I am the most important person in New York

Or at least I feel like it, when I part ways on the street with my boyfriend and his pooch. Because she cries, cranes her neck and howls (while he stands there impassively and sips on his iced coffee) and it pierces through the ambient Manhattan noise, and ricochets around the skyscraper canyons. Hurried businessmen and -women stop, turn, look for the source of this tortured wail, and then follow the direction of its plaint up the street, to me, grinning, blushing, hurrying to the train, fishing for my metrocard.