My cat looks out the window, chattering at planes like they’re birds because she doesn’t know the difference. But I do.
I know that a bird contains one heart and planes, many. But she doesn’t know that either.
I’m convinced she knows when I’m leaving. She perks up if she’s been sleeping, and stalks me with wide eyes, and green, that can’t know when I’ll return, and God forbid – if.
So when I do leave, eventually, and pet the large and dirty street cat who hangs around our block, inevitably, I feel like I’m cheating.
I meet a friend for coffee and tell him that Laura Dern was twenty-six when she filmed Jurassic Park.
He is concerned for me.
I am explaining to him that being twenty-six means considering Laura Dern’s age. You’re not even trying to be an actor, he says, which offends me even though it’s true. Half true.
Former theater kids with day jobs never stop “trying” to “be” an actor. Who knows, I tell him. My discovery is simply overdue.
Later, on the subway, I ride the front and stand my back to the locked operator’s cabin. Staring straight down the barrel of the car, I remember that it is my half birthday.
We’re underwater between High Street and Fulton when I single out one frightened tourist to tell her, and she congratulates me, politely.
She is concerned for me.
Happy with myself for the generous gift of a strange encounter on the New York City subway system, I start to wonder whether I’d be more likely to survive an unlikely collision on a middle car or at the back.
I don’t know enough about the laws of motion to seriously consider this because theater kids do not pay attention in physics.
When the train begins to break, I know that all I know is that mechanical and human error scare me equally, and that error is the only certainty.
I remember this later that evening, when I tell my brother that it is my half birthday, and he responds that actually, no it isn’t, and that I’ve done the math wrong.
When I leave him to go back home, I notice a woman three and a half times my age hobbling the major avenue, tote slinged around her shoulder.
Her outfit is accidentally on trend in that her clothes are vintage, and by vintage, I mean they are from the nineties, which wasn’t even that long ago.
Her pace is glacial; she’s being passed left and right. She’s carrying stuff in that tote, and most of all she doesn’t seem to care.
I doze off and think about how people in this city are always carrying things and wonder if that’s true for other cities too.
Because I haven’t stopped walking, I notice I’ve taken to this old woman’s pace and people are beginning to stare. It looks like maybe I’m following her, or playing tag in slow motion, so I pass her just like the rest and think about what it is that I carry.
I love to watch postcoital couples hold hands on Saturday mornings while I stroll lovingly arm in arm with my bag.
It holds three shades of mauve lipstick, some illicit drugs, and hand sanitizer, among other normal essentials like the eight different keys I need to enter my apartment and my phone, on which I learned the internet’s most helpful trick:
Look squarely in the direction you’re walking to avoid running into people, God forbid you do that awkward sidewalk dance. You know the one.
I’m convinced it’s foolproof despite what I said earlier about error and certainty.
When I get home and use key number six to finally enter my apartment, my cat is sitting patiently behind the door. We’re both glad to see each other on what is definitely not my half birthday.
I remember being told as a kid that if you can’t say the word sex without giggling, then you’re probably not ready to have it.
When I tell people I’m a poet, I can’t help but smile.