imagine new york: thousands of people walk past thousands of other people on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis. during the day, it is a sea of people, a blur of lightly colored impressionism, one person fading into another. nights are sharper, edgier - bright lights blur into fantastical streams of light and color, shining in a way that makes people more apparent. but you still don't notice them do you? you walk right past them until one day, suddenly, holding on to a subway strap, driving down lexington in a taxi, wandering around times square, someone pops out at you. some face, amongst a sea of faces, looks at you and changes things, if only for a second. suddenly things slow down. suddenly you stop, the frenetic pace of things pauses ever so slightly, and you look...you SEE.
but the nature of things in a city like new york is such that nine times out of ten, you miss. she gets off the subway three stops before you, or he turns to his girlfriend and kisses the top of her head, or (most commonly) you simply do not have the balls to say a word and poof---! the person disappears from your life forever, swallowed again into that teeming storm of people. only in new york can you lose people like this. only in new york can you stop for a second to regret things and never see a person again.
and sometimes, you receive the rare and beautiful gift of seeing that person again...and when that happens, what will you do?
*****i am nervous - i am fixing my hair for the 23rd time in the reflection of the espresso machine at starbucks in union square. do i look like a creepy stalker? like a pale guy who sits in front of his computer all day and posts mildly desperate but subtly poetic odes on craigslist? does the navy blue button-down shirt and khakis make me look too square? oh god, i think, oh god, i look like a gap ad. the guy who stares back at me is indeed pale (it's march, give me a break), with a dark tuft of tousled hair that makes me look paler. peaky...do i look peaky? i lean in further towards the metal of the espresso machine befor realizing that i look like a douche, and embarassed, step back into the line.
i really hope this isn't a hoax. that the woman who answered my posting on "missed connections" isn't some hooker trying to get a paying customer. i hope it's the real thing. i hope it's her.
******
a week ago, i was late for work. i ran down the stairs of the subway station two at a time, and still missed my normal #2 train downtown. and so, edgy and jumpy, bouncing on the balls of my feet amidst other cranky new yorkers on their way to work during rush hour, i waited for the #3.
i'd been late to work once that week already. the senior editor at the publishing company is a Big Name in the industry, a man who pulled in prize book contracts and can market authors like nobody's business. he is also a hardass. he is also my boss.
for some reason, my boss doesn't like me. whereas he sees publishing as a shrewd business, all about the financials and the profit and technicalities of print jobs and font sizes, i work here, as a meager associate editor, because i love the industry that gave me my imagination. this is the place where my childhood companions were churned out, onto a page and between covers, so that the 9/10/11-year-old me could meet them under the shade of my favorite tree, on hot summer days in connecticut. i am a daydreamer and a lover of words. my boss is not. he stood under the office clock two days ago and caught me as i sidled in, 20 minutes late.
that was not an experience i hoped to relive.
fidgety, i shifted my messenger bag from one shoulder to the other, looked out over the sea of people to the electronic board responsible for heralding the arrival of trains, looked down....and saw her.
she was one of those people who can dress uniquely and yet look put-together, confident, stylish. long black hair, raven-black, not stick-straight like so many girls who wrestle their hair into unnatural states of being, but slightly wavy, the clouds of it framing her face and delicately caressing her chin. i can't tell you what struck me about her, but there was something...ethereal about her. while the mass of people between me and her looked annoyed or harried, while most of them were on cell phones or blackberrys, ignoring everyone else around them, impatient and therefore unimportant and thoroughly normal, she stood straight, still, serene. she looked out at the track as if searching for something, waiting, delighted, for its arrival. a small smile played across her lips, a mysterious one, as if she kept within her some greatly satisfying secret.
with its usual rush of noise, the #3 pulled in, and i turn to look at it for a split second as bodies around me begin to move as one. the senior editor is forgotten, as i struggle to make my way towards where she is, but wrestling rush hour subway riders is a death-defying feat, and one i am not equipped to handle. i turn and follow the tide into the train, hoping that i can move between cars once the train gets moving to get to her.
the train starts moving and i stand holding a pole for a moment, getting my bearings. what will i say to this woman when i do see her? will i say something inane and innocuous? will i turn her off with a word? at this, i hesitate. but some force propels me, finally, towards the door between subway cars. mentally i count to myself - 4 cars between me and her. there's nothing i can do but start walking.
i pause at the third door and peer inside. she is in there, standing at the middle of the train, holding on to a pole with one hand and a book with the other. i can't see the title from here, but she is immersed, engrossed, the slight smile still there, standing with such stillness that it seems impossible that she is real. i muster a deep breath and step inside.
as i get closer, i see she is reading neruda's "100 love sonnets." this makes me panic for a second - is this a gift from a boyfriend, a lover, a husband? quick check - no ring, slightly wistful expression. she reads something then looks up and out, her eyes seeing past the people on the train, past the underground, right through all of it, and she is lost...i decide this means she is looking for love, searching for something with those eyes that searched the tracks earlier. there are people between me and her, and it takes some maneuvering to get past them, but just as i am nearly there, the train stops and she steps (smartly, resolutely) out the doors.
i have lost.
i look out the windows, look at the stop, but it is too far from work, and the real world comes crashing in. a clock, an apopleptically red-faced senior editor, a cubicle. the doors close, we move on.
*****
i make it to work just in time, and avoid the impotent eyes of my editor. to be on the safe side, i avoid saying anything and bury myself in my cubicle. once i think i'm in the clear, when the editor goes for his 10 am cigarrette, i dart into anna's cubicle.
anna, my best friend, the childhood friend i moved to the big city with right after we both finished at UConn. she's sitting at her desk, bent over what looks like a sheaf of papers, but which i know to be a sheaf of papers covering the journal she is filling with her own novel. her hands deftly let the papers fall over the journal before turning around, and i laugh at the relief on her face. i tell anna, the way i tell anna everything, about the woman on the train. she listens for a bit and then tells me about "missed connections," the portion of craigslist where people try to find the fleeting touches of people they've just missed, and when i scoff at the probability of succeeding in a city of millions, she looks at me seriously, the way she does when i second-guess myself, and asks what the fuck is wrong with me. there's no harm in trying, she says. what if it works, she points out. get your shit together, she tells me.
i think about this as i walk back to my cubicle. the page, when i open it up, is full of the horny, the drunk make-out sessions, the blurry club at 3 am. but between the lines, as i scroll down, there are sparks of intelligence, of wisdom, of melancholy. i think about it for a bit, and then post my own ad.
"to the woman taking the #3 train from 103rd street to 23rd street at 8 a.m this morning, soaking in pablo neruda, i say this:
'I do not have never-again, I do not have always. In the sand
victory left its lost feet.
I am a poor man ready to love his peers.
I do not know who you are. I love you. I do not give or sell thorns.'
neruda believed in second chances - do you?"
******
i waited.
what did i expect, i tell myself after the 100th check for responses. no one goes looking on this website...it is simply a way of posting a frustration, recording one more missed opportunity, one more lifetime's regret.
after six days, just when i am about to give up, i log in and see a message:
"Neruda didn't actually believe in love, and that poem sounds better in Spanish. But I am intrigued...Saturday at noon, find me at the Starbucks in Union Square. Bring your copy of Neruda"
and i am delirious.
*****
so here i am, waiting for my missed connection, lost and now (hopefully) found. on the table is a battered and dog-eared copy of neruda's poems, a gift from an ex-girlfriend (as neruda usually is). i watch the doors open and shut, and suddenly, there she is. i hold up my books and she walks towards me, a red spring trenchcoat over a spring dress. she sits. we speak.
some people, i think, should remain enigmas, fondly remembered in the soft afterglow of old age as a regret, as the one that got away. in those memories, in that old brain and the stories it tells itself, they remain perpetually beautiful, always graceful, always perfect.
our conversation goes nowhere. this woman in whom i had envisioned depth and poetry and longing and beauty was callow and superficial. she is a woman used to being adored, and this makes her haughty and remote, unfriendly. the silence and stillness i had associated with grace was simply a disinterest in the world and its creatures. there is a brittle quality about her, this feeling that she has a silver tongue and a pretty mouth and beautiful eyes, all of which she uses to prettily rip into people with a subtle cruelty. she spears my profession with the precision of a harpoonist, dismissing it and my world of words with a wave of a hand. she is a woman who collects hearts the way some peopel collect stamps - another story to tell her girlfriends, another conquest she has made. she has come here, for no other reason than to size me up, and in finding nothing of consequence in my person, to gloat and to practice her wiles.
we get up and shake hands after an hour. she gives me her number and throws a "call me soemtime" over her shoulder with a smile and a glint in her eye, and toss of her hair, all of which means "call me so i can toy with you, but i will never reciprocate." she walks away, and i walk in the opposite direction - not because that's where i need to go, but because i need to get to the polar opposite end of the earth from that woman for awhile.
every failed love affair carries with it a deflation of our hopes, the sting of rejection and disappointment. i throw the slip of paper with her phone number on it into the nearest trash can and keep walking, hands in the pockets of my khakis, thoughtful.
the one place i want to be right now is anna's apartment, telling her this story of a failed second chance. i look up and get my bearings and start walking...
*****
imagine new york: thousands of people walk past thousands of other people on a daily basis. a sea of people, a blur, until some face, suddenly, looks at you and changes things. suddenly things slow down. suddenly you stop. and suddenly you realize, on a warm spring day in the middle of union square that you've been missing a connection you've had all along....
"I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep."
- Pablo Neruda
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