The rule of thumb used to be, for me at least, that you wait 6 months between involvements before dating again. It’s only been less than 4 for me but the last one was barely worth a mention in the ripple-fest of time.
Staten Island will likely make this a no-starter. No offense to SI. I like the place, what I’ve known of it. It’s just far, and the ferry, and all boats, have started giving me motion sickness in recent years. I always thought the CW was that motion sickness evaporates the second you set foot on dry land but that has not been how it works with me. Boo hoo.
The Dunkin’ Donuts on John Street just disappeared. It was there yesterday, gone today, with a printed notice that the downturn in the economy caused them to shutter that location. All workers were reassigned to other nearby locations. There are a lot of other nearby locations, suggesting they were maybe a little overextended. Oversaturated.
A woman I used to pay attention to on the subway would get her DD every day, like clockwork, at the Cortlandt Street location, just off Broadway.
There came a point at which I think she thought I was stalking after her or something stupid like that. I shouldn’t call it “stupid” but seriously, how unusual or random is it for two people to see each other on the subway every single day…
I guess it was a little odd that it suddenly started happening. Every single day, 7am, there she was, there I was. Never a word spoken, officially I don’t even know what she looks like since she masked up, hatted up, covered up everything but her eyes.
For all that it was amazingly easy to identify exactly who she was. I should express amazement, though. I’ve become a bit of a sleuth when it comes to neighbors, strangers, and people proverbially passing in the night. It’s just a hobby. At one point I built a sort of dossier on the names and backstories of the people in my apartment buiding. This included deceased and those who had moved elsewhere. It came to feel like a kind of community mausoleum. So random are the paths each of us diverge upon every single day, yet we are discretely united by our street address and shelter.
So it was that this woman, who’d been making nervous eye contact with me for a period of days, became known to me through nothing more than her street address. Her name sounded like the title of a romance novel, and her creative output made her an enduring interest of mine. I have no designs whatsoever on a woman half my age, though I say that as one who just happens to have had a number of encounters with woman much younger than me these past several years.
But that doesn’t matter. Not here. She is just a person I connected with in a fanboy kind of way, from a safe and discrete distance. Her work is interesting, and varied.
I have not seen her in probably a couple of months now. Maybe longer. I wonder if she changed her routines, as she sometimes did with respect to her DD habit.
There was a point at which I felt certain she felt certain I was tailing after her, tracking her paths and patterns. During this time I remember she went to a DD on Pine Street, a location enough out of her way to make me think she was trying to lose me, or else she was trying to determine if I really was following her.
I did not follow her that day. In fact I never really followed after her. The paths we took were identical, or very close to identical. But when she diverged from her usual pattern I would not have known where she went if I did not just happen to cross paths with her, a DD coffee clutched in hand, as she left that DD on Pine Street. I was en route to 77 Water, which had been a daily destination for me at the time on account of the carousel of payphones where I would leave my Payphone Radio cards.
I don’t think she saw me that day but man, if she had, and if I was reading her anxieties as accurately as I suspect I was, she might have flipped the fuck out over my apparently staking her out when in fact our paths crossed because this labyrinth of streets in lower Manhattan is pretty compact, like a small town with very tall buildings disguising the smallness of it all.
Upon identifying her I quickly found she has a broad public presences in art, writing, photography. She makes concerning references to suicide and self-harm, but at other times seems like a perfectly natural woman, sailing through life on her way to what I do not know.
Officially I still do not know what she looks like but I found all that. She’s not shy, with artistic nude photos of herself and no shortage of close-ups of body parts, tattoos, etc.
I just took a break from typing to to check on her web stuff. She’s busy, and now accepting students. I should totally sign up for lessons! Hah.
OK, gotta work.
