Sometimes I Drive into Brooklyn at Night… #PoetryCave

Sometimes I drive into Brooklyn at night

just so I can see the tiny windows lit up along the edges of streets. Strings of christmas lights and mini chandeliers and, if I’m lucky, the smudgy handprints of children looking back down at me, wondering what it must be like to be old enough to drive.

Hundreds of lives behind pieces of glass. I wonder what it must be like to condense all of my old art projects and cheesy figurines and piles of books I’ll probably never get the chance to read into a three room apartment surrounded by other three room apartments of equal size.

I wonder if these people smile when they hear loud music from next door or when police sirens race by below because even the universal noise of emergency vehicles must make them feel so small in a city so big.

Maybe they don’t feel so alone.

I wonder if they knock on their neighbors’ doors just to borrow some sugar even though they’re not planning to bake for another week, just so they can soothe their itch to socialize.

I wonder if the kids meet up in the elevator before going to school or if they do their homework together in the sixth floor hallway while all of the young professionals come home in their suits and step over them like they’re just distasteful spills on the carpet.

I wonder if I’ll ever get the chance to be as anonymous as “the girl who lives in Apartment 307 B” or if the closest I’ll get to being a mystery is the perplexed look that the doorman gives me when I drive by for a third time in ten minutes. Maybe he thinks I am looking for parking

or maybe he wants to help me because I am lost but he doesn’t realize that all I have ever wanted to be

was lost.

Misplaced.

Nothing.

Nothing but the name 307B.

I want to be anonymous. I want to be 307 B.