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there is nothing for you here: part six
The Cutest Boy in New York has a girlfriend.
After five months of empty subway cars and boring walks to work, I saw him again this morning, trudging through the tunnel to transfer trains. I only noticed him because I was looking at the jacket of the girl next to him. It was some overly-complicated self-consciously fashionable jacket, with a belt that had bunched up awkwardly in the back. As I walked behind her I tried to figure out how it was supposed to fit, whether the bunching was intentional or she'd done something wrong along the way of getting dressed that morning. I took one last look as I passed and saw the boy walking next to her, not holding hands but clearly keeping pace, was the Cutest Boy in New York.
They were the same height, with the same grim look on their faces. They weren't talking, and at one point the distance between them grew so wide (him in front, her behind) that I thought I was wrong, that they weren't together after all. But then he slowed and turned his head to make sure she was keeping up as he lead her down the platform to where they would wait for the train.
Were they in a fight? After months of walking to and from trains holding hands and joking and smiling, had something turned? Was their relationship ending? Or was it just beginning, and this was the first walk together down the subway tunnel, the silence filled with hope and expectation and worry that the next thing you say is going to sound completely stupid to this beautiful creature standing next to you? That there was no hand-holding because hand-holding is still a few dates away, when you've become so comfortable that reaching for their arm is the same as touching your own? And is this what we chase after, this quiet awkwardness or silent dissolution that ends up as routine as the same streets we walk day after day after day?
On a sunny Saturday morning in July the Mummy and I walked in our own silence from my house to the subway, a straight shot seven blocks up the street. "Don't you get tired of walking the same way every day, doing the same thing?" he asked, with a tone that implied he knew the answer and was the only one with wanderlust, the only one who got bored. I squinted up at him through the sun, and said, "Yes."
So the Cutest Boy in New York has a girlfriend. I'm unsurprised, but not comforted by the inevitability.