Punctual Magic
Every morning we step into the elevator, hit the button for the 11th floor, and go up. Hockney on the table. New York out the window. Cohen written on the wall: “ring the bells that still can ring / forget your perfect offering / there’s a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in”.
The city is decidedly grey, but COLLINS is decidedly not. There’s color everywhere. A big yellow dining table. An orange ceiling. A giant blue crayon propped up against a window. A library with thousands of books and objects stacked to the ceiling: jet-planes, snow-globes, and telescopes in between titles like ‘How To Be An Explorer In The World’ and ‘Everything That Can Happen In A Day’. Not to mention the puppets in the hallway, like spectators, watching everyone going back and forth. Walking around here is like playing one big game of I-Spy. How they got everything up 11 floors, up above New York City, is beyond me.
Every evening I step into the elevator, hit the button for the ground floor, and go back down. In my head everything is punctuated with an exclamation mark. Downtown! Uptown! The words I overhear. The buildings I walk past. The new faces I meet. “Young and free!” she says. We’re smiling with our eyes rolled and our noses screwed up at the thought, before we sing in unison: “young and free!” If New York belongs to anyone, it belongs to them. All the kids brave enough to move here and try to make it. All the people I meet who were once those kids. We hold onto the railing on the subway and try to keep our balance. New York, are you there? Can you see us? Are you with us? I stare down the tunnel at the end of the train platform half expecting a voice to echo back. Maybe New York is listening. Maybe it’s not. Maybe all we have is each other.
“Maddy,” she says, “look!” I’m at my desk when I see the tiny white dots spiralling towards to the city. Ohh! Snow! It’s snowing! I am all naive enthusiasm— standing up close to the windows, like a kid in an aquarium. The streets are covered in an icy sludge. The roofs of the buildings are all white, like they’ve been dusted in icing sugar. Even the black garbage bags on the sidewalk are strangely beautiful—like unfinished snowmen.
How punctual magic is. Just when you forget about it, or doubt it—there it is—prevailing. Right on time.
After work, I take the long way home. Snow, falling. My shoes, swivelling on the ice. Life, bursting everywhere. I can’t stop smiling. New York, are you there? You must be. I know you’re tough as guts and all slick talking, but there’s a heart beating under there. There must be. I can see it.
Originally published on World’s Greatest Internship here.