Post Love Thirty Seven
There is only way I wake up in a new city after I’ve spent all night exploring it, finding my adventures in it, going to sleep feeling accomplished and envigorated in it. I wake up dissappointed. New cities get me drunk, new cities give me hangovers, new cities are the best and the worst places on earth. To see the same streets again in daylight, with all its’ ordinary people walking to ordinary places, taking it all for granted, it makes me want to go back to sleep until the streets fill with neon blood, neon people, people that came out because they wanted to. But I never do go back to sleep. I too have to be ordinary, I too have things I have to do.
I faced the mirror and looked at the man that had done it last night, had taken big steps, steps maybe not in the right direction but at least away from the same old spot I’d been circling in. Something was gained. Innocence was lost. Good riddance. I got dressed and walked to the elevators knowing she was still on me from last night, her nakedness still on my unshowered body, I proudly carried her with me into my everyday life. I get a kick out of embracing my secret vile self, my inner scum, my incessant wrongdoing. I smirked walking down the Amsterdam streets covered in Amsterdam hooker underneath last nights’ clothes reworn. Me and my fantastic secret, keeping me connected to the night, to the adventure, to the life I like to lead. Away from these morning people, these workers, these jobs and this sun and this stupid music ruining this breakfast.
Once I’d eaten and daydreamed of the hooker, I slowly adapted to the current reality of my day. I was to shower, prepare for work, and take the train to a small town outside Amsterdam. I got up, walked back to the hotel with my head settled on today, and its’ new opportunities, and the girls in the daytime streets that would surely be around later. I was excited to take a train, I was excited to go to a small town where I could find some real, local, non tourist population. I’d had enough of the city. For now.
I was taking in the landscape from the passing train window, my own solemn spot on the bench, just me and the soothing train hum until they got on. Two women, one in her fifties, one around my age, both disturbing my tranquil joy. Chatterboxes of the worst kind, forcing their lives upon me, in english no less, leaving me no choice but to sit there and let their stories pollute me. I learned that the old one was the mother of the younger ones’ boyfriend, and I understood the forced smiles and awkward tension between them now. Their mutual disinterest was concealed, but present nonetheless, enough for me to notice even in my annoyance. They made the best of the situation, and I happened to be there, along for the ride, doing the same. The mother was british, very british, but the girl had an accent I couldn’t place. She had light brown skin, great big warm brown eyes, a gentle smile, calm and graceful movements accentuating her speech. She noticed me looking at her. I felt odd. I’d been staring, mostly just looking at the only person that was in my line of sight, but staring nonetheless. The old woman went on and on besides me in her great big pompous accent as I looked at the girl, learned more about the girl, feeding my sudden intrigue. She was dressed for office work, higher up office work, but I sensed a complete lack of greed in her. Her clothes cost more than mine, but only if you knew. She worked for fulfillment, not money. Colored office girl with foreign relationships, well spoken and well traveled, a world citizen full of ideals, I knew she must be bettering the world somehow.
She looked at me a bit longer the second time. She was acknowledging me, she was playing along, and I was surprised at her interest in me. At first she looked only in between sentences, playing it safe, then she started to look right in the middle of them. Office girl yearning for adventure, even in the face of mother-in-law to be, she never looked too long, but always with increasing intensity, stronger eyes, more messages passed across the short-lived pathways between our eyes. I played along with her, having much less at risk than her, just a single man looking at an attractive woman. She was the one with the dirt on her.
Flirting on a train is pointless. Flirting on a train, or a bus, or any kind of confined, boring public space where you sit in close proximity to others. Your eyes scan everything and everyone, as far as they will reach, endlessly sending out a signal until it is returned. Brief excitement, reassessment, enter the confirmation phase, make sure she’s not just bored and looking around. The second glance is crucial. Once you’ve successfully entered the eye-contact-flirt-zone, you realize that it is the terminal of the line. Because now what? You sit there and wish you had the confidence to get up and sit down next to her and strike up a conversation, if there are any empty seats by to her in the first place, but you feel too selfconscious to even picture it. Everyone is going to look at you making your move. They’re all watching, listening, and while this is mostly paranoia and anxiety talking, you must consider the quiet boredom of such surroundings, the kind that got your eyes wandering for entertainment in the first place.
She looked mid-sentence again, her eyes rolling towards me like uncontrollable hounds breaking from their leashes, she paused and fumbled her words, and I wondered how dull this old brit must have been to miss this back-and-forth between the girl and myself, this wordless yet dirty encounter, she fucked me with her eyes as she spoke of her boyfriend, spoke of him to his mother, eye to eye when they weren’t on mine. Wether or not the old bat knew what was going on, the girl and I were stuck in a catch twenty-two, for neither of us could go any further, could not talk, could not elope from mother and make sweet forbidden love in a foreign train station bathroom somewhere. At the same time, our flirting would have never escalated to such heights had it not been for mother superior, had it not been for the odds we were fighting, had it not been as wrong and as impossible as it had been. Maybe that was the only reason it happened. We needed that safety net to go so close to the edge, and now that we’d been there, we could only turn around and go back to life as it was and always will be, void of true adventure. We were cowards and we knew it. We were at the terminal, travellers slowly getting ready, putting away laptops, putting on jackets, grabbing bags and suitcases, collecting our wandering minds back to function, to get off and get to whatever made us take this train to a little dutch village.
My mind was already on the job as I got up. Sliding my arm through my coat, I turned and saw her standing there. The mother was already on her way out of the wagon. The girl had stalled to get one second with me, to stand in front of me and look into my eyes, hers bright and excitedly nervous above a fantastic smile, mine dumbfounded and blue, for she had broken all the rules. She had spoken. She wasn’t supposed to speak. I had done this countless times. She was supposed to get up and leave and be another dead end encounter. Had no one ever flirted with her before? Instead, she looked at me with a strange, lively expression. “Well… goodbye” she said in her mysterious accent. All I managed to mutter back was bye as she turned and walked out, leaving me with the sudden panicking realization that this had all been real.
I could hear everything else she had told me, too. I heard all of it in the tone, the inflection, I saw it in her eyes and her smile and her energy and her uplifting ways and the fact that she understood the situation as much as I did, but did it anyway, spoke to me anyway, even if it was pointless. And it was. We never said hello, we never talked, we just said goodbye.
I got out onto the platform with my tired mind suddenly racing to catch up to the situation, like an ambulance on a tired old boulevard, too little too late, the moment was dead, the old locomotive had sounded the death knell and there was nothing to save, there were no possibilities left. I walked a few feet behind her, keeping my distance, observing, thinking, resuscitating the aborted heart fetus to no avail, should I run up to her and stop her, should I get her number, is it worth ruining her life, do I care, yes I do, in the end I’d rather keep that moment, that memory, and let the girl go. If only I could meet a woman that way, if only I could live that moment again, if only there were happy endings that weren’t crude ways of getting off and off and never on.
