t remember it right now. Something about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or the right place at the right time. Either way, it doesn’t feel good.

I’m here, though. I can’t leave. Not yet.

The wind is cold. A shiver runs through me, but I don’t move. Just press my knees into my chest, let the city settle around me. Everything’s quiet, except for the distant hum, the clink of cans in the alley, a siren in the far-off night.

I think about what I’m doing with my life. What’s the point of any of it? What am I even doing? Everyone’s got a plan, right? You’re supposed to be working on something. Something tangible. Something real. But I’m just... stuck. Staring at the skyline like it’s a movie I don’t want to watch. All those lights down there—people getting up, doing things that matter. What am I doing? Nothing. Nothing worth noting. Nothing anyone cares about.

I think I want to make something. A poem maybe. Or a book that no one reads. Something like a song you hear in a dive bar and forget about the next day. Not even something worth remembering. Just something real. Something that feels honest for five seconds before it’s gone. I could make it cheap and wild. Write it on napkins. Let it drip out of me in little pieces. But even then... who’s listening? Who’s gonna care? Probably no one. Probably me, for a minute. And then I’ll be gone.

Or maybe I’ll disappear into the library. It’s the only place I ever feel at home. I could disappear in between the pages. Alphabetize dead authors. Learn their names by heart. Live somewhere in the dust. There’s a strange kind of freedom in being forgotten. But... would I be okay with that? Being forgotten?

God, I can’t think straight. It’s like there’s a fog hanging over me, like my thoughts are caught in a slow river and I’m just waiting for something to snap me out of it. But what? What snaps me out of it? Another drink? Another bad choice? Or do I wait until I’m so far gone I don’t even know where I am anymore? I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be the kind of person who forgets themselves before they know who they are.

I close my eyes for a second, just to shut it out. The noise, the confusion, the pressure. The empty feeling that follows me like a shadow.

The sky’s starting to lighten. Pink streaks cut across the horizon like it’s trying to remind me something’s out there, something real. I stretch out, feeling the pull of the cold air in my chest, and let my body flop back into the abandoned kiddie pool. It’s a mess up here, leaves and broken glass everywhere. But it’s still kind of perfect. I let the wind move over me, like I can’t get enough of it. Like it’ll wash everything away if I just let it.

I don’t even know how I fell asleep, but I do. I just let go. For a minute. Or an hour. Or a few hours. I don’t care. Time means nothing up here. The city keeps moving beneath me, people walking to jobs I’ll never know about, talking in languages I can’t catch. Their lives keep spinning and I’m just... watching. Watching them go by, like the tide in the distance.

When I wake up, everything feels both too close and too far away at the same time. There’s a headache, but it’s not the worst. My body’s sore from sleeping on a pile of broken dreams, but I get up anyway. The city’s waiting. The city’s always waiting. And I have to keep moving. Keep figuring it out. Or not. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe there’s no point. But I’ll keep walking. Maybe I’ll find something along the way. Something that makes it all feel real.

I push up from the pool. Dust off my jeans. Stretch. The air’s still cold, but the sun’s coming up. The whole world’s waking up. And I’m still here. Still trying to make sense of it. Whatever it is.

But for now, I’m still thinking. Still wandering. And that’s something, right?

The streets are colder now, the air biting, sharp enough to make my teeth ache. I tug the collar of my coat up and walk faster, my boots clicking on the sidewalk, trying to get to Grand Central before the cold creeps through the fabric. It’s late, the city’s pulse slowing, but still awake enough to feel like something’s about to happen. People move past me in blur, shadows in the dark, everyone with somewhere to be, everyone headed somewhere. I envy them. Their destinations are clear. Mine isn’t.

I turn onto 42nd Street, the lights of the city glowing like something from a dream—too bright, too loud. Grand Central rises up in front of me, looming like a monument. The crowds have thinned here too, but there’s always a buzz inside. Always a rush. I pause for a second at the foot of the steps, just watching it all—people darting between the platforms, the sound of footsteps echoing, trains arriving and leaving like clockwork. I wonder if anyone else here is feeling like I am. Like they’re just waiting for something to make sense.

I push open the heavy doors and step inside. The grand hall stretches before me, towering and magnificent, the ceiling painted with constellations that never change, no matter how many years go by. I weave my way through the travelers, past the grand staircase, toward the platforms. The familiar, concrete scent of trains mingles with the distant sound of murmured voices and the faint screech of a train horn.

I check the signs, scan the listings for my train—#6. I know this routine by heart, have memorized the number of stops, the exact amount of time it takes to get home. It’s nothing. A habit. The world that passes by when I’m inside that train car might as well be a different dimension. It doesn’t matter. I’m just... passing through.

I buy a ticket from the kiosk and slide it into my pocket, not bothering with small talk as the attendant takes my fare. Another wave of tiredness sweeps through me. The kind of fatigue that sits in your bones, settles deep inside until it’s almost permanent. I want to disappear into the movement of the crowd, let myself become a shadow in the shadows.

I walk down the steps to the platform, find a spot near the track, and lean against the wall. The cold seeps through my coat, but I don’t care. I need the distance. Need to be out of the city’s reach for a while. The subway cars are too close, too familiar. The metro’s a little too suffocating now, like I can’t breathe in it. I need a change in rhythm.

The train pulls in with a screech, and I step forward, the doors sliding open. I slide into an empty seat by the window, my breath fogging the glass as I settle in. The doors hiss shut behind me, the rumble of the train vibrating up through the floor. I close my eyes for a second, the motion of the train lulling me into something like half-sleep, but my mind doesn’t stop. It never does.

I board the train and slide into a seat by the window, my reflection in the glass barely visible in the dim light. The city flickers by like a series of disconnected moments, one after the other—too fast to hold onto, too scattered to make sense of. The train jerks forward, and I lean back against the cool metal, letting the hum of the wheels and the rattle of the tracks fill the spaces between my thoughts.

The car’s mostly empty. A few stragglers in their own little worlds, heads bent over phones, lost in headphones. There’s a guy across from me, slouched in his seat, his coat collar pulled up, but even his presence doesn’t mean anything. There’s a woman with a stroller a few seats down, her eyes glazed over, her baby asleep, face pressed into the soft folds of a blanket. I watch her for a while, wondering what it’s like to be someone who’s anchored to something, someone whose world hasn’t cracked in half yet.

The train pulls into another station, and the doors hiss open, letting in a gust of cold air. I shiver. People rush in, moving quickly, some of them glancing at me, but I don’t return their looks. I don’t need to. I’m not here. I’m still walking the streets, still with Fazzy in pieces, still replaying his voice in the back of my mind, trying to catch the notes of it before they slip away completely.

I close my eyes for a second, just a second, and I can see him standing there—his hands stuffed in his pockets, his face tilted up to the sky like he was trying to catch the words that were always just out of reach. “What are we even doing, Kennedy?” he’d say, a little too loud, like he was trying to shake me awake. I’d laugh, not because I thought it was funny, but because I didn’t know how to answer him.

“I don’t know,” I’d say. And I’d think about it, I’d think about it until I couldn’t anymore.

The train starts moving again, and the city slips away into the dark. I glance at the map on the wall, watching the stations blur together. The lights flicker overhead, the same dim buzz in the air, the same dull thrum of the train pushing forward. I look at my reflection again, and for a moment, it feels like I’m someone else. Someone who has it together. Someone who knows where they’re going. But the moment’s gone before I can breathe it in, before I can make it mine.

I run a hand through my hair and turn to the window. The city’s out there—cold, indifferent. But I’m not really part of it anymore. Not in the way I thought I’d be. I was supposed to be someone. I thought I was supposed to be something. But now? It’s all just white noise. Just fragments of what was, what could have been.

I wish I could make it stop, the thoughts, the memories. But they keep tumbling, uninvited, tumbling through my mind like a train of their own. The sound of his laugh, the way his eyes lit up when he talked about music, the way he’d look at me like he saw something I couldn’t see. And then, nothing. I can’t find him anymore, not the way he was. Not the way I need him to be.

The train slows. A few more people get off, and I shift in my seat, suddenly tired, bone-deep tired. I lean my head against the window and close my eyes again. The sounds of the train, the steady rhythm of it, the lurching stop-start, begin to soothe me, like a lullaby I used to know.

I think about where I’m going. Home, I guess. Wherever that is. Maybe it’s the little apartment, the same one I’ve had for too long, too many years. Maybe it’s the bed I crawl into most nights, pull the covers over my head, and forget the world for a few hours. Maybe it’s the empty space in the corner, the one that used to belong to a different life.

I don’t know. Maybe I never did.

The train stops again, and I glance up as the doors open. People shuffle out, but I stay seated, watching them leave. They’re moving. They have a destination. They’re going somewhere. They’re doing something.

I stare at my reflection once more. A girl in a too-big coat, with eyes that have seen too much, but haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.

The train lurches forward again, and I let myself breathe. One breath in. One breath out.

The world is moving. It always is.