New York City's beauty is a willful one. Sometimes all you can see when you look New York City in the face is decades of truly unspeakable filth and grime embedded in the grout of the 42nd st subway. The filth is sometimes all that's left of crumbling structures and has replaced steel beams and ceramic tiles with just the memory of them, supported only by years of caked dirt, dust, rust, and human secretions. Sometimes all you can see is the various splatters on stairwell walls, the avenues, building door handles - and wonder how long it's been there, and hope that there aren't too many identifying qualities that reveal what the substance is. Sometimes it can feel like your only true goal of the day is to get by without having truly understood what you've looked at, because if you did, you might never leave your apartment ever again.

In New York City you are always seeing your reflection in sidewalk shop windows like some kind of hellish mirror funhouse. You never know what exactly you'll see, and sometimes it appears unrecognizable. The glass—angled, pristine—a surface that feels too eager to reflect the weary lines of a New York frown. The longer you look the less defined you are: you are one smudge among a sea of smudges, imprinted briefly on that glass in the form of your sfumatic colors that blur together, and body heat fog that lingers on the glass, an imprint that someone alive stood there looking in. Reflections and fogged glass are sometimes the only imprint one will have made in a New York City day.

Sometimes it feels like you're walking through an everlasting crowd, one that never dissipates but morphs and metastasizes like a perpetual tumor moving throughout the bloodstream of the city. Down the avenues and numbered streets, rushes of human lives always in mechanical flux to and from the elusive beating heart of New York City that can be found accidentally in a small Italian restaurant on a cold January night, or in a hot-dog stand in central park on a Tuesday afternoon.

It can feel like you're a ghost of a ghost, a ghost of other people's ghosts. Ghosts in Dante's first circle of hell, lingering and aimless, ghosts in the form of dead personalities, personas, would-bes, and never-even-got-a-chance-to-be demons seeking eternal damnation —the city doesn’t need help killing these dreams once and for all.

But sometimes there is an untraceable magic that ebbs into your life just when you’re about to succumb to the city’s in the way of small moments and then, like all magic, disappears to lap the shore of another downtrodden spirit.

I catch my breath each time I'm on the subway and see an Express train running parallel with ours for but a brief moment. I look out the window and see people in the other subway car, just like me, standing in a long metal tube hurtling in the dark toward some destination. People sway unconsciously to the whims of the train car; closing their eyes; reading; looking at nothing in particular; chatting with companions. The sounds of their train car are silent to me, but the entire scene is narrated by screeching metal wheels on tired rails and the familiar dull thumps over old tracks. In those moments, I am a voyeur and also no one in particular; I am them and they are me, like two mirrors held against each other, light and reflection cascading into each other forever. And then, in a quick moment, their train disappears from me (or am I disappearing from them?) as it dips below on its unseen track, and those train car people have once again vanished into what feels like another universe, never to be seen by me again. Parallel trains meeting in the middle of a common existence before diverging forever feels like the very essence of New York City, where every day and every interaction feels like a string of near misses and improbable odds. Fate can exist in a city like New York due to the power of probability alone: millions of people, countless objects and minutia, infinite decision branches, and infinite human feelings that compound the chances of every outlandish and mundane possibility alike—forever. In New York City, every interaction can feel like fate simply because you were there to experience it at all.