805 Michaels

I’m back. I know I am back because they start road work at 7 am, enormous mechanical teeth tearing through Fulton Street, making my building, my bed, the skin between my hipbones vibrate. I know I am back because I am stepping over a smoldering cigarette butt rolling on the begummed sidewalk, inching down the subway platform from a man who, if he ever was adequately medicated, surely is not right now.

In my email box at work, there are things of greater and lesser importance. Deadlines are being changed, a new policy for housing homeless families, new zoning for providing services to the elderly. The New York City Department of Health wants me to know that in the most recent year with complete data, 805 Michaels were born.

They have not turned the heat on in my office yet, fall weather is corkscrewing its way in, going down and doubling back over and over, so I go for a walk at lunchtime to warm up. There is a long line at the bank and thin music scratching to cover that fact and I keep thinking about 805 Michaels and this city and its too-little, too-much, prickle-backed elbow-wrestling can have its 805 Michaels if I can stand near my one, even if it means I have to go all the way across the country to do it.