Let’s Not Crash and Burn

There are two kinds of air I love. I absolutely would, if they were physical beings, have sex with them. The first is winter air. At home in Jersey, away from the industrial mess along the turnpike that everyone associates with the state, away from the smog and smell of burning rubber, in the winter as it gets colder, the air gets crisper. At dusk, right as the sun is going down and right before the temperature plummets, there is that short time where you can still see your breath—thick and slow-moving like cigar smoke—and you can still feel your face. Being able to feel your face is important, once it goes numb and your nose starts running, phlegm and snot clog the airways and breathing becomes a hassle. Sucking the air in deep, all the way down to the diaphragm, it chills then stings your insides. What feels like an icicle stuck from your throat to your stomach stays there until you exhale and watch the breath wisp away.

When I was a child, I was intrigued by the idea that I could look like a bull if I snorted hard enough in the cold air. I would stamp my foot and exhale as hard as I could, at the same time trying to catch a glimpse of the air before it disappeared, sucked up by the fading sunlight. I adore the crisp feeling of the air. Feeling like, if my lungs were outside my body, they would crack in half after a deep breath. It is the same in the morning when, right after you wake up, walking outside for the mail you can stretch, inhale and shake awake instantly. It is a jolt. And I like jolts.

The winter air is also comforting. It is a safety net that I know will be there every year. The temperature begins a gradual slide and one day I’m able to see my breath again. After sweating profusely for many months it feels good to see only my thick breath leaving me, not what seems like gallons of sweat in the summertime. As the summers get longer, though, and the winters get a few degrees warmer, with fewer nights showing me my breath, it worries me. Will it all be gone by the time I’m an adult? Will it be warm constantly? Will snow completely disappear? All I can do is hope not. I pray that I’ll have snow when I’m older, that, even when I’m thirty, I’ll be able to stand outside, arms stretched to the sky and breathe in deep, exhale slowly, and watch my breath drift away from me in the same smokehouse-fashion as it does every winter.
The second kind of air isn’t the kind I should love. But instead, I have a dirty, hot, heavy, secret relationship with it fit only for back alleys and two-dollar whorehouses—the kind of relationship I’d come out of with a disease. It is city air. Let me be more specific, it is New York City air, and the air in the subways and on the PATH, the air that goes between Jersey and the City. Other city air isn’t the same. Boston air? DC air? I was immersed in the good City air every day for four years on the PATH twice a day to get to and from my high school. The air is dense, muggy and slightly saline—from the sweat of thousands of immigrant workers and white-collar businessmen, or the dollar peanuts, or some other viscous, vagrant-emitted substance.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about the air now, six hundred miles away from it, are toxic-bright yellow lines on dead-gray concrete, the three-inch thick line commuters swarm to, watching rats while waiting to get on the subway first. There was a time when I was younger that I would point out the rats as they scrambled from under tracks to pick up crumbs and back. Now I watch as little kids, their first time in the city, do the same. I can’t believe I was that stupid. It’s a rat, who cares?

The City conjures those images—the lines, the rats—and steam in my mind. The air, even inside the PATH where they pump air conditioning, is steamy and heavy. It sits on your shoulders like a conscience, reminding you that the City is what it is—dirty but full of everything, anything you can think of. But then what is that new smell? A whiff of flowers or something. Perfume. Cologne. Whatever. Something new to the mix, strangling the original scent of the air, another reminder that things are changing. Slowly. The aroma stays for a few moments then goes, but comes back when another tourist boards. It is slightly omnipresent, like a ghost, in and out, there but not. I don’t like the perfume. I love the stale, heavy air. It reminds me of day trips to the City—the American Museum of Natural History, the Intrepid, Radio City Music Hall. It reminds me of high school—all those days dressed in khaki and dress shirts, watching as bums begged four feet away, and hoping that they wouldn’t come close enough that I’d have to interact, have to fake that I didn’t have any change. Then again there is always that burst, that fresh scent again, and my attention is back to a tourist in a cowboy hat or an “I Love New York” shirt, forcing his or her way into a seat, oblivious of the old, black grandmother, two grandkids in tow that couldn’t make it fast enough from the platform to the seat. The subway dings and dongs, then rattles off.