Prose about the big city, about disappearing and seeing the movements of life.
Me, in front of the famous "Angel of Independence"
I came to Mexico City and left behind beautiful Oaxaca City because of a vague omen, a gut feeling urging me to become one of the 20 million-plus souls stuffed into this valley. There are few places in the world of this scale, few valleys or plains or crevices that hold so much life, and of these cities carrying 20 million-plus souls, only three of eleven are outside of Asia. This jungle of humanity, this endlessness of sprawling concrete constantly reaching for the sky, this is where I belong right now, this is where the feeling implored my body to go.
The feeling told me I must join the hoard occupying this dried-up lake bed, I must surround myself with the type of people who have places to be, and with faces that I will never necessarily see twice. I must walk many miles under the streetlights, feel the grandeur of gloriously lit monuments, and meander through the forest parks under my rolled-palm-leaf hat. Only in Mexico City, only in the world’s megalopolises, can a person work while truly being absorbed by the nothingness of their own totality, can they forget everything from before times to just live with the smallness of their own existence.
In the world’s megalopolises, there is no past, no future, but there is a present. When no one knows you, when hundreds of thousands of people walk this sidewalk each day and think nothing of me, I magically disappear. Thoughts of those ambiguous troubles, of the steep path to my goals, of you, they all become as common as Sunday afternoon strolls, common like ants in the cracks of park pavement, or like people swarming the Angel of Independence.
I know I could make faces familiar, I know there are thousands of circles to join, a set of adventures so vast and diverse that only multiple lifetimes would reveal even a fraction of them all, but I have trouble caring now that I’m here. Here a strange sensation overcomes me, sometimes evoking a single tear, sometimes a great excitement, or sometimes a quiet acceptance. In the big city, the best hiding spot is amongst crowds, the most intimate moments in a full café, and the quietest rest is had ten stories above streets endlessly occupied by the engines and horns of traffic.
I learned long ago but forgot, and the city reminded me of it upon arrival, that living small is the best and only way to live. In a midnight cab I looked up at the steel towers, dwarfing me and my feelings, and I realized they were so gigantic and unmoving that they are incapable of sympathy for the small anxieties which constantly bubble up through the cracks of my composure. When the city blocks out our night sky’s stars and reminds me of its lessons of my smallness, I take to heart quickly how lucky I am to both feel and forget, to captain my own boat and return to the harbor after months or years at sea.
But the feeling which brought me here, I no longer feel; that feeling was lost somewhere between the hours of tossing and turning on that night bus and shaking that first hand here, in this Selina hostel. Now when I think of that feeling, of the omen, I just feel the emptiness of completing a goal that took no real effort yet was necessary and preliminary to some big prize far out of reach. I’ve now confronted the possibility of longevity or passersby in whom I meet, allowed my heart to crack and then open, and understood how small I am.
I can build, I can speak words, I can write, yet what I cannot do is control the way all these efforts unfold in the world. I might write accurately what was inside me and longing for expression from given moments in my life, but I can never know where they will go, what effect they will have, whom they might make a difference to. The city reveals on every corner some great and tedious effort; the stalls set up each faithful morning and disassembled at night; a socialite dressed and groomed so impeccably that crowds notice them; a homeless man trying to shelter himself from cold cement with cardboard.
There are so many things happening here, that all I can do is to let go or risk missing what’s there. But even then, there is no understanding of the multitude, the deafening buzz of this megalopolis where I find myself, Mexico City. All that exists are the marble or plain pavement stones, and the endlessness of possibility while walking them.
Each day brings something different here and although never exactly the same, the day relentlessly brings. A helicopter projects its noise down from above the alleyways, a brigade of clowns gathers children and parents alike in a square, and workers scold consumers to pull their masks up.
I am always surprised, each time anything happens. To be absorbed by the freedom of this place is to lose yourself without regret within the sheer magnitude of Mexico City, sitting at 8,000 feet above sea level yet surrounded by taller mountains, hot in the daytime, and chilling to the bone at night. This place is a worldly capital of smog and life, bustle and isolation, beauty and desolation.
This city is for me, for everyone, and for nobody. Come here to lose yourself, rebuild yourself, be yourself; the city doesn’t give a damn about you or what you do. Leave behind every preconception of who you are and come to the city, only then will you remember what you’ve forgotten all this time—that you are but a speck of dust, a drifting asteroid free of gravity and surrounded by debris, you are your feet, your journey and nothing else. There is no you at the center of the universe, there is no reason why your life has turned out this way, there is no great path that you will find only through triumph and subjugation.
There is only you, and there is life’s jungle. There is your inner world, there is the outer world. There is a thin boundary between how you interpret the world and the world itself. There is how you live, and there is life itself. Come to the big city, feel small, see how you fit in as one of the 20 million, and take with you its lessons before the city consumes you completely.
Come to the big city, it will be fun.
-Justin Markowitz
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