We live in a time of resignation, one that contains constrained myriads of tongues that beg to harmonize and, in the process, can only differ. The power that divides us as such threatens each tongue in its uniqueness until each is nearly indistinguishable, cardboard, and divorced of any noise through which it could inhale its unique purpose. But my city holds power, too, and my city lives in a time of awakening, one during which those myriads and tongues that beg to differ can divorce that pigeonhole and create its own harmonies. A symphony of differences learns to, altogether, sound like one sweetness.

In the shoebox of home in South Jersey, nights were a bright light that merely drew the blinds tightly closed and offered little traffic. My neighborhood here offers the opposite. St. Nicholas Park is among one of uptown’s most plentiful spots for people-watching, its ancient concrete staircases beige and fine at a glance but bronze, muddy, and rather rotten at a sit. The scenery would come to underscore my soul’s transition to the openness of the city through the exact language with which I will always speak about it. Thanks to Elena, the city would become both my favorite learning and teaching experience in the multitudes of this little language. 

I had never spoken to this Elena, though she met me at the park with this giddy, almost inoperable laugh as if I surely had. Thus, I wondered why she revisited my second step from her debrisless, leafless third that the park would not continue to replicate either way. It almost made me laugh louder and more definitively than she did. Though I could not move behind her thought process, I certainly was not going to move against it, for it offered me a sort of purpose. I was no longer a statue in our city. 

Since moving to this heightening city from the stillness of the suburbs, I had felt so small and motionless. The city offered this sort of grand landscape and hustle that had simply been foreign to me. My older street clothes had worn themselves out, a green cargo pant fading olive and little approachability in a wrinkled black tank. I was not the cooler passerby I was twenty minutes prior, when I lit my first Marlboro with a Bic lighter that matched that tank’s dull pallet, almost like compensation. Why was I almost like a friend to her if I had been a sabeteur to the city’s charm? Her knitted cardigan was a much more vibrant green, and she walked with a brighter bounce and this refusal to step backwards. I felt differently. To Elena, though, I might as well have not. She certainly could not have smelled the burnt ash of my palms from a flash in the night by the flick of a lighter, but she must have known the metallic taste of tobacco leaf I had been trying to swallow and savor at once like my first sweet mistake of both youth and adulthood. She crouched down, eye-level.  

“Do you have a cigarette,” I captured with a head tilt and her wild curls, strawberry blonde and bouncy and unfair as they were. Her smile was toothy and two teeth poked out either side of it, like dulled, unique vampire fangs whose only expression was curiosity. 

“Will you need a lighter,” I offered in that same soft, antithetically innocent tone.

She echoed Harlem’s finest favorite phrase, “a lighter.” 

She took a seat on the white-spotted, bird-burdened step below us, as maybe most definitive answers were not verbalized, but attended to in a language much stronger. 

But she had been working towards fluency with the one I had been speaking all along. 

“I’m practicing my English in the city. That’s a lighter?” 

 I gleefully nodded. 

She might as well have been of larger help to me than I was her. For the first time since moving to the city, I felt I had something to offer, almost a distinct language in and of itself prompting me to believe in the power within the newcomer I had been. Thus, we shared these spoilages and exchanged stories of her neighborhood far downtown, in Chelsea, until the city allowed us even more to offer.

“Pier? That’s what it’s called,” she inquired upon my description of the palmy boardwalk-based Little Island that was, indeed, one. I nodded.

“Pier,” she silently repeated to herself like a promise. “Pier.” 

Though quite brief, my interaction with Elena taught me the immense power of language above the invisible distinction between the two of us on opposite ends of the stairs. There might as well not have been one at all, as language unifies and uplifts two passerbys that just want to know the beginning of the answers to each other’s largest questions.