The Glass Between Us
I remember standing under the awning of a bookstore on 5th Avenue, watching the rain turn the pavement into a dark, shimmering mirror. A woman next to me was checking her watch, her breath hitching in the cold, while inside the nearby windows, everything glowed with a golden, curated perfection. We were all just ghosts passing through the city’s veins, separated from the warmth by a thin sheet of glass. There is a specific kind of loneliness that only exists in a crowd—the feeling of being a spectator to a life you aren’t quite living. We spend so much of our time pressing our hands against the windows of other people’s stories, wondering if the light inside is as steady as it looks from the street. It is a strange, beautiful ache, knowing that while we are all shivering in the same rain, we are each waiting for a different door to open. Do you ever feel like you are watching your own life from the outside?
Madoka Hori has captured this exact feeling in her work titled ‘Nueva York’. It is a quiet reminder of the distance we keep even when we are surrounded by the pulse of a city. Does this scene make you feel like a participant or an observer?
