Terror and Beauty

The city is terribly beautiful, or beautifully terrible. I can't decide. There is jazz in the summer, lights and colors, snowflakes on my tongue and garlands stretched from pole to pole. I like the business and the bustle. I love looking up at the buildings and feeling the city's pulse--it is bright and beautiful, and I am everything and nothing all at once.

But looking down, there is darkness that I don't know how to judge. Two levels below ground trapping all the dripping smells of congested traffic, sewage and who knows what steaming out of vents in the walls--the sinus of the city. A man lays his head down to sleep behind 2 cardboard curtains. This decent blocks out the bite of the wind, but not the freezing blackness in his eyes. Another man does not speak, but holds up two fingers for two free lunches. The tense gathering of skin around his cheekbones says please. And thank you. Then he returns to his broom and dust pan, sweeping up the place he calls home.

It's a home, isn't it? A small, fragmented society exists quietly below the streets, behind the music and the architecture, and this is where it lives--underneath everything. A home is a perfectly rational place to sweep. But this home is so grossly removed from the homely and the comfortable, the warmth and the family, that his lips make no sound and his eyes, too, are frozen like colored glass, empty of some things but so incredibly full of others.

Everything about this side of the city is so terrible. So terribly unjust, so terribly wrong. Perhaps society is terribly at fault. Yet I can't help but say that this man with the untold story in his eyes is somehow very beautiful.