This is what the wall told me when I got up close enough to hear. It made me smile.

It's spring and it's Fleet Week and a crazy pent-up energy is roiling in from the piers. You are in the middle of it, in a stranger's apartment on 42nd Street, hard up against the docks. You are ironing and you have taken off your skirt. You have prepared for this occasion by wearing both underwear and rollerblades. It strikes you that your life might be odd, that to say you embrace the unusual might be an understatement.

Her face is bunched into worry in the middle, riffled and downcast. She has a fake Chanel bag on her lap, her t-shirt says "You are not the boss of me." I can hardly see her because there is someone in between us, a man standing aggressively close, given how empty the train is. He is close enough I can clearly see the tag on the back of his Levi's, W36 L32. I wonder what it is like to have your waist exceed the length of your leg. I have never experienced this myself. Or wait, I have.

In 9th grade and in recovery from dislocating my hip I was ordered out of my schools' organized sports and into an alternate hell of P.E. Mixed among the regular school population they weren't so obvious, but clustered together these girls were a shameful clump of the hopelessly physically inept and horribly afflicted, girls whose bodies were so alien to them they couldn't do the simplest things, like run, and then girls like the one who had blown out her knees skiing, the wheezing asthmatic, the girl with scoliosis, and the fat girl, Alison Moore.

There were other girls just as fat or even more so, but Alison was the school's Fat Girl. Maybe it her rough complexion or her dirty hair or her cheap glasses, but there was something about her that was so ashamed, so degraded, that she was roundly shunned. When it came time to do our Fitness Test, no one would hold her ankles while she did sit ups.

So I did. I held her ankles while she grunted and heaved every sit up. And when she came forward, her knees would drop open, and I saw, starting at mid-thigh and going all the way up, bruises. Bruises on bruises, from her thighs slamming into each other as she moved through her day.

I don't think I gasped. I surely didn't say anything. It is not often that someone shows their secret shame to you, never mind demonstrates it in a way so horrible, so unmistakable, but also unknowingly, silently, like the accidental reveal of a dark card in the hand. That sidelong glimpse into her misery was a searing one, and now I can't wait to get off of this train, immerse myself in a hard run, make this memory go away.

When my roofer comes to pick up the payment for his work his hair is wild from the wind. His hands are black from tar, he is twisting them in front of his solid belly, a man uncomfortable at being indoors, discomfited by the company of women and domesticity.

A woman was strangled to death in her apartment two doors down from me, her body lay without notice for four days before the ME’s official vehicles wreak the street with warning lights.

On the front steps there are too many budding strawberries to count and when I water them in the morning a long-timer complains that I am always busy, no time for chatting. Now I know how carefully I am regarded, that could be a thing of greater importance.

There is a faint unpleasant smell when I sit on the front stoop and the pigeons above the door seem to have abandoned their nest. Or perhaps they have left it in spirit only and it is the body that I smell.

The sidewalk on the way to work is constellated with broken car window glass, an unmistakable blue glint into tiny pieces, and someone got the fix they needed last night.

I am not in too much of a hurry to not notice the first roses in the park next to my office, to see the flash of a mocking bird dive bombing from a high wall.

These things, stitched together in a long line, will gather me back home at the end of the day, unspool again in the morning. It is as gentle a settling as one could reasonably expect and for now it will suffice.

I am waiting at home for the roofer to come and give me an estimate for the leaky roof and spewing gutter amelioration. I am trying to squeeze this in before going to work and when he arrives, I show him out to the fire escape. We go up one floor to inspect the gutter, then he scrambles two more flights all the way to top of the house, nimble as a monkey, and when he gestures me to follow him, well, I do. When I get to the top I am considering how to swing my leg from the straight ladder over the parapet, when it hits me. I am wearing heels. Mules, no less, jesus. And a dress. With a slip, yes, but no panties. The breeze four stories off the ground is significant and I realize that the urge to put a hand to my billowing skirts is a nearly irresistible reaction to the cool morning air hitting my rump. I look back over my shoulder, to the cracked concrete of the back yard, a killingly long drop, and know what a fecking idiot I am, because now, with flip floppity shoes and functionally bare-assed, I have to get back down.

The moment when you realize you have imperiled yourself needlessly makes the danger that much greater, for creeping panic can cause worse mistakes than just blithely going forward. This instance on the ladder at the top of my house flashes me back 20 years to Austin, when I found the windy meandering street I was riding on suddenly turned into a highway. And the bad possibilities of Texas highway, underpowered motorcycle, and lack of exoskeleton are nearly endless and nearly always fatal. Today was exactly the same kind of shock. You have simply wandered into a position where you could actually die. Now, find your way out.

I did take a moment to understand the gravity of my situation, explain to the guy that I was not really dressed for climbing and therefore would not be joining him on the roof, then carefully negotiated myself back down the ladders. What this reminds me of most of all, in the spike of fear I felt looking down, is the great, simple desire to live. And, like 20 years ago, I still don’t have an exoskeleton. Jackass.

Today I picked up a crumpled dollar bill of God's money and I knew I would be giving it tonight to the street case at the top of the subway stairs, clinging to the pay phone to anchor his shame. I press it into his outstretched palm, feel his hand under mine, his fingers clevering closed.

In the middle of the sidewalk a little girl is spinning, spinning, her short dark braids pinwheeling and sailed out by white barrettes while her father and his friends laugh and lean against the bodega wall, indulgent and protective, and my face splits a grin.

The grey soled grocery store has the first of spring's cherries, yawning cashiers who chat into their celphones in languages I can only guess at, raspberries so fresh and perfect to eat them will feel like theft, and the guy who camps at check out with his bootleg videos for sale.

A long sweet run on a night when the air traffic to LaGuardia goes right over the park, shivering and screaming the air, lights flickering in the blue hour.

If we had tornadoes in this town I would never leave it.

From today's commute I can tell you about shoes. About battered flats, sneakers, ankle chains, a tiny tattoo nestled next to an Achilles tendon and meant to be hidden underneath socks when home from college on holiday breaks.

I can tell you about the bags that are resting on the subway floor. The flimsy plastic bags from the grocery, the deflated anemic gym bag, the take-away tote from the conference in Rochester, as cheap and unsubstantial as the event itself.

I can’t seem to be able to lift my head up, to look at the faces that belong to these shoes. I am afraid of their terrible truths, of their casual degradation, of their bleak blankness. I am not sure where this has come from. No, I know this is coming from me and I want it to stop. Here, play the Beastie Boys, run up the subway stairs, burst into the honk and hustle of midtown, and shake this sidewalk until its teeth come loose.

Garlic is blistering in the saute pan while I am butchering a tomato. I am cutting out its heart and thinking about the size of the wounds we create. Seeds and slimy guts are spilling out and I know it is good to be reminded of the depth of cuts as I slice the fruit and make it show me its insides.

The tomato is slid into the pan. Now I am dicing artichoke hearts and remembering the oracle that is Myers-Briggs, which says once he discovers I am not perfect his disappointment will be a profound, obstreperous obstacle. And that despite how tender I try to be, what I do to tender grace, I am at core a hard dark seed.

"Your ego is writing a check your body can't cash" and when heat is applied the tomatoes release their liquid, the artichokes turn to a soft, sweet mush that will linger in my mouth long after dinner ends. Add the chicken I pay someone else to skin and cook and chop for me.

Pour this over linguine, and take it to the window. Early mosquitos are batting against the glass, it is still raining hard, now it's time to eat and think about the races I ran today with a calculator, the jockeying of egos and papers and timelines, the stretching of patience and resources and time, and the run I did not get to have today, the tangible feet on asphalt, the struggle for oxygen, the firings in every muscle, and know there will be tomorrow.

My hair hung all the way to my hips when I cut it all off two years ago. If you asked me why I would have lied to you. I would have told you it was a bother to my training schedule. It was hot, it was heavy, it was always wet from sweat or showers. If you cried out in reprobation, I would have lied further, and said I gave it to charity to make wigs for children with no hair.

The truth: there was a man. And the train that went out of service and left me stuck on a platform and late getting home; the cab that whisked efficiently through traffic and got me to him early; the celphone call that cut out at that dead spot by the power plant near the highway, all served to confirm what he thought he saw when my eyes met the waiter's when I placed my order, when I stopped to pet a neighbor's dog and praise him extravagantly, when my face already had a smile on it as I walked through the park to meet him. It all read as betrayal to him, either completed or imminent.

So I cut off my hair. I made myself into a meek novitiate, begging acceptance into his order. I sought to make myself plain, arid, beautiful in penance only to him. I was both privately proud and secretly ashamed of the sacrifice at the time.

Today when I check my email there is a promo: check your love horoscope! Does it ever say, hell no, you are not ready, in fact you are a toxic slag heap with an unknowable half-life? It seems like there would be a benefit in that. At least my hair would be on my head, instead of in a bag on the corner of my desk.

Someone has shoved an icepick between my scapula and now my shoulders want to be ear muffs. I am moaning over races I'd like to run but there is not even a water tight roof on this house. Helicopters circle danger overhead and I have to remember to pick my chin up. I'm not as sad as I sound, it's just my laundry that needs deliverence.

People on this train look like brutalized versions of people I know. A flame faced old Irishman is hard eyeing me from behind the fortress of his bones, his dense hands swollen together into a mass. He looks like he has been beaten every day of his life. Another man is curling into his middle-aged bullk, his widening face squatting behind a chin belonging in a Velasquez painting of the Hapsbourgs. That is not a compliment.

I will concentrate on smaller beauties: her intricate braid laying thick and black down her back; a trill of tulle peeping like a sparrow from a denim bodice; the thicket of blooming wisteria over an old brick wall; the rush of busy outside the coffee shop windows. Reach deeper in now, find the satisfying place in memory where lives the points of bone under the skin, the breadth of shoulders, the shape of air in the mouth, the man who asked me to kiss him then let me breathe him in.

He is sitting in the corner of the car with a red suitcase, coming or going, I can’t tell. A blue paper cup of cheap diner coffee and he is in a nodding groggy twilight, bent nearly double, hand fumbling the brim of a baseball cap lower on his face. He is drunk-sleeping and slipping away and the coffee falls to the floor. It was a full cup, and the smell of milky sweet fills this corner of the train. His face fills with embarrassment too, as other riders lift their feet to avoid the sticky wash, but soon enough he won’t remember it at all.

All last week a crew was outside the park gates, removing a tree that had been growing through the wrought iron for fifty or sixty years. They were disassembling slowly, taking off the arcing branches, gradually de-limbing, then cutting the trunk down in rounds with a chain saw. Now they are to the part that has merged with the fence, now they must continue by hand, now a necessary intimacy. He has selected his weapon, an axe, and I watch his shoulders move, watch tiny slivers fall away, the tree steadily dwindling even further.

Today I am missing the perfectly imperfect, the soft hand with the rough nail, the kiss that unmakes and makes me, both. There is no time for this. I lay my tools out on my desk, this is what there is today. This is all there is.

At the airport

Far off lights glittering under a scudding sky.

I am in line in the bathroom before the flight. All I really want to do is take off my bra. So I do. The other women in line turn their flat eyes to me in the long mirror. There is nothing interesting in this shuffling shit hole.

Architecture of convenience, all made to keep you moving. Concrete, harsh light, chairs for twenty minutes.

I am used to seeing beat down and voided from the places I have lived, from the places I work. Here, with the expectation of travel, reuniting, adventure, I don’t expect it. The well-kept have a frosted blankness, or a twitching grinding agitation, or an overfed bovinity. I don’t want to talk to any of these people, I don’t want to hear any of their stories.

We are standing on the subway platform but it may as well be seventh grade girls' locker room for the way she is eyeing me. A calculating appraisal, sideways but fully hostile, analyzing the assets I have, the perception that I might take what is hers.

The competition is only in her head. She is young, round, and what she is trying to save for herself is standing right behind her. While she fixates on keeping me away, he is leaning in to be closer to her, dipping his face to catch the scent of her neck.

It has just started to rain. Just enough to sigh the warmth from the afternoon pavement. Just enough to raise the smell of soil and and rust from the squared cement, just enough to bring the tired petals from the pear blossoms down, mixing white and water on the black top.

This girl wears armor sewn into her skin, a permanent hardscape so she will not forget, will not let you forget either. When you look at her you will not see anything you are not meant to see. If she allows you even the air she has exhaled you had better know to be grateful. I saw her throw him a crumb and I knew what it meant, even if I hadn’t had the dream, the dream where I laid my hand on his shoulder, looked down into his face and said “I know you are seeing someone.” The rush of shame and panic to his face remains with me like the balloon you watch escape into the opening sky.