Tranggy
"Here is your food, miss" - the delivery guy from the Vietnamese restaurant I ordered on Seamless Web handed me the plastic bag with a toothless smile. He wore a flurry hat with flaps covering his ears - the one we often fondly called "Russian hat", an oversized coat damp with the first New York snow, but no gloves. I could see clearly his red knuckles and cracked fingers. Outside, on his bike hastily leaned against the black marble wall of 1166 Avenue of the Americas, I saw dangling more plastic bags - he was on his usual delivery routine. But I have never noticed until now: his red sniffing nose, his shivering shoulders, the piercing cold of an indifferent winter in a rather indifferent city.

"Oh... it must be so cold outside." - I said almost apologetically, wishing I had brought more tips down.

"Yes, cold." - He nodded several times - "These, warm." - and pulled out a cigarette half smoked with a light laugh. I lingered to watch him: as soon as he exited the revolving door, he lighted the half-done cigarette, hunching his shoulders to shield it from the wind and took few satisfying deep puffs. Then he hopped onto the bicycle and pedaled away.

New York seemed to dissolved, and I could suddenly see myself, on a bicycle, wheeling away down the crooked pebble roads of New Orleans one winter night, a delivery girl.

I had to run to the bathroom to cry a little. And I wondered how had I forgotten all about it - my other life - the moment I started earning paychecks and swiping credit cards. Hard times...

Over dinner in the still busy office, I scrolled through my pictures from long long ago, and suddenly wondered what had happened to them - the friends I met and the friends I lost. Oleysha and Ivan, a poor but loving Russian couples from Wisconsin who shared with me their winter coat and home cooked dinner. The two little kids we met in a monastery in Tiksey, India whose hair were full of sand and who fell asleep so easily on the earth. The rich doctor family of Saint Charles residents who were rude and impatient, but kind enough to give me a ride for one and half year of high school. The Jamaican handy man with hope in his eyes, who I later learned has cheated on his wife and ran off to another Bahamas island...

All those people from a long time past which I do not want to relive, but know that it was much more poignant than the life I am now living.

Unless I could make this new, beautiful, comfortable, American-dream life as meaningful as I aspired it to be.

And so I pray - pray you remind me of the more important things worth living for...