You didn’t move to a big city for the easy life. You moved because something here was always meant for you, slow walkers and all.

Nobody warned you about the slow walkers. That part didn’t make it into the dream.The dream had skylines and coffee shops and that specific energy of a city that never fully stops, the feeling of being one person inside something enormous and alive, surrounded by other people who also chose this, who also showed up with a bag and a plan and the unshakeable conviction that something here was meant for them. The dream was real and it still is. It’s just that between the dream and the reality there is a person walking directly in the center of the sidewalk at a pace that suggests they have genuinely nowhere to be and no awareness that anyone else exists behind them, and you have four minutes to get to the subway.