Connection in a populous city – thoughts on the non-Spanish side of the brain

I live in paradise most of the time, a mentally rocky place in the world around the middle of the earth in between the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Connection is something hard to find in my two favorite islands, maybe it's the island mentality. New York city is the other island I speak of at this moment . According to the New York government the city (NYC) hosts about 8 million people in a bit of 304 square miles of land. Add to that all the visitors that are in and out like me. That seems like a hard place to connect with so many people, you are faceless. Then, why did I find a connection in a New York City?

What is a connection between all of us? It must be something more than just an half-empty bed with two people or more than jinx type of thought moments. I'm sure it's easier to find a nice piece of pizza than a real person to bond with at one point of your day in the city.

What is a connection? According to the dictionary it can be anything from “the act of connecting”,”meeting of trains”,to “association” or even “sexual intercourse”. Most probably this definition is applied differently for different people or even depend on context. I shall examine for myself, for a moment: What is a connection, and specially in New York City according to January?

Is it sharing laughs about bad dates? About loves of theater, and how hamsters make cute pets? Is it sharing love for food with Spanish names? It is sharing a bottle of wine? Is it sharing your favorite concert and the bum bum of your heart as “your song” comes along? Maybe it's more like sharing a smile with a complete stranger in a train full of sour morning faces. Should it sound more like the rain you both complain about? The first time you held hands with someone and meant it? Is it toasting about the future with island rum? Is the fact that someone you know found a glove you lost a few hours later in the subway knowing it was yours? Love for hot weather? Sharing stories about drama-drive lives? Creating our own storm? Or knowing we did the city right?

Connection: it might just be fact that you know none of this will ever repeat itself again. I don't really know if all of that is true or not, I live for the maybe. As that cheesy quote says “Every man is an island”, well, from a girl from an island who went to another island to make connections;I'll say like that Ebony Bones song I guess we'll always have New York.



p.s. It was either that or posting on New York's craigslist “Missed Connections” section ;)

T

El tiempo

"Time is a tricky thing, because, you can't work your way around it". I told this to a friend of mine a couple of days ago when he was complaining about his vacation ending. It is true, it goes forward and nothing else, that's it. It makes some people miserable, like the Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite who was obsessed with the past so much he even buys a fake time machine.

I love to do this lil' trick where I call my friends from other countries with different time zones, specially on New Year's and say Happy New Year. They either are in the next year or in the past year. It's like the only time, pun intended, you can fool the sequence of time and be within two years at the same time, through a phone call.

We can't change that fact that the past will never come back or could be change, we all learned from it and the future is still filled with possibilities, good or bad.

T.

Tania is a poetic terrorist

I rather not share but I will. I shared this with a friend, told him as a warning " I liked it when I wrote it but now I think it's pathetic. He said (something among these lines) "Nothing that you write, about what you feel is pathetic, it is true in the moment you wrote it because you felt it, it was real". Maybe he is right.
Gracias Ingo.

Spanish

Siento un vacío, un espacio con viento entre mi corazón y pulmn, y a veces pienso que lo toco, un vacío un hoyo. Una desesperacion, un dolor, como cuando quieres llorar y no puedes, porque lo aguantas hasta que se va, como aguantar el calor de un casi orgasmo que lo aguantas tanto que se va y se voló. Ya los sentimientos no son ¿porque lloras cuando otros lloran y no por tu propia razón?Y quiero tocar tu mano, quiero sentir tu calor pero estoy fría, fría y no es la hemoglobina, en un espacio con viento entre mi pulmón y mi corazón.

Mi bou read it and asked me "Does this mean you have no love to give?"
I never answered, but I didn't because I did have.