by Ava Kingston

Created on: June 06, 2008

I woke up, grabbed my coat and walked out the door. I had a granola bar for breakfast. I didn't have a place to be, nor did I have any idea of where I wanted to be. I plugged my headphones into my iPod and just hopped on the subway. The trains were full of kids on their way to school, people on the way to work and then there was me. Just me. I could feel it. I felt the energy and the way that everyone was looking at me. Poor guy sitting all by himself. He must have no one. I could see the way their minds were working. I got off near Columbus Circle. I walked into the park. I wandered. I watched the men and women jog through the park.

I created their lives. I knew the man in the Cardinal blue shorts and bulky iPod was a lawyer who had graduated from Columbia. He had a teenage boy and twin girls who were eight-years old. His wife didn't know it, but every hour long that he spent at the office was actually spent with his secretary. The woman walking with her toy poodle had moved from some place in Eastern Europe. A place like Turkey or Romania. She looked Turkish or Romanian. I knew that this woman was in her early 20's. She had arrived here a few years back to attend some prestigious liberal arts college. Probably Wesleyan. She looked like she could have gone to Wesleyan. When she arrived, she had her mind set on studying. She wanted to be a doctor. She wanted to travel the country and do pro bono work on the side. Of course, that was before she met her current boyfriend, a new-age "artist" who swore he could get her instant fame. She was disillusioned. He flashed his money, and a pretty smile. He told her she could decide to go back to college once she had made her millions. His friends called him a modern day Andy Warhol, and she was today's Edie Sedgwick. He was in fact no big hotshot, but he had succeeded in trapping her in an abusive relationship, which she couldn't pull herself out of.

This is how I imagined the lives of these individuals. I knew what was coming right around the bend for them. They may not have known what the future held but I did. I controlled their lives, down to even where they would shop and how much they made in their jobs. I could control the lives of millions, and yet when I lay in bed considering my life I felt that someone else was controlling my life the same way I was controlling the lives of others.

Six years back, when I moved from my native Italy, I figured that New York would be the place for me. It was my chance at a clean

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