They didn’t talk much, although the one with the small, white hospital towel draped over his knees, offered that, “heart disease might be involved, too.” He took a drag from his cigarette as he waited for a response. You could see the tattoos covering his hand, the IV piercing the skin just above the word HATE spelled out on his knuckles, the smoke being exhaled. The other guy nodded. He had nothing to say. And with that the conversation disintegrated. Just space between them now. An unbroachable distance. Grief-struck and lost, a million miles apart, they looked through all the people passing by on the sidewalk in front of them, and stared off into other worlds.

Thin and pale, her hair was pulled back into a practical, oddly lonely ponytail. Her mother walked beside her, carrying the young woman’s belongings in a plastic bag and speaking cheerfully about trivial matters, as if relieved to finally be able to speak of trivial matters. She was trying to assure her daughter that she did not belong in a hospital, I think, and that she could just pick up her life wherever she had been forced to abandon it. The young woman said nothing as the mother talked, and although her eyes were still a little sunken and dull, there were traces of relief to be read in her tired and beautiful face.

They passed through the revolving door that led to University Avenue and stepped out into what must have felt like a miracle. The night was so unseasonably mild that it seemed like you’d just emerged into some temperate and surreal vacation– and everything, the waiting stand of festive cabs, the disembodied sounds of the night, everything,  felt laden with potential. The young woman stepped forward onto the sidewalk and looked up into the the dark canyon of sky above her. With arms outstretched and head back, she moved in a slow circle, as if calling the world back. When she was finished she was facing her mother, her arms still open. And in this unexpected moment their eyes caught. They smiled at each other, and then over the course of a second, maybe two, their smiles began to tremble, and then they were both in tears, sobbing and embracing on the sidewalk, the cab drivers looking quietly on.