The city breathes. It sweats and cries and knows of love and strife. The endless grid of connecting streets and alleys are veins which carry the tales of all its inhabitants. Passing them to vital organs and tissues and muscles as needed. The journeys we take - the paths we walk - are all strands of the web of humanity. We all add to it, we all take from it, And we touch each other's lives in some way, even if we don't know it. A girl walks down Broad st until she hits Bowe. She is alone - carrying only what she could fit in her pockets. She gets to the starbucks. Goes in. Orders a coffee or a tea or maybe a bite to eat. She goes outside and, takes a seat, and reads the paper. Two tables away a black family sits discussing their daughter's plans for college. Radford? Longwood? ODU? She just wants to make her break. She sits listening to her parents in her camouflage jacket and black leggings, occasionally nibbling at her sandwich, two tables away from the girl who sits alone. Alone in her wool cardigan and her pinned up red hair. Alone smoking her cigarette. The old man who lives at the elderly home for the mentally unstable and composes great feats of musical beauty stands off to the side in his worn slate suit beneath his snowball hair. He walks up to the alone girl and asks if he can maybe get one of those cigarettes, please. She hands it over and he lights up. The grey and blue smoke lazily wafting over the grey and brown tops of the city. The only evidence of the intersection of their paths slowly becoming part of the very city air we all breathe. One table away I sit with my notebook and coffee and cigarettes and sunglasses spying on the world. Making my little observations. The stained ink on the page the only evidence that our paths ever crossed slowly being read and recycled. It's the circle of life