Everyone must go to New York once in their life.
You walk down the streets of Manhattan. The buildings are so tall you cannot see their tops. The streets are ordered like channels for electrons moving through a silicon chip. A lazy smell of marijuana drifts through the air. New York's yellow taxis beep-beep-beep their way along. Black birds pass silently through the sky. Suddenly someone on a bicycle or scooter slices through the block with a whoosh. A few police officers lean side by side against a wall, playing with their phones, their flesh pushing their uniforms tight and round.
All of this is completely a movie. You can hear the sound, but the sound is a silent background. If this were a movie, perhaps you would hear a thud, and in the distance a plane would surrealistically crash into a building. Then, on the block before your eyes, people would scatter in all directions like headless flies. Taxis would be forced to stop; one would block a whole row, crookedly, and the jam would grow worse and worse. At that moment the camera would suddenly turn toward you. You would be the protagonist of the world at this instant. You would look at your phone screen and, with a click, leave behind a selfie.
Of course, the plane did not crash into the building. You run to the site of the Twin Towers, and there are no broken walls or ruins like the ones you imagined. It takes you a lot of effort to find the black pools. The water flows endlessly into that dark hole. You know it is artificial. It consumes electricity. It should be fragile. You feel it should suddenly stop. But like the trains of this city, it runs without cease, greeting every sunrise and seeing off every sunset. For more than a hundred years, it has been like the fragile life by which human beings struggle to survive. It is like an ever-burning lamp lit devoutly by believers in a Buddhist temple, the trembling flame never going out. This is New York.
Its subway stations are literally like holes in a whack-a-mole machine. You suddenly see an opening and go in; suddenly you come out of some other opening. Between one hole and another, you are transported by the train, and everyone else is transported by the train too. You look at each person, as if they carry as much pain in their hearts as you do, as much heavy history. They carry the past on their backs and, without caring who sees, become themselves in this city, because there is no one else to become.
You are exhausted. She is exhausted too. He is exhausted too. He sits across from you playing with his phone, just like in an advertisement. She and he lean against each other, as if it would also be fine to dig the other person out of space entirely.
You have heard that the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue looks at night like a transparent, glittering bubble. You burrow into a hole on Wall Street and emerge from a hole called 47th St. After walking a few steps, you see that Apple Store. People enter and exit. Light forms industrial stripes on the glass. All of this is like an old house before the New Year, still lit at night, red lanterns waiting to be hung.
You know that she will have that moment: the moment when you poke your head out of the hole and she strikes your skull like a heavy hammer, thudding down, leaving it buzzing. Slowly, out of the diffuse dizziness, you see a perfect, glittering bubble.
Exactly like your broken heart.