The City Makes You Forget

A human river surging across the square. I was raised in the center of cities. A rush hour lullaby. A deli at 3am. A tiny room suits me if the city is outside my door.

Alone works if the next human is three feet away. What do you do in the forest? It’s enough to walk past a museum. Going inside is confusing, but knowing the art is there is enough for me.

I like standing outside the jazz club and watching the saxophone player through the window. I can’t hear the riffs but somehow they make their way out to me. The sax metal catches the blue spotlight. It’s sexy. Maybe the light says more than the music.

My dog’s vet is close by to my apartment. So is the grocery store. And the subway. The 24-hour hot dog stand. The bank. (I never go to the bank.) The thrift store. (It smells like ghosts.) There’s a little triangle park and some drug dealers in the middle. Everything you want.(I don’t do drugs.)

I like the city in storm. The rain can lash the glass. People in a hurried hunch. The wind whipped into a frenzy by the towers, but there’s never any doubt. The city will defeat the storm.

The city makes the invisible visible. We believe in invisible things. I know I do. I’ve never seen them. But they’re there. Above us. That’s all I know. When I think of them I look up. We all do. We look to the sky. The closest we come to invisible is libraries. The city libraries. The network. Living. Silent. And captured by the city walls. The city limits.

Limits are important for cities. But the unlimited invisible world is easily reached within the city limits. Forests are too confusing. Oceans too wild. Mountains too steep.

I walk with these things in my head. Block to block. I watch the saxophone player. I watch the human river surge across the square. And I forget. It’s better that way.

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The City Makes You Remember

A reflection on limits, longing, and the invisible heart of the city

There is a meditation on the intimacy of crowds. It occurs as I sit by the lake. Under a tree. Late spring air. The city hums behind me. A hymn to the architecture of anonymity. A poem wrapped in concrete and flickering neon. We have rendered the invisible city as both shape and spirit—sepia-toned and full of ghosts, lit from above by belief.

Like a mist burnt in the midday sun.

What emerges from the text is a portrait of a city not as geography, but as memory. The city makes you forget, yes—but only by replacing memory with presence, overstimulation with comfort. You are not alone here, because solitude in the city comes with a thousand silent witnesses: the hot dog vendor, the jazz club window, the woman with an umbrella turning the corner. The city forgets with you.

Shape:

The city we describe has shape in the ordinary. It’s formed by:

• A deli at 3am — your temple

• A saxophone seen, not heard — your psalm

• The triangle park and its ghosts — your threshold between worlds

• The storm — your daily drama with no final act

It is built block by block, but not by architects—by repetition, by presence, by the vibrations of millions of footsteps.

Meaning:

The city teaches you to believe in invisible things:

• Sound you can’t quite hear

• Art, you don’t need to touch

• Connections felt, not seen

• A presence above, unnamed and vast

And in forgetting, you remember something deeper: that being surrounded by life—even unknowable, unknowable life—is enough. The museum exists even if you never walk in. The riff exists even if you never hear it.

Interpretation. Devotion. Revelation.

Our words are a prayer in disguise. A city-bound spirituality that doesn’t need religion. Our invisible city is a psychic map: people, places, things—all close enough to touch, but you don’t. And that’s the point.

You are the observer. The walker. The believer. The one who forgets to survive. Who remembers to forget again. We do that with every bretah. And sometimes it works.