I opened the front door of my apartment building today and felt the calm chill greet me with a lackadaisical care of my existence. Was it the air that was rushing in to vent my space or was it the other way around — for I had felt at that moment that my simple, quiet intrusion had caused a ripple that truly meant nothing to the world around me. But I had to stand there and take it all in for a few seconds at least; as tribute, as homage, to our city and our fates intertwined. Door hinged midway like the symbolic opening and closing of a chapter in a book — same book nevertheless but definitely a neatly tied up ending that had run its course. The only thing propping that last sentimental page up was my questionably straight, solitary arm in the doorway of life — of the most deliberate few tributary seconds of my life. That delaying, that procrastinating, that solidifying of the moment was like instant gratification as I breathed in the velvet wintery New York City air on the morning of February 9th of 2015, when I was finally performing instead of speaking my acceptance and acknowledgment of my helplessness in this vast life of change. And stepping down those royal steps of life, one walks tall and hardened at the same time — cold yet warmed by the vicissitudes and circumstances we are born into, and one emerges a half-formed amphibian — perpetually walking on land and attempting to swim in the sweeping waters of life.

I did not remember the door closing behind me on that saturated Monday morning, but I know that it certainly did and I certainly let it without putting up any instance of a fight.