December 13, 2006

• camaraderie

  and in a truly cliche manner, the corridor was eerily quiet, and i realized i was completely alone.

  not that the ny subway is anything to fear exactly; unlike boston, there usually are people milling around even in the wee hours of the night; baked eurotrash, college students reeking of drugstore vodka, something of a mix of the destitute elderly and the inebriated youth. if one were to let the senses have free reign the subway becomes almost trance-like, that night-world of fluorescent lights flickering on plastic painted in flat, unreal hues.

  but tonight, my senses were reigned in, in a hypervigilance that subconsciously toggles when one realizes that they are alone in a bad place. i heard the click-click of my foolish heels on the cement floor bouncing hollowly through the hallway and metallically tumbling over stairs, where a bum sat with his head between his hands, sniffing god-knows-what out of a soiled McDonalds bag. along the side of the metal bars were two Mexicans, fiddling with an ambiguously shaped plastic bag, leering slightly as i walked past (as much of a leer as can come from men standing a full three inches shorter than me). a couple sat at the far end of the platform, the girl dressed in three different coloured tights, the guy with shaggy, long, hair, head lolling back from too much of something i couldn't have named. but i had done this before, i was ready - a mask had descended on my face, half unapproachable austerity, half distracted disdain.

  but then she came, and i couldn't say no. her face was ruddy through the dark, wind-bruised skin, her limbs thick with a lifetime of cheap foods fried in cheap oils that sustain but do not nourish. wrapped around her neck was an atrocious multicolored yarn creation that smelled suspiciously of vegetables gone long to the wayside. her hair was fastened in a hasty, messy knot, but unkempt wisps kept nagging at a wide, squinting face. her jeans were flared, an almost comically trendy touch. this was obviously not a midtown neighbor of mine.

  all the same, her eyes carried that forlorn questing look, the imploring look of someone in a foreign world who is terribly lost.

  hui jiang pu tong hua ma? - i nodded. D train zai...? lady, forget the D train - this is your direct route home.

  turns out she needed to catch a bus from Grand Central - easy. i told her i'd stay on the train with her until we got there. i was getting off at the next stop, anyway.

  and she sat next to me, puffy off-white coat and all, nestled intimately close in the way completely lost to the crusty upper-middle-classes, who, i think, value personal space at a premium, far above personal connectivity. there were no other people sitting in our row, so for a moment i contemplated shifting to the right, where i could maintain my sterile midtown existence, my sterile midtown smell.

  but then i saw her her hands, folded in her lap, calloused and dark. their darkness hit me first, because it made them at once so weathered and so earthly. i could not stop looking at them. they were the image that my mother repeatedly drummed into me as the ultimate epidermal armageddon, leading to years and years of religiously applying forty-dollar suntan lotions and panicking when an afternoon in the sun left them one shade darker than the imaginary past. all i could think at the moment, however, was how much those hands had done. my own were folded in my lap, a few inches away, small, useless, nearly translucently pale, ridiculous.

  hai hao wo zhao dao ni le (thank god i found you, i was lost.) ye hai hao ni you ge ban, pei ni hui jia (and thank god for you, to have a companion on the journey home.)

  and she was right. i had thought there was a world of difference between us, but at the end, i wasn't all too sure. we were simply two scared, discomfited women, just a little vulnerable at midnight in this city of leering men, who, having momentarily found each other...were just a little glad not to be alone.

   

   

  • 2:39 am
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