that looks like it could change your life

said the guy next to me, of the giant slice of carrot cake I'm eating at this cafe in Bedford Stuyvesant, New York.

There's a smell of onions in the air so strong it pricks my eyes. I take big sniffs. Onions, coffee, soup, wafts of the street outside. Air crammed with the smell of life. The total opposite of the air I breathed yesterday, the remnants of which I'm pushing out of my lungs.