Astral projection

I found a new painting. It's called "Rain Storm, Union Square," and it was painted by an American Impressionist, Childe Hassam.

I posted it as my desktop background.

When I look at it, I'm drawn into it. I'm standing on the rain-slicked concrete hearing the sound of cloggish shoes and carriages rattling and pigeons fluttering. I can smell oily rain and pollution. In the distance there is a café with its early morning patrons sipping coffee and rustling their newspapers, but I'm not there with them. I am standing in front of the woman with the umbrella. She doesn't notice me. She's in another world, far from New York. You can see it in her eyes and in the line of her jaw. She's thinking of Paris, though she's never been there. She's thinking of a man she'll meet there - a poet from New Brunswick or perhaps a banker from Maine - on vacation like herself. Escaping existence ... just like she is. They'll talk Emerson and Thoreau and about the migration of seals.

No one in New York knows her. No one knows how brilliant she is, how she walks barefoot at night, that she's ticklish on her bellybutton. At work, they think she's sweet and quiet. They don't realize that she likes to watch the boxing matches in the park, or the dark-eyed men who load and unload the ferries and whose arms are sweaty and knotty with muscles. She watches them from behind her menu, but secretly hopes they'll see her watching them. Her pulse quickens and she gets sick to her stomach.

That's why I like the painting.