A beautiful book with some missing pages..

When I lived in New York I used to walk past the same woman everyday. She would sit on the stoop outside Strand Books on 828 Broadway, always holding the same book, reading it again and again. I never knew her name, but she was a part of my life as much as those that I had loved intimately. A fixture that was familiar, that I would be lost without. 

She cried twice a day around the same time. I wondered if it was because of the book, if she reached the same part of the story each day at about the time I was walking by. I wondered about the book, I never knew what it was, but I desired to, to know what moved her to tears and if it might move me too. I wondered if she had been given the book by someone who had exited the store in years gone by and if that moment of kindness had fixed her to that position for eternity. Perhaps by a tourist, who had gone home soon after never realising how that moment had shaped her, or another, or me.

I wished sometimes that I had been the one to give her that book, a point of conversation, that I might know her name. I was painfully shy and she looked as though she liked to be alone. But know one really likes to be alone.

I had drinks with my friends one evening after work and we had taken a different route home. I missed her. The next day my lady was gone. There was a smooth patch on the stoop where she had sat for years. She was the first person I knew when I moved to New York, but I didn't really know her. 

I looked for her for months afterward, in homeless shelters and outside bookshops. I looked for her for the rest of my life in the faces of those I passed, never knowing if she had thought of me, if she had ever even noticed me. Never knowing that someone was looking for her.

I wondered if she had died, who had moved the body, if anyone had claimed her?

Maybe she had decided to go home, perhaps another stranger had placed a new book in her hand, finally releasing her from her world on the stoop.

I asked the workers in Strand, the Falafel guy on the corner and the Halal girl across the street, know one had noticed her. I hoped everyday that I would find her again to tell her that I had noticed her.