Intersections---Crosswalks

You can see the multitude of the world when standing at a corner, waiting for the light to change. This city, home to some 8 million inhabitants, is where people of every stripe, shape, color, language, and every other distinguishable characteristics that separate us from one another, have come to live, to work, to fight, to dream, or simply to exist. And none illustrates this diversity, this convergence of peoples than the list of those who died on September 11th. This list of names, some faceless, others not, encapsulates the draw, the romance of this city. I don't think there is an ethnic, racial group not represented by those names. There are Muslim sounding names alongside those that are Irish or Anglo-Saxon.

When you live among so many bodies and so many lives, it becomes easy to feel invisible. My presence on that street corner, one of so many, becomes, in so many ways, inconsequential to those standing alongside me. This invisibility creates a shield, allowing you a certain freedom. People may or may not observe you, but again, your face, your body blends into so many observed in a day. Ever since coming home, I've realized how easy it is to disappear here in this city of so many. How easy it would be to walk outside and simply disappear, if not for my son and my husband. The search for this missing person becomes much like that cliche of searching for a needle in a hay stack, a near impossible task.

The feeling of being observed, but not really noticed, is what keeps all of us sane despite living lives stacked one on top of another. In Tokyo, a city that is well versed in the phrase,'crush of bodies,' people actually use mental discipline to tune out those standing so close to you that the scent of their shampoo lingers long after you've disembarked from the subway car. New Yorkers, it seems, practices this same thing unconsciously. We stand alongside one another, sit alongside one another, push past one another, and yet we allow for a certain distance where eyes rarely meet, hands rarely brush against one another.

So, I stand at many intersections, watching and not really seeing those around me. And content in the knowledge that I am observed and not in much the same fashion.