Not getting anywhere

we all stand around, looking back and forth, making small circles, sometimes listening to our music and sometimes glancing at our books. some of us have been on this humid, narrow platform for over an hour. we are not strangers to stagnant crowds, we are professionals.

two grinning jamaicans drinking from baby blue bottles wrapped tight in plastic bags. an inordinately diverse group of loud mouths smacking each other, screaming idiotic gibberish, and giving a large radius of commuters something on which to direct their wandering frustration. a frail old woman in a short blue dress inhales from a smokeless cigarette while badgering another woman who just wants to go home and see her cat and go to sleep. most of us are unremarkable, trying our best to be unremarkable. most of us didn't know which way to even look for the train to come. shuttle bus weekend is anybody's guess, but the old school riders, we know.

a gentleman reading a book next to me, it had an interesting cover. he was overtly literary. probably not a fan of genre fiction and yet his existence was a kind of genre; a book person. at some point he pulled out a small piece of index paper and began to scrawl something on it. typical, i thought - and not a little bit hypocritically. but as i took another peek i realized he was writing a love note. it started "you're cute..." and i knew who it was written for.

she was three feet away, two feet away from him. i tried not to stare at her. beautiful women don't like that. she was certainly gorgeous tho, cat eye glasses and light brown hair, a t-shirt and shorts but with style. a regular girl-from-the-loft-next-door beauty.

but my friend the bookworm was not her only admirer. another gentleman, easily the douchiest of the three us all, starts asking her questions about the subway situation. "when is the train supposed to come? will it be on this side or that side? i'm trying to get into manhattan for a concert. do you like music?" a love note became a bookmark and there's no story here.