I Heart New York
Two trains had already come and gone, heavy with bodies desperate to escape the workday. I let them pass, deciding that I’d board the third, whether crowded or not. My headphones had lost their charge, and I felt restless to get home to eat the last brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tart I’d saved from this morning. Clearly, my priorities are well aligned.The doors shut behind me with a soft thud, sealing off the platform and muffling a man’s homiletical discourse that, up until now, had been cutting through the usual subway din with impressive precision.
Through a flurry of heads and shoulders, I glimpse an advertisement for New York’s Organ Donor Registry. The message is straightforward: by consenting to have your heart, liver, kidneys, and so on removed from your body and given to someone in need, you could save eight lives.
Eight lives.
You won’t get that kind of return on Wall Street.
As of October 2024, more than 50% of New Yorkers have registered as organ donors. This figure doesn’t surprise me, given the crowded symbiosis that defines this city—where people live shoulder-to-shoulder in an unspoken communion, driven by a tacit "love thy neighbor" ethos. Giving away one’s vital insides to save the life of another seems only fitting in a place like this, no? And if not out of some moral imperative, I can easily see the choice arising from a kind of stoic—if not acerbic—outlook on death. A certain lack of sentimental softness that seems to say, "Sure, chop my shit up. I’ll be dead anyway."
As for myself, I can’t help but think there is a strange romance to it as well.I mean, what could be more romantic than the idea that someone—a stranger whom you’ve likely never met—might one day be walking the streets with your lungs, your liver, your kidney, your heart?
You have no real way of knowing where you might end up. Or, more precisely, who might end up with you. It’s an experience not unlike falling in love, meeting a close friend, or having a child—each of which brings a manifold of outcomes, shaped by the smallest, most unpredictable of happenstances.
There’s an undeniable solace in knowing that, in some small but meaningful way, you might still be needed. That, even after you’re gone, you could remain of value to someone—if only for a brief moment longer. And is it not death itself we fear, but the thought of our existence dissolving into nothingness? Is that not why we construct narratives of an afterlife? To alleviate the unease that arises from confronting the possibility that this truly may be all there is?
If not through the legacy of your children or the resonance of your work, perhaps, at least, a part of you might persist. Not in memory, but in flesh—alive in another. Not you, exactly, but something of you that is given a second chance at life beyond your own.
With this, I step out of the station. My cheeks made red by the mid-November wind.