As the afternoon brings with it the children on stoops, the mothers wandering back from the farmer's market, the teenagers pushing out of the bar as the last match is done, you pick your way through the cobblestones and wish for a Brooklyn brownstone life.

Tonight you will listen to stories strung together in modern age poems, wit and sadness in accented melody, a defiant lad rhyming over popping beats.

It would be ridiculous to break up with him just because he isn't emo enough.

By the fountain in the Common, an old man will speak to you. Words will cascade into a story from Cambridge to a graveyard by the Cape, from acres of farmland in Vermont to a family long fallen, scattered in Boston. You will search his eyes for sanity and find only emptiness.

There will be attempts to disrupt your tranquility. Take a deep breath, imagine the tiny man as a piece of lint, easy to flick away.

Beware of figurines crouching in corners, the mad proprietor with her wicked grin. They can turn you into a toy at the slightest touch.

Go out to your neighborhood bar and get yourself a mango martini from the bartender reading his paperback Proust.

Someone from your past will return to remind you what it feels like to live.

The empty walls stand witness to stolen pictures. The orange tree in the garden will bear bitter fruit. Remember the girl trapped in the painting. When you were ten, all you had to do was whisper those three holy words to free her.

In a crumbling loft in a Rust Belt city, she will present herself to you. Fearless, naked. She does not know of the ballerina. She has chosen to ignore your silence. It does not help that you find yourself at midnight missing the warmth of her back as it arched into your chest when she would sleep. It does not help that you send her messages with ill concealed yearning.

Leave now. Leave and never speak to her again.

Fortitude will come from the pages of an instruction manual. You are trying to change the world. Sometimes, that is easy to forget.