Possible Happiness I

In the museum of my mind, dioramas depict endless scenes of possible happiness, each serenely illuminated from above, each a self-contained world indifferent to the rest. Here is one: hands tap, tap, tapping on wide-leg jeans to the rhythm of a song on a late summer’s day. The air has begun to grow cool, and people too, here strolling in Carroll Gardens, in Greenpoint, in Battery Park have begun to sport light sweaters—unzipped, unbuttoned, fluttering like wings in the wind. Here a traveler once young, now not quite as young, has come to rest, leaning against the railings facing New Jersey, with the endless skyscrapers of the financial district towering behind her, and she is content with her journey’s end, contemplating whether home has not turned out, in the end, to be where she had once longed to never live again.