Excerpted from The Book of Collected Stillness. Based on a true story.
I am already halfway down the block before I realize my shoulders have crept up toward my ears, as if my body is trying to make itself smaller without asking my permission. The street is dim in that thin early-morning way New York does—darkness still pooled between buildings, the sky not quite committing to light. A delivery truck idles at the curb and the exhaust lies low, sweet and metallic at once, mixing with last night’s garbage that’s sweating through black bags. A man in a reflective vest drags a rolling bin across the sidewalk and the wheels chatter over the seams, a hard little staccato that sets my teeth on edge.
I can feel every change in the sidewalk through the soles of my shoes: the lipped edge of a curb cut, a patch of gritty salt left from some earlier snow that might as well be a rumor now, the unevenness of a flattened piece of gum from some long ago passer by.
A subway grate breathes warm air from underground and for a second the smell changes—hot dust, damp concrete, a tang like pennies, a bit of sewage. I pass a bodega with its security gate half-raised, and the fluorescent light inside is too bright for the hour, flattening everything it touches. It isn’t that anything is wrong, exactly. That’s part of the problem. The city is functioning the way it’s supposed to function, with its trucks and bins and steam and sirens in the distance, and my reaction to it—this inward flinch—feels both disproportionate and unavoidable.
This morning the assault on my senses comes at me like a wall. A bus sighs to a stop and releases a batch of warm human air—deodorant, yesterday’s smoke, laundry detergent, impatience. Somewhere, a jackhammer starts up in the distance, not loud yet but insistent, like a headache clearing its throat. The visuals stack on top of each other so quickly my eyes don’t know where to land. A brightly lit poster for a Broadway show peels at the corner. A blinking pedestrian signal counts down as if it’s scolding me personally. A pigeon jumps away from my foot and I have the embarrassing surge of adrenaline that comes with being startled by something you could easily step over. There’s a phrase people use—sensory overload—as if the senses are electrical sockets and the city is a power strip full of cheap plugs. But what it feels like is less technical and more intimate. It feels like being pressed too close to reality, like the air itself is sticky with facts and leaning against you.
It’s not just the amount of information; it’s the insistence of it. The smells aren’t background. They have weight. The sounds don’t pass through; they land. In other places I’ve lived, or visited, there was usually some mercy built into the day: a stretch of quiet road, a field, a long hallway, even an empty parking lot where your mind could take a breath. Here the mind is always being handed something. A flyer shoved toward your hand for 30% of weed. An address in four foot lettering across the street. A stranger’s conversation into space that seems like it’s with themselves until you realize that they are wearing earbuds. Then you realize nearly everyone is wearing earbuds. A dog walking with their owner; tightening your chest because the dog is clearly stressed and trying to hold it together.
It’s a city that rarely grants you the dignity of pretending you don’t live among other people. There’s a specific embarrassment in being overwhelmed by what everyone else seems to handle as normal. I imagine the city teaches you to perform sturdiness if you’re there long enough. You don’t stop walking. You don’t look confused. You don’t hesitate at the curb like a small animal deciding whether to cross. But sturdiness is often just a set of practiced gestures. Underneath, the nervous system does what it does. It doesn’t care that I’m only here for a few days. It responds to the real, physical barrage: the unpredictability of movement around me, the sudden horn, the smell of urine rising from a doorway before I even see the doorway, the way the sidewalk narrows around scaffolding and forces everyone into a temporary intimacy or a near collision. There’s something cloying about New York’s reality on a day like this: not sweet, exactly, but thick and inescapable, like air before a thunderstorm. People talk about the city’s energy, meaning it as praise, but energy is not always your friend. Energy can be what keeps you from sleeping. Energy can be what crowds your head until your thoughts feel like they’re standing in a line that doesn’t move. I turn a corner and the light changes, a thin wash of gray-blue that makes the wet patches on the sidewalk shine. A woman is sweeping in front of her storefront, pushing last night’s wrappers and cigarette butts into a small pile with the patience of someone who knows the work will never stay done. The broom makes a dry whispering sound. That sound, oddly, calms me. It has a human tempo. It is one task being completed in the middle of the larger roar.
The body keeps a ledger, even when you’re pretending you don’t. A friend of mine once said New York is a place where you can’t fake your relationship to control. You can be a person who likes to plan, who likes clean lines and predictable sequences, but the city will still throw a man carrying a ladder across your path, will still shut down the train you need, will still make you walk through a cloud of sour trash juice because you chose the wrong side of the street, will still present someone cutting across the intersection across your path so they may get where there going a few milliseconds faster.
The day here is a series of negotiations with things you didn’t schedule. On mornings when the sensory pressure rises, what I want, more than quiet, is a little sense of choice. Panic isn’t always fear; sometimes it’s the feeling of being trapped in immediacy. Everything is now. Everything is loud. Everything demands a response. Even the ads demand you want something. I stop at a crosswalk and wait. A taxi slides through the intersection too late, the driver’s face blank with that particular New York mix of fatigue and entitlement. The walk sign flashes and I step off the curb with the rest of the small crowd. We move together for a few seconds like we belong to the same purpose, though none of us do. Someone brushes my sleeve and mutters “sorry” without looking at me, I do the same later when I come around a corner, cutting it too close into their “lane”. Another person doesn’t bother. I can smell their shampoo as they pass—something clean and floral that has no business competing with diesel, but does. Halfway across, a siren swells behind us, and the sound is so bright it feels like light. The siren doesn’t care about my nervous system. It’s the purest expression of the city’s priorities: someone’s emergency outranks your comfort. It should. It must. But my body still reacts as if I’m the one being chased.
It occurs to me that the city must train a person to be porous. You cannot fully seal yourself off. You take in other people’s crises, their music, their cologne, their anger, their laughter. Even if you keep your face neutral and your headphones in, you are breathing the same air. You are stepping around the same puddles. There’s a generosity in that, and there’s also a cost. If you try to take away sound, suddenly you can’t ignore the visual chaos: the scaffolding poles, the clusters of signs, the endless bright rectangles, the way the street itself seems to vibrate with motion. What actually steadies me is something smaller and less heroic. A hand on a cool metal railing. The predictable weight of my wallet in my pocket. The taste of coffee, bitter and grounding, reminding me I am in a body with a mouth, not just a mind being battered by input. I pick a single point to look at—a crack in the sidewalk, a particular window frame, the way light falls on a stone step—and let the rest blur at the edges. It’s not mindfulness in the trendy sense; it’s triage. There’s a subtle difference between paying attention and being forced to pay attention. The city specializes in the second. On the worst days, even pleasure can feel like an additional demand: the smell of fresh bagels outside a shop is wonderful, but it’s also one more thing grabbing at you, saying “Here, feel this too.” I walk past a row of trash bags piled like glossy black boulders. There is a shadow digging in them to find something they think want. The shadow ignores everyone around him as they ignore him.
The street is waking in layers: more lights snapping on, more footsteps, the first real wave of traffic. A man leans against a building and coughs the deep, wet cough of someone who has spent too many years in places with bad air and has added to that air with a pack a day for as many years. A teenager laughs too loudly at something on his phone, the sound bright and careless. A woman in heels hurries, her steps sharp as punctuation.
I think about how the city makes it difficult to have a private mood. In quieter places, sadness can spread out. Anxiety can ebb and flow. Here, feelings get jostled. You start the day tired and the street tells you to hurry anyway. You start the day calm and someone shoves past you and your calm is suddenly a small, fragile thing you’re carrying in your hands.
And yet—this is the part I don’t like to admit when I’m complaining—the city also offers a kind of companionship for the overwhelmed. Nobody is untouched. The person who looks perfectly composed on the sidewalk is still negotiating their own set of sensory assaults: the itchy tag in their shirt, the smell of the subway, the glare of the office lights, the constant low-level performance of being around strangers. We are all, in our own ways, managing the crush. I reach the corner where a vent in the sidewalk releases a steady ribbon of steam. It curls upward and disappears. The steam has that faintly chemical smell that makes me think of radiator heat and old pipes. I stop for a second, not because I need to, but because I can. My coffee is half gone. The street noise is louder now, but it’s also more predictable—less of the sudden shocks, more of a continuous hum. A small thing happens: I exhale all the way, and my shoulders drop a fraction. No revelation. No transformation. Just the body remembering it has joints, it has options, it can release even if the city doesn’t. I am invisible and need not worry about anything around me.
I watch the steam for a moment longer and then keep walking. The sidewalk is still crowded ahead, the smells still complicated, the sounds still ricocheting between buildings. The reality is still cloying, thick with other people’s lives. But my feet find their rhythm, heel to toe, and for a few blocks that rhythm is enough—a quiet, physical agreement between me and the street that I can be here without being swallowed by it.
New York City, Late April 2026