The concept of presence, being present, seeing and being seen has been in my head lately. I am mostly not present in life. I drift in cloudy remove, consciousness barely a twinkle in the low-vision smog that invisibly surrounds me.
Looking around the subway car this AM, forcing myself to be present in the moment, trying to understand what brought us together in this moment, a couple dozen strangers united in the goal of getting somewhere. But that somewhere is like an explosion of rockets blasting off in every possible different direction.
There is little unity in this task. One might wiggle their ass to make room for me as I took a seat between two other already-seated people. But no one looks at you. No one will remember you if you pass again in the street, months from now.
I relished the air conditioning on both the N and the 4 train today. It caressed my head and trickled down my shirt, reappearing across my arms. It was a minutes-long kiss on both of those trains today.
There is one woman I’ve been seeing, almost daily, but only when I take the R in the early AM. I wanna go where she’s going. Her pants are torn and those legs look like they could wrap around me. Her shirt is loose and lightly worn. Her countenance is concerned and tired. She must be a worker, but where would she work with such slovenly attire? I’m thinking hotel maid but maybe she’s an artist going to her studio. I’m thinking she’s a bartender at a ghetto dive bar, but where are those bars in midtown, and why am I not thinking that she is the Creative Director for a midtown advertising or luxury products firm?
Ummmm, somebody is vomiting in the bathroom right now. I got here way early today, a full hour early, now I’m hearing the end of the overnight sound world of this place. And wow, someone is really trying to be restrained about it but the sound is unmistakable. When is the last time I threw up? I don’t even know. I may have had a few close calls, and there have been some phlegm-related incidents in which expelling some random fleck of phlegm became an utterly monotonous chore that made it sound like I was barfing. But who cares? I just hope this dude who’s expulsion of innardal rotgut feels better for having let it go. He is all quiet now. I imagine him sitting on the floor, next to the toilet, comic-book-style bubbles o f no scientificly explainable origin rising from his head, deciding whether or not to wait for the next round of esophageal rejection or take a chance that removing himself from this environment, where its mental associations might make it almost impossible not to vomit, will itself relieve his inner turmoil. I’m channeling my own past experiences from years ago.
Okay, the dude has moved on. I don’t know who he is or what he does here. I assume that level of familiarity is mutual. So many people here have no idea who each other is. Which is not unlike my attempts to be present on the subways, or anywhere. Yesterday I assayed the tall buildings that surround me and which I occupy 4 days a week. Windows on higher floors are sometimes opened. It seems hopelessly dangerous but tempting as well. I’d like to think that behind every window on every one of the 75+ floors of the supertall buildings there are lives lived, histories being made, futures crafted and made for happiness.
But it’s not like that. Much of the space is empty, conspicuously so, and could remain so for generations. Are the lives of the people I see on the subways equally empty, or are they the ones making history, crafting a future for themselves and the world they did not ask to be born into.
Being present in a place or situation is not just about seeing things. It’s like travel, where seeing things is part of the intent but being seen is the real value, teh reality of the experience. I need to be seen.