The floor is the glass she walks on between Broadway and 4^th, and the only sound is of her heels clicking on the wet ground. The sidewalk turns a fluorescent orange, she looks up and sees a line of flashing numbers plastered on the front of a building, wonders what they’re counting as the final digits get larger and larger, but she carries on, pulling her coat closer around her body. Once a friend speculated it was counting the number of people who had died, but that couldn’t be. The number of people who had died since when? She said, laughing. Ever? Someone else told her it was the time, and she nodded, thinking that it made sense. It was 3:43 and the numbers read 03041188180304.

In the morning she opens the door to sirens and a sea of faces, weaving her way through them all and switching her gaze from her feet to the street in front of her almost as if to keep her balance as she walks with the fear of arriving too late. A part of her wants to smile with the acute knowledge that she has learned the ways of the street, knows when it’s better to turn right on 4^th Avenue rather than wait for the traffic light to turn green, knows where to find the man who sells knit hats with cat ears stitched on, adorned with rows of black and pink and green, knows when she hears the faint chiming of the Hare Krishnas that she is close to University Place.

The first time she had seen it was the day before she would have to learn to navigate it on her own. After exploring the area, her mother dragged her to Union Square, and she watched in awe as she was able to take her there without the help of Google Maps, It’s easy, these streets are going up and these ones are going down. Do you get it now? It’s just something you have to learn by living here. She was beginning to worry she never would. They passed by Parsons. She wondered if they were close yet, wondered how she would be able to walk this far to get to class every day, wondered if she had made the right choice. Beneath her, she felt her feet begin to ache and push against the inside of her sneakers. Once they turned left onto 14^th, any doubt left about where they were had disappeared. In a spectacle of colors and lights, the distinct smell of the smoke from the Halal cart on the corner, and what seemed like a symphony of yelling and the bustle of people trying to get past the crowd, she was experiencing for the first time what would later become more of an annoyance than a moment of bewilderment. She felt her mother’s grip tighten around her arm as they raced to cross the street with only 7 seconds left.

She walked with the silent but desperate purpose of arriving within the safe confinement of the heavy doors that blocked the entrance of her dorm as soon as possible, holding her cell phone up to her ear and speaking in Portuguese, even though the street was mostly empty. She watched a couple leaning against the wall of a Walgreens, trying to avert her stare but hardly feeling the need to, knowing that everything around her was like an exhibition, demanding to be looked at. In the same instant that they were uncomfortably close together, they were suddenly separated as the woman waved her black shoes above her head, holding onto his arm for balance with her other hand. Why don’t you call her then? Does she know where you are now? I bet she doesn’t. I bet she has no idea. She looks up; it’s 02491551782653.

In October she waited for the rain to pass and wished she had a better umbrella. Her friends came to visit and when they walked out of the subway on a Saturday they were met with hundreds of people going past in black t-shirts, carrying signs that read Black Lives Matter while police cars scattered the road and red lights reflected on the sides of their bodies as they marched. She learned to memorize the people who sat along the side of the street and what their cardboard plaques read, and the very fact that she knew their location so well began to scare her and make her think about how long they had been there and how long they would stay. When it rained most of the people who slept on the street were gone, she wasn’t sure where they would go, but the ones who stayed put their cardboard in their sleeping bags and zipped them all the way up. She walked with a constant awareness of where she was looking and the kind of face she was making, afraid of giving off the sense of how fearful she truly was. She jumped when someone turned to her and asked her a question, Do you know what time it is? Could you help me find 5^th Avenue?, and put headphones in her ears to drown out the sounds that circulated around her as she moved swiftly past them.

Blisters formed around her ankles and her toes like reminders of the fact that she was somewhere she did not belong, like the rejection of a place she had tried to adopt as her new home. While her roommates said they avoided 14^th street at all costs, taking detours down 4^th Avenue or going down Broadway so that they wouldn’t be confronted with the noise and the crowd and the incessant shuffling that came with a trip alongside Union Square, she continued on without truly knowing why. One day she realized that she had never really looked up as she walked down the street towards her dorm because once someone had told her that the true mark of a tourist in New York City was that they were always looking up, and she didn’t want to seem like someone who was not a local when she was starting to believe she was. On a day when the sky was a milky orange and the sun peeked out from behind the thin blue clouds that grouped together above the barren trees, she raised her head and caught the first sight of the tops of buildings she had lived next to for months and had failed to observe until that moment.

She walks with the rhythm of honking cars and the chatter of the people walking next to her. After the rain stops, the water that gathered in the sinking road is a murky reflection of the white lights that shine through the store windows. A man sits in front of her and calls out the same string of words over and over; One dollar, one dollar, soda, water, one dollar. She smiles as she walks by, and the final orange digit changes from 5 to 6.