significance

I push the boundaries of serotonin syndrome occasionally, so a few days ago, I asked this girl and boy near Delancey to measure my pulse for me.

We struck up a conversation. I tried to describe how my Effexor tended to make me feel that arbitrary sensations and thoughts have deep significance. “It always makes you feel that this moment, this impending moment, is monumentally significant. Even this wind has significance,” I giggled, to illustrate the absurdity.

But the girl started stretching out her arms; looking up to the sky and closing her eyes, she spun her hands and arched her shoulders and thrust her hands into the gusting wind. “This wind has significance!” she said, almost calling into the wind.

“Are you making fun of me?” I asked.

“No…!” She smiled. “I was just echoing what you said.”

I sit out on my fire escape, gazing down onto the rushing traffic of Broadway, hearing the excited agorachatter of the people strolling below as the city lights of North Bergen glisten across the Hudson River. Dark, churning blankets of clouds occasionally expose hues of the dying sunset. I feel the ever-changing eddy currents of the wind.

“Even this wind has significance,” I say to myself. As I relish the gusts blowing in from the Hudson, the memory of the girl standing by Delancey St with her arms outstretched pours back into my consciousness.

I suddenly look at my hands.

“Even I have significance?” the question pops into my mind.