The Rhythm of Passing

I keep a small, rusted skeleton key in a velvet pouch, though I have long since forgotten which door it once opened. It is heavy for its size, cold to the touch, and carries the faint, metallic scent of a house that no longer exists. There is a strange comfort in holding something that has outlived its purpose, a relic of a threshold I crossed a thousand times without ever realizing it would be the last. We spend our lives moving through spaces, our feet marking the pavement in a hurried rhythm, rarely pausing to consider that we are merely ghosts in the making. Every street corner we turn is a place we are leaving behind, a geography of departures stitched into the soles of our shoes. We are always in transit, caught in the brief, flickering intersection between where we have been and where we are rushing to go. If we stopped for a moment, would the city still recognize our shadows, or have we already vanished into the gray?

José J. Rivera-Negrón has captured this fleeting energy in his work titled Quick Cross. The image echoes that restless motion of city life, reminding me of how quickly we pass through the frames of one another’s stories. Does the pavement remember the weight of your step once you have hurried away?