For the Love of Robin

Living in New York, you get very jaded very quickly. Every time someone shoves into your backside at the turnstile. Or pushes up against you while they propel themselves into that last bit of breathing space left in that train segment. How about when people appear out of nowhere, as if conjured out of thin air while you, the schmuck, waits patiently in a line with your card out, ready to swipe it as you board the bus?

It's enough to make a person want to swear off the human race. I mean, what redeeming values do people in a great metropolis really have? We are pushy, arrogant, rude, have no patience, no time to wait, no concept of the word tack and in an homage to exceptionalism, everyone is so special that nobody's shit actually stinks! You would think that the makers of Charmin would go out of business at this rate, because apparently nobody in an urban environment would ever have a need for such a product!

I often wonder why is it that I seem to be trapped in this vortex of hubris and hardness. True, like thousands of other peons, I'm tethered to a job which pays me little, provides me with scant opportunity to give or get respect, but keeps food in the fridge and the landlord's litigators away. What reasons could there be to continue to live a life devoid of purpose, sunshine and reason? I can't find the answers, though I've looked often and regularly. I think that I'm not alone in my questioning. People turn to other methods to dull the numbness, to make sense out of the senseless, and to pretend to find reason where none exists. Church, athletics, family, volunteerism.  Even the occassional scrap book and hand craft is just hollow in the face of long and endless stretches of  emptiness.  Somehow, what works for others just doesn't quite cut it for me.  I can only decorate so many cupcakes, ties so many bows, stencil so many placecards, or glue so many pieces of semiprecious jewelry in place.  It means nothing.  It gives nothing in return.  It doesn't breathe, or think or comprehend.

Which is why I think a little bit of my crust, my frozen heart, my broken soul, finds a bit of salvation every time I look into her eyes.  She's a quite little thing, and sings in a soft, hardly audible voice only when you least expect it.  Those bright onyx eyes betray little when they stare at you, her head cocked at a coquettish angle, as if she had a line directly into the deepest recesses of your being.  She seems to sympathize, to understand, to share your pain and anguish.  As she perches precariously on my laptop, her crimson bosom rising and falling with every breath, I sense that the connection between us, unlike with humans, transcends words.  She understands much, reveals nothing.  But through her eyes, and her quiet ways, she affords me peace and restores my faith.  While hope wanes with each day I am forced to continue living in this urban hell, Robin's merry presence keeps a tiny flicker of humanity alive in my heart.