NY lights

New York, New York

Let me ask you this. Do you think you can fall in love with someone that you don't really know at all?
The reason I ask, I live in New York City with almost 8 million other people and I always thought.. who knows, the person sitting next to you on the subway could be your soul mate. My point is, the instant before you do meet them, they are strangers to you and you to them.

Strangers.

In this city, an absolute stranger can inspire you.
You can walk past the same building every day and not even realize the person who lives there is one day going to be your best friend. Maybe someone who desperately needs a best friend. It's my favorite thing about New York. You have got some people on top of the world, others scraping rock bottom.

On any given day, you never know who you are going to meet. Maybe it will be someone just trying to clean up their act, as tough as that might be. Or maybe someone living their life with reckless abandon. Someone trying to lose themselves completely.

But we are all forced together. Everyday. And the only thing that separates us is chance. Fate maybe. You go through your life, your daily struggles. You think you are alone but you are not. 8 million people in this city. And anyone of them, anyone, at any time can walk into your life and change it.
Forever.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

How do I love thee
Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway.