A light rain - a mist really - falls gently through the lamplights and the headlights of passing traffic. On Astor Place, right outside Barnes and Nobles, next to the paper stand, and one pace off the street, I am leaning against a clicking signal box and it's 2am. The streets are wet. As the taxis streak by, yellow lines with red lights, I'm pulling another drag from my last cigarette.

It's Saturday night and people still walk by. I've just come from Erica's apartment on 12th street and you can't smoke in the subway, so I'm waiting outside. It's cold. And I'm wet. The mist doesn't fall like rain. It descends like white sheets thrown on a summer day over grass, slowly. It covers you when you walk. Wets your eyes. It rests on windshields and park benches. People are walking down to St. Marks. Hitting the bars, then stumbling home. Everything is covered with a fine mist.

In front of me, Lafayette meets West 8th, St. Marks, and Astor. It creates an island in the middle. During daylight, a traffic nightmare. A skate spot. There are no skaters now. It's raining.

I've grown up in the city, right here. And in places just like this, at night mostly. Sitting on the promenade with Thomas for two hours on summer nights watching the traffic slide by across the East River on the FDR. Dropping by Washington Square Park to see what's going down, to see who's hanging out. Walking through Union Square late enough not to see any cops. Skating around the city, and ending up at the Brooklyn Banks. The daylight hours are just fine, but there's something about the city at night. The way in the dark you can see the lights, the life. The feeling of walking down the Bowery at 2am and being completely alone, knowing that you're surrounded by people for miles.

Tall buildings enclose traffic, public transportation, pedestrians. The city is movement, the city is music. Sometimes piano keys rolling in like thunder. Sometimes smooth like Coltrane. The people move with it. Up and down streets, in and out of buildings. All with music. The sounds of the city. The sound of the subway rumbling under the sidewalk. The car horns. The bus engine hum. The shouting people, oblivious. And only after they're really tired, worn out from a day of work, will they stop to drink coffee at Mona Lisa's or Shakespear's Sister.

The buildings, swarming with people, like ants in an ant hole. The traffic moving like rivers along the avenues. The constant sound of traffic, like the crashing of surf, comes in intermittent waves created by traffic lights. All of it movement. Somehow the people don't stop moving in the city that never sleeps.

My cigarette is out, burn straight down to the filter. I drop it and step towards the subway. The six train rumbles closer, approaching the station. As it nears, the rails gleam with dirty white light and the man down the platform stands and approaches the edge. The doors slide open and I sit next to the conductor's booth. I think to myself, "All this is home. Tomorrow I leave for Hartford."

The thing about the city is that no matter how you feel, it lends itself to your emotion. No matter what your mindset, the city will provide for you to be completely immersed in yourself. If your happy, the city is a great place to be, it will make you happier. And if on the same day your sad, and that's all you want to be, it will complement that as well. Unfortunately, this behavior is interpreted by outsiders as somewhat selfish, or self-centered. But I tell you, that in a city with so many people, in a city when your never physically alone, everyone needs a temporary escape, some time to yourself. What people don't understand is that yes, these people are immersed in themselves, but it's not selfishness. Selfishness entails being closed minded and implies that someone else is negatively affected by your actions. The average self imersed New Yorker is actually concerned only with himslef, he's probably very open to other people. He's just trying to spend some time with himself.

A man in a brown coat sits catty-corner from me accros the triaincar. His head is lowered, and he rests his elbows on his knees. With his shoulders slouched, his are eyes fixed on his hand turning a quarter over and over. He drops the quarter and leaves it. He sits back against the side of the train and props his head on the window. Things haven't been going well for him.

"You dropped your quarter." I say.

"Oh, yeah, thanks." He replies as he bends over and picks it up.

"A buck fifty is rediculus." He adds.

"Yeah, I've always got all these damn quarters lying around." I say.

"I remember back when a ride used to be a buck, nice and even. But know a days... Well, this is me. G'night kid." He smirks at me as he stands.

"Washdaclozindoors" the conductor says at Bowling Green, the last stop in Manhattan. The man in the brown coat has left the train, leaving me alone for the last few minutes of my ride. The train pulls away, and as the dirt yellow lights of the tunnel begin to pass faster, the train pushes deeper under the East River towards Brooklyn. For two minutes I ride flat on the bottom of the river. Then the front of the train pulls up, there's the familiar clacking of loose track, and the train comes to a quick stop at Bourogh Hall. Outside, there are no taxis and a sheet of newpaper blows across Court Street. It is still raining and I begin my walk home from the train station.

New York, just like all other places, is changed by weather. New Yorkers, on the surface, are unaffected by it. "I've got to go to work and some damn hurricane isn't going to stop me." The time exposed to the elements has been reduced from the walk from your front door to the subway, and from there to the office. But despite our apparent disinterest in the weather, and the minuscule effect it has on our everyday lives, New York is only truly itself in the rain.

They gray Hudson, mirrored in the slowly passing clouds, pushes slowly down the West Side, the rain disturbing its glassy surface, rippling it. Somehow it matches the used sidewalk pavement. Somehow the subway is only really a sub-way once you've been sheltered from the elements above. Somehow office buildings, standing taller everyday, don't seem as tall until the tops disappear into low clouds.

A few blocks closer to home on Clinton two cops sit in their cruiser while all sorts of vehicles pass. The city has an affect on everyone it contains. The traffic flowing endlessly up and down avenues carry life like veins through all of us.