Rockaway Lover
It’s winter in New York and everyone holds hands under down feathers.
the couples who fall over themselves on the rockaway parkway line do not meet my eyes. they only continue their prenuptial gazing into one another, lovingly ignorant to the world.
abhorring something equally unloveable, their love burns white and harsh.
this burden of transactional relationships is a cruelty i find on the train daily.
on the way home i watch the two lovers opposite me unknowingly drown out a woman selling candy and chewing gum to the rest of the unbothered and oblivious lot of commuters. the woman's son trails behind, worried and white with wilting humility for fear of a lost fortune; another barren christmas.
the pair clad with arrows from cupid’s recent aim seem to rarely even notice her, nor are they affected by her eyes of misfortune.
she passes, offering the assortments and they go on to snicker over shared jokes, batting eyelashes and flushing red; bashful and blind.
the woman and the box of candy move cars while her son loiters behind.
he looks back at the purveyors, oblivious head by oblivious head, until he finds his way to my eyes.
the boy is small, still young and unaware of how afraid he is, and yet he looks at me with a distrusting air, as though born to see through nods of acknowledgement and mimicries of a forced sympathy.
he looks at me and then to the couple, still smiling and burning, and then this small boy, standing now much too long in front of the train's sliding doors, looks back at me again, this time holding a much heavier gaze.
i look deeply into him and his eyes do not move. they seem to be asking me a question, one that i could not at the time, and would never be able to in the future give a furtive answer to. i lowered my eyelids then, smiling a half-full, peevish and limp smile. i wanted the connection to cease, for him to follow his mother into the other car. i wanted to continue to feel oppressed by the syrupy couple melting before me, so i smiled at him.
i was scared looking into him, in the way that young girls at sport tryouts are scared, caught under hellish white lamps and small amongst the vast pitch.
the boy’s eyes never moved from me. they remained rigid. i can’t for the life of me recall the color of them, but i remember how sharp they seemed, as though sharpened by the loose metal fluttering about brooklyn’s bridges; the kind of metal which glimmers on the side of the road at the sight of oncoming traffic.
it wasn’t smart to smile, but i was distracted. it seemed that my distraction, this time however, was unwilling, and i moved my eyes to shake my head, making room for the settled thoughts to fall and for the boy to leave my sight.
mother and son inevitably left when the next stop arrived.
in their leaving, almost by law of the world, came another imminent and intrusive entering. on waltzed two more figures of youth onto the train, and taking the two seats to my right, i equally recoiled and rejoiced for having another thing to chew on.
they nestled beside me. the boy out of the pair started buzzing like a giant gnat in the blazing july heat. his whispers, young and incessant, slathered the mumbled sounds in a honeyed and rapturous love, one much too sweet for my own tastes. pouring a thick lovely goo into the girl’s ears, he echoed odes and glories of forever. a very obvious fresh love, the two boasted obstinate gratitude for finding such a perfect person for this very droll and lonely upcoming winter.
i suppose in attempts to hear these poetics over the screeching of cheap burning metal, the young girl leaned forward ever so slightly at the hips. her eyes lie fixed somewhere low in front of me. to my knowledge these eyes did not see what was actually there, and was rather caught in something else entirely from the spot which she lay stuck upon.
as if the other senses were far too engaged in the audible stimulus, probably succumbing to his whispering and the subsequent subtle flicking of saliva which built onto her right ear becoming visible, it seemed as if the girl had fallen transfixed under a spell. she was lured by a tempering overwhelm of internal operation. although she may be experiencing a bursting of capillaries and boasting of great pride for securing the adoration of pure and true love, all this poor girl has to show for it is her glazed expression on the train back from manhattan, while he spits freely in her ear.
i am obtusely involved in their affair. my proximity to this young man’s clambering consonants has inevitably made me curious, so i have been checking in periodically. most of it was cliched and at times sweet, but as i soon as i hear the words “forever” i feel the train jerk right, then left.
the word plays in my mind and i close my eyes to allow heartache, past lives and turbulence fuel me with nausea. the noise begins to blur.
exhausted by the siren of “ess’s” and “tsst’s” that floods her ears, i attempt to fall into the same post-coital gaze that she so selfishly defaults to.
in my mirroring, i feel the nothingness of early puberty’s hormonal changes. as though i have just come out of a coma, in this lobotomized feminine sedation, i breach a blurred blindness through my prefrontal cortex.
it takes an immediate effect. avoiding the feeling leads to obstructed vision of where i am on the train, or where i am going, either to or away from manhattan. i feel myself slip into a liminal gray of desolation, devout to the rumination of lives i have already lived.
i feel the car shift and i smell the wet raincoats, must, but i do not feel real in my seat.
the sensations blur red and my reality poses trouble in actualization. most of all, caught in the mind of a young girl listening to her suitor’s empty promises, my inherent numbness drowns out the man at the end of the car who, in his own variation of folly and joy, begins to wail to himself in sutured tones and corrupted decibels a song which i nor they have ever heard, and which i hope at least for the sake of my sanity will never hear again.
these echoing shrills burden the fleeting reverie of fresh and dense love.
as though barred behind privacy glass, her hinging forward inevitably produces a screen to which i can no longer see anything past the middle of the train, and so i cannot see the man as he wails.
he screams in crescendo and the lover’s make no fuss.
the rockaway lovers continue to board.
the conducive lobotomy which i gave myself in attempts to step into swoon grows tiring. i shift focus onto the tunnel lights whirring by so that i may feel something other than the relational reverie and my subsequent stomach-sickness.
the automatic memory recalls a time dead yet still not dug, raising my neck’s hair and i roll my eyes. i stare forward and wilt amongst the blossoming new winter love.
i keep my eyes on the moving windows.
i watch the lights fly by.
the other young man whispers something into the other young woman’s ear, and within minutes, her harrowing gaze turns into small wrinkles, and a feeling of static frequency clings close to them, as though their bodies have conglomerated together and produced its own center of mass, with it its own orbit, as well as a shared pulsing heartbeat.
in their gravitational pull i sink the flank of my left side back into the seat so i do not get sucked into orbit, and in this strain my head begins to ache.
i try to watch the stations pass by. i haven’t seen the names clearly since eighth avenue.
the man still sits and screams, much farther down the train.
on the same side of the car we all sit together. my community of companions; the man much farther down the train who wails and sings, who i also notice now has an empty stroller in front of him; the bag next to me which contains nothing except loose cash and vaseline; the lover’s tacked to the bench, sewn with ribbon; the foreboding couple circulating new satellites amongst their gravity.my disgust fades as i feel the erupting of society warp our faces and bodies into one meaningless and vital portion of fuel for the day’s universal electricity.
another stop comes and as one entity we see the rummaging of on goers and off goers packed to the brim, buzzing with pieces of information from useless publications picked up on the way to the station.
they all look in opposite directions, remembering and forgetting something which they have for the fourth day in a row remembered and forgot.
i notice the faces that fill themselves with the hubris of wanting to think about something else other than what is already on their minds, and i watch as their hands fall over one another.
i see the vacant eyes lay motionless amongst a sea of transient soles urgently gripping through socks at a world moving too fast to consume completely.
we are all there for a moment fleeting and still somehow permanent.
under the white fluorescence we all briefly endured – my eyes red and watching, the lovers laughing, the man at the end of the car wailing – the thoughts which we never wanted to overcome.
there at the end of my commute, when the car grows vacant and the time between stations get longer, the figures turn to shadows, the man becomes a silhouette, still wailing sounds that fade into fuzz. no one even seemed to notice his crescendo throughout the ride. no one seemed to care. they made no fuss, the lovers. i made no sound.
the lights no longer blurred for the train began to slow, and the man continued his wailing, the lovers their whispering, and my mind fell limp under the pressure of thoughts somehow out of my control. for despite the noise, this was my home, this seat was my seat, my life was their life, and there’s mine.
in the end it wasn’t that i wanted my eyes to glaze over but that i wanted to see the two for what they were, and i wished to hear the man for what he was, but instead i sat still and waited for stations to become clear, for the signs to prove right, for us to all think the same thought.
the thought that even these perennial people too will lose something they loved.
i thought of the little boy and his mother, the candy i never bought but paid with delicate smile. perhaps we would have to grow fond of these losses, growing never bitter, ever-embracing the ways in which we lose, the grief which we would gain.
as the train lights flicker overhead, i watch the remaining lot wavering under their own actualities of who they are, what group they belong to, and what they want as they leave and enter back into their world. in this chemistry of proximity i feel a burning deep in my lungs, my chest aflame with the comfort of being close to a wood fire in the winter evenings.
when the train doors open before my stop, i smell the white phosphorus of my steadfast adoration burning the lonely train passengers who want more than what they have –– these lonely and unassuming companions i have fallen in love with, and some of whom i will lose.
whoever said love is blind does not know the blurring of subway stations and a biting winter frost.
the female voice sings "this is montrose ave."