Today, I was an angel.

I felt like an angel, looking down on the world and knowing that I was forever outside of it. I knew that I could never be a part of what the people walking below me were. I could never live their lives—think what they think, feel what they feel, walk how they walk. I could only stand and watch, and wonder at all of this.

I wondered what they would see in my eyes, those tiny people below. I could feel something in my eyes, something that wasn’t there before or wasn’t nearly as clear. I could feel it in my entire body, pressing through my eyes. I wanted the people in the lobby to see my eyes.

The security guard to my left kept his eyes on his desk, filling out the paperwork before him. One girl, going down the stairs to the eleventh floor, looked up at me. She held my glance for just a little too long and I wondered if she was worried that I’d jump. That prospect amused me a little, for a moment or so. Then I saw someone asleep over their schoolwork on the tenth floor. They were so still. I wanted to walk over to them and touch their shoulder, see if they were all right.

I rode the elevator to the ground floor and stared up at the tenth, hoping I’d see that person again. I didn’t. All I saw was an awesome element of bigness, something that when I’d first come here I’d admired. Now, I think how much of a child I was back then.

Last year, before I knew much about what I wanted to do or how I’d get by day to day, I was so eager. So starry-eyed. I was in love with the grandeur and myth of New York.

I walked into Washington Square Park from the southern entrance and looked around me. Really looked. I saw a man shuffling, another trying to dial a number: the latter looked me in the eye and held my glance for longer than I thought necessary. I saw buildings, such tall things from which tops held perspective on par with the angels. I thought what builders must see, what jumpers must see.

I didn’t want to have to work for a living, to be forced to live hand to mouth and make a salary to keep myself alive. I knew that I had to be an artist—at least, I knew that I could not be someone who fell into that cold, cynical, mechanical way of thinking. An artist seems to exist outside of that mentality, and I thank God for that. Call me childish if so inclined, but I do not think of myself as childish. I wanted more than anything to appreciate the world around me, to take in all of the sights and sounds and smells and details and never once take any of it for granted. I wanted to live in that moment, forever and ever.

Walking home, I noticed a shift of perspectives. How the wind forced me to look down, how the buildings forced me to look up at them—a backwards “Through the Looking Glass.” Literally, the city rimmed itself in with high buildings—forcing itself to look down and left and right and up rather than in. I looked on the idiosyncrasies of all kinds, and smiled. A child climbing over a railing to look at a statue. A group of friends discussing what sort of dress their male friend should wear to a party.

I valued people from a distance, knowing that I could never be one of them.