How strange the stories we hear and come to believe, and our reactions come late. He didn't say much, but he easily got his point across and in the process shook me with emotions that he believed needed. He said that he was sitting there at the 7th Ave E train station, facing the Queens Bound side. The train had just left and he was just sitting there.
I couldn't quite understand why she couldn't say more. It was over. It was a blur. I was just sitting there as the E train had left, her face, in my mind, melting among the other faces. A very blurred photograph. That was my ex before I met her. I didn't meet her that day, of course. That day, a long day, followed by many other long days, was a tough day. I felt shivers through my spine as I sat there, watching the silence between the different trains that had pulled in the station. I was late to work, but I would rather just jump in the train tracks before the silence there was broken. Broken like my heart.
He was walking through the passage way in Grand Central that is flanked by expensive boutiques and food stalls. He was inspecting the fresh fish of his favorite fish monger.
It had been a few months, probably four, since the E train stop. I was in that passage way, inside one of the shops, the tea shop, which is right next to the stall of the fishmonger. My heart was still mending but I was in better spirit. I was looking for an herbal tea that had no caffeine. All my teas were green so they were not for bedtime. A woman walked in, but I smelled her before I saw her. It was a slightly peachy scent, and that scent suddenly made me decide on this tea that I had never heard of. Not sure if it was because the unfamiliar scent drove me to select an unfamiliar tea, or that the color of the peach was the color of the tea. So I put my face over the sample of this tea and it was really good. She said that too, and upon hearing her voice, I looked up, only to quickly look away. Then I looked again. Ah, I knew her. What a small world! We had known each other since high school, but had stopped keeping in touch for the past few years, and only sporadically before that.
He sat almost across from this strange woman in the downtown bound Q train towards Chinatown. The woman, probably homeless, judging from her dirty, thick bundle of clothes wrapping around her, was incessantly sanding the floor of the subway train with the sole of her right shoe. She was mesmerized by the sound it created.
I didn't take a good look at her. She was a black woman, a slight heavy set. She held two bags in each hand and carried a bigger back on her back, all bags being made of plastic. Her eyes were closed and her lips parted slightly, but she didn't make any sounds. I felt Stephanie's hand grip mine a little tighter. She would get emotional like that; she didn't like human suffering, even though the woman a bench away from her didn't seem to be suffering. She was in some sort of trance, snuggled perfectly in that swooshy sound from the sole of her right foot. I wondered what she had been doing and what she would do next. And then through the tightened grip of Stephanie's hand, I wondered about Stephanie, if she would really join the volunteer groups she had mentioned so many times. I kept it to myself, but i felt that her pity of the helpless was just a way to make herself feel better.
The cloisters are a fortress-like building situated on the northernmost tip of Manhattan, north of the Washington Bridge. It is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He sat one of the lookout points where the Hudson River flowed slowly between the island and its out-of-town neighbors in New Jersey. Beside him was a woman in her late forties. Still beautiful, with a gracefulness that deserved many pages to describe.
I could see the Hudson River's glitter behind the silhouettes of joggers on this late summer day. It was a perfect day. I was with Stephanie, both were resting on our folded forearms as we chatted. As the sky blossomed slowly with the twilight that heralded the end of the day and the impending closing of the museum, I told Stephanie how much I liked her, that in reality I loved her. Those words came out with a mixture of sternness and fear. She smiled and leaned her head on against my right arm. That was enough for me; her silent response didn't really bother me.
And in the botanical garden I could only see roses on her face as I took a deluge of photos. Perhaps one of them included by accident the old man and the slightly younger woman he was with. I wasn't sure. There were so many people that day. Now he sat next to me, and he ended he tale by telling me that we were both waiting here in vain. Where our paths didn't intersect at least in his case he realized she wasn't really in love with him, just enjoyed his company. She was just biding her time, waiting for this man of her age to eventually commit and marry her. He had found out just the day before that she wouldn't be coming back. And when he saw me sitting here, he realized his mission today was to convince me that the woman I thought I knew would not showing up today, for no other reason than that we have inadvertently try to find each other this past year. And so we shared a common fate.
I looked at the watch and she was more than half an hour late. He sighed and told me, still not looking at me, that sometimes however impossible the magic trick done in your life is, you have to believe it before you can dissect it.
