Today there are new advertising posters up in my subway station. So I look for the phantom hand of the unknown philosopher, the one who wrote “what do you really want to create with this life” last week, and “welcome to the moment you are currently in” last month.

What I see makes all the tiny hairs on my arms lift up, prickle in thrilling anticipation. It’s the ads for the New York City Marathon in November.

I promised updates on my progress, so, here goes:

1) I did not get a slot in the NYC marathon, something about not being Albanian. Whatever. I am training for the Philly, which is two weeks later, right before Thanksgiving.

2) My hip is actually totally fine. This week my lungs are pronounced clear, for the first time in 10 months. It will be, it is now, a chronic problem, and I am having to re-learn how to breathe and re-train how my heart beats. Which means…

3) I run really slowly now. This Sunday I run 18 miles, and how that feels will determine whether I really can go forward with this crazy thing.

Please do wish me luck. This does, in fact, scare the living daylights out of me.

I am waiting for the downtown local. At some stations the express track is sunken below, or higher up, or on another platform entirely. Here, it is a scant few feet away.

When the express train pulls through the station here, it is not the usual scream of silver and flash. There is construction further down the line, so the train goes slowly, a trundling exhibition of commuters moving by.

I can look at each packed car. Watch her leisurely yawn, see him flip his newspaper. Sometimes our eyes meet, before the distance and darkness intervenes.

The Scream joins us for birthday cake in the 3rd floor conference room.

What do you really want to create with this life? is what the wall in the subway says to me today. I am going to fall in love with the author if they don't stop it, don't stop puncturing my day perfectly, making me reel backwards, snap my head around, stop for a moment, blinking, thinking. Someone I don't know, can't imagine, is throwing themselves against a wall to see if they stick and now I am looking through the sun beaming through my window, prisming through my eyelashes, at a spot where feathers are stuck to the glass from a sparrow earlier today careening, careless, but uninjured.

A loud voice, an Irish brogue “At least there’s one real man on this train!” I let my hair fall over my eyes, to provide subterfuge while I scan the car. I can’t tell if it’s a statement or a challenge, but my fixin-to-get-ninja-on-someone’s-ass alarm is going off. Peering through the crowded train I find him, his clothes are clean and new, he’s not a streeter. His rough large face is flame red and as he asks the two Caribbean women what they are knitting I am not sure if he is drunk or just foreign. As he prepares to exit, he tells them “You’re on your own now!” and I can smell it as he passes by me. Pissed out of his mind at 10AM.

Out on the sidewalk I see a couple embracing. They are dressed in the clothing of the day laborer, their tiny stature tells me they come from an underdeveloped country, of generational food scarcity. They part, and in Spanish I hear her promising to meet him again at 7 that evening. I can only see the side of his face, the apple of his cheek, it’s curve intimating the enormity of his smile.

And now I am back on the train and there is an angel in this car. He must be coming off a night shift. He is angular and angled across two seats in the corner. His construction boots, work pants, t-shirt are filthy, caked in dirt. His head is thrown back, deeply asleep, and his clean face is a shining restful beauty.

I am walking with my head down, I am thinking about a man who wore his masculinity so easily on his skin, as his skin. He adorned himself casually but never fussy, a simple strand of beads, earrings, rings. Once, in a game, comparing hands, he slipped a ring off his finger and onto mine. When he would not let me take it off the game became a gesture, the gesture made my heart beat faster, tangling in my chest. I am passing a basement mah-jongg parlor, the door is propped open and I can hear the spill of the tiles, the clacking and slapping as they are mixed in preparation for a game. The tick-ticking sounds like the words that followed the game of putting the ring on my finger. Hollow, hollow, clakety clack.

Out of the subway, tucking my book under my arm, my head is still down. Now I am thinking of all the art I have subjected myself to recently, all so filled with self-loathing and despair. No wonder I feel leached, leeched. Men on the streets are converging on the mosque for evening prayer. I turn the corner to a sidewalk game of basketball, the muslim boys playing their last minutes before the swirling chant calls them in. One of the boys yells for a time out, and I know it is to clear the way for me to pass. I look up to see my path cleared, save one boy hurtling toward me, rushing mid-stride towards the basket. I turn my shoulder to take the brunt of the impact, to stop his rushing exuberance, our eyes meet, startled, and he pulls back, wheels past me, avoiding collision. I continue, my heart beating faster, snarled against my ribs.

This morning in the shower I can't stop thinking about running away--about joining the Peace Corps, or moving to Thailand, or dissolving my life down to a tiny whisper unheard in this loud city. When I get to the subway, the local train hasn't come for a while. The platform is filled with my neighbors, not too crowded, they have arranged themselves, as if by prior agreement, with even spacing, respecting invisible personal kingdoms. I wait for the train at the far end of the station and as I walk down the platform I note each person and each person is so beautiful. They are all dressed in their hope for the day: shirts are still crisp; hair is still neat; lipstick is still fresh. Noone has stress lines on their face, there is no fussing, no arguing. It is quiet, with people reading, listening to music, simply waiting. It was so simple and so extraordinary and I looked each one in the face and smiled.

I noticed this new sign tacked to a city signpost on primary election day. I would like to believe it is for the Butterfly Party. Or perhaps butterfly parking. Of which I have seen neither, but either would be appreciated, by me, at least.

Sometimes work really is a three ring circus. Yes, with clowns, too.

Work is gut-churning, so much so that I have lost my appetite. I slog my way through a run, beating myself to wring out every step. I sigh my way home, feeling like some days are a pointless grind of work, running, taking out the garbage for the building, jumping the car’s balky battery so I can play opposite-side-parking street hockey.

I open the front door, and someone has shoved papers under it into the vestibule. This is not unusual, today it seems like yet another of the endless streams of business cards, menus, flyers, supermarket circulars I am forever chasing down the sidewalk, picking up off the stoop, clearing from the hallway floors.

I look at the papers to see how to relegate them and the little negative head flow of pity-me dries up. Two pieces of paper, folded together. There is no envelope, but the insignia of the Brooklyn DA’s office. Unpleat their accordion to reveal the missive is from the sex crimes unit. It is a summons to appear, an order to testify, it belongs to someone in my building.

She could be a witness to the crime, she could be a character witness, she could be the victim. Whatever she is, it is none of my business. I am horrified at the invasion of her privacy, that everyone in the building could know. That I know. I ring her doorbell and hand her the papers, mortified, apologetic for the inappropriate knowledge I have, tongue tied by awkwardness.

Last night when I came home, a further summons, the card of the detective, was stuck in the front doors, with her name hand-written on it. I gave it to her, and she gave me cookies she had made, an astonishing act of grace for one so violated.

The girl steps onto the train, leans against the closed doors, and beckons her companion to join her. Her girlfriend steps into the open arms, and I watch as they snug themselves together, fitting against each other. It is so achingly sweet, such a simple familiar choreography of movement. I realize how much I miss, not touch, but having a body be so familiar. Knowing just how the shoulder cants, the ribs align, the hip notches, to meld into comfort.

People on the train smell surprisingly good, their first of the morning smells, still of clean and soap, tea and toast. I am standing at the bottom of the subway stairs, waiting for my chance to ascend and the bright blue sky hovers above me like a balloon. When I burst up from the station my headphones are playing Liz Phair’s “Extraordinary” and I can swing down the street in joy.

I wasn’t going to say anything. There are so many words already and there is so much work to be done, here, now.

But I exit the subway station to an achingly beautiful clear blue sky. Just like that day. And an emergency vehicle screams by, jolting me further back. Something nearby is on fire and it is an unnatural smell, not like wood, but like plastic, synthetics. There are police cars, secret service, security vans everywhere. And so there I am, again.

My office in the park was oddly removed from the horror that was occurring. I stayed, captaining that ship, until all of my staff found a safe place to stay, found their relatives, found a way to get home. I was there until late in the afternoon, when neighborhood families, reunited and relieved, starting coming into the park. Like delicate deer, they nosed out of the trees and into the meadow, the ball fields, the pond’s edge, the gentleness of the landscape drawing them in.

Then the dark clouds moved overhead. They were not clouds bearing rain, but a different kind of precipitate, the incineration of the buildings and all that were in it. Debris starting falling from the sky, dust, ash, little pieces of paper, raining everywhere. I saved none of it but the memory.

I can hear the marching band coming when it is still blocks away. I drop my paint brush, lace up my sneakers and go outside to watch. It is some kind of Masonic parade, somber black suits punctuated with strange white aprons, winged purple wrist cuffs, red vests adorned with six pointed stars. They are walking to a stiff version of "Amazing Grace" attenuated with extensive drum solos.

Now I am waiting for the rain that has been threatening all afternoon to finally break. The last light of day is bouncing back from a mirror in the living room. A black cat is stalking pigeons on the roof of the grocery store, and now here comes the call to evening prayer from the mosque, swirling, diving, getting increasingly urgent before fading out.

We are having a long, looping discussion with glasses of wine and a view of the Hudson River. A turn in the joking and laughing and I look up to see the sun lowering a bit, still clutched high in the teeth of stepped skyscrapers. The conversation turns again, and this time the sun has dropped to hide its face behind the mantilla of trees. Later still and the ferocious orange light is flaming a little girl sitting at another table, the sun is about to slip below the water line, but not without turning her into fuzzy pumpkin first.

I have stayed too long, but I float out into a beautiful night with the streets of Tribeca filled with people, spilling over sidewalk cafes, chatting, smoking. Two men on one corner have made each other laugh so hard they are staggering, throwing their heads back, their teeth shining. I turn the corner and in an unlit entryway I see a well dressed young woman, stacked around her feet are the large plastic covered trays from a catered party. She is chewing vociferously, more food clutched in her hands, her face aimed into the darkness, away from the street.

I head to the subway, to Brooklyn, to home.

“Welcome to the moment you are currently in” the wall in the subway says as I pass by, fumbling with my ipod. I want to hear that song, the song I played over and over at the end of the winter when a sudden loss left me with a restless walking blues, driven driven and walking block after block, like the harsh stomping of my boots could drive my questions into the cement and bury them, like the repetitive metronome of my stride could soothe my bewilderment, like the simple crude passing of time and miles could be an anodyne.

I want to hear that song now, a song with such sad words but a provocative happy up-beat, the perfect pairing of the sweetness and bitterness of having and losing. There is a place in the middle when the keyboards break out like the sun from behind heavy clouds, a brilliant burst and the vocals soar out and at that exact spot one wet winter dusk I threw my head back on an empty street and howled in release.

That’s what I want to hear, a glorious radiant wash of relief and confession and sorrow and hope, I want it to break over me pounding as the air starts to vibrate, the floor starts to tremble and the train thunders into the station.

Welcome to the moment I am currently in.

I am painting my apartment. And it is going much more slowly than I thought. Perhaps because the last time I did a job like this was a critical handful of years ago, or the whole building was nearly empty, or the ceilings were two feet lower. So, having not come even close to finishing, last night I went to bed with the house all disassembled. Furniture all pushed around, curtains down off the windows, stacks of stuff on all flat surfaces.

I thought I would sleep restlessly, shallow and tossing in accord with the disturbance. But I woke to a delicious cool morning, sun brilliant through the unshaded windows. There is only my bed in the room and the walls primered a flat white make it blissfully simple. I don't think I will see anything more beautiful today than the intricate shadows of the ironwork, the fire escape, striping clean walls.

It is strange to watch someone's mouth for two hours. But that's what I did last Sunday. On her way to her first TV interview, Catherine Ndereba asks me if she can have something to drink. "I can't recommend that." Can she if I get her something? "I am not allowed to hand you anything." She tells me if she doesn't get some fluids, it will take her four hours to get her sample. We find her a sealed Gatorade.

It still takes two hours.

So while we are waiting for that Gatorade to make its way through her famous and finely tuned body, I have to maintain my vigil. I watch her hands. I watch the hands of everyone who touches her. Which is a lot of people, since she is the winner, tons of people shake her hand, hug her, clap her on the shoulder. I watch everything that goes into her mouth (one Gatorade, one half liter of water from a sealed container, and finally, tea with the mercifully diurectic caffeine in it).

I stay close, but try not to be too intrusive. But the very nature of what I am doing is intrusive. I cannot imagine having my body so much as public possession, to be so scrutinized, to have my most basic functions monitored.

And intrusive in other ways as well. In those two hours I watch her hug her daughter, tenderly take a piece of lint off her husband's chin before a photo op. I watch how she interacts with other runners, press, race officials. I am sure if I were watched for any two hours of any day, I would do something ungraceful, ungracious. But she didn't. She was poised, kind and so gentle with everyone who approached her I was simply awed.

When my job was finally done, I shook her husband's hand and thanked him for letting me get so close to their family. Then I walked to the subway. On the way, the final stragglers are coming over the line. These are the ones who are really struggling, who have gotten injured, where something has gone wrong, but they are still trying to make it. Their faces are pained, they are soaked in sweat and rain, and people on the sidelines are screaming their names, urging them on, and there they go, in their own grace, slogging towards the finish. My eyes tear up still at the memory.