The boy got up and joined his dad, but he didn't pay much attention to the adult, just looking into the distant behind the subway train doors. Another adult awkwardly maneuvers toward the empty seat the boy left behind, trying to get between the tiny space between the seat abandoner and another adult oblivious to his environment. The seat seeker seemed nervous, fearful, perhaps, that someone closer to the empty seat would grab it just a split second before he reached the Promise Land.
After he has reached the land of comfort and settled down with his morning reading, my attention was switched to the people getting on at 168th Street, where the boy and his dad got off after some brief discussion on whether to take the C train across or walk. The bell outside tolled to advise commuters that the C train was about to leave from its terminal station. The door closed and ushered in more students. They always made me wonder what I was like when I was taking the train to school. I was taking a different train that traveled on the same West side as the train I was on now. My journey was far longer than these boys' (unless they were all going to Brooklyn Tech, but even so, it was still a shorter trip than mine that traversed three boroughs). I dressed differently, no doubt; these boys were in a different era where many of them liked wearing jeans that whose belt level was low enough to show most of their underwear. And they were different from the younger me because they were not of my cultural background. If I had seen the likes of them back when I was their age, I would have been a little afraid, assumed they were up to no good, trying to cause trouble. They were wearing not only baggy and super-low-cut jeans, but crooked baseball hat, and headphones to show clearly their walls of disdain for everyone else around them. Now I see them as just boys who looked different, and behind that facade of clothes they could be violent or tame, dumb or smart, no point judging. Of course, I no longer need to judge because I no longer needed to protect myself physically from the real danger that was pervasive around me back then.
Behind the new arrivals was a man that had been sitting next to the Promise Seat since I got on an express stop ago. He was wearing a camouflage shirt with a four-letter word of which I could only see the last three: "A-P-E". What would the first letter be, I wondered. Can they really make a daring shirt saying "RAPE"? Or something lame like CAPE or TAPE or NAPE. NAPE would be the optimal. The man wearing it was a not-so-young black man, a little skinny, and looking rather tame. He wasn't a business person, I had an inkling. He seemed shy next to a friend of his that he was whispering to, whom I couldn't see with the passengers standing in my line of sight. I was too curious about the first letter of that word on his chest to return to my reading.
The anticlimax was that a little before I got off the train I saw finally the word was "BAPE", which doesn't mean anything, not in the formal dictionary, not from some urban connotation. But by then, my curiosity had worn off a great deal, mostly from my thoughts that morning.
It was the first time since last Wednesday that I was going to work from Washington Heights, the land of the castles. I came to the pianist's home after she spent an exhausting weekend preparing and performing at her concert that apparently was a great success. She told me about what happened, and how it worked out overall but not her own part because of this and that reason. I listened, but at the same time, I realized I was tired. I was hungry. I paid attention until she was done and went back to her practicing, and then I made dinner for her, which she thoroughly found delightful. After that we chat a little more before falling asleep. I got my more-than-six-hours of sleep, surprisingly. But in some ways, that's not altogether great.
I woke up few minutes before the alarm went off, and stayed in bed for another two-three minutes. I was thinking on this gray morning whose silence was regularly punctured by the rush hour traffic outside. After getting out of bed I realized I only looked at her once. Something was weighing increasingly heavy, and I knew what it was. What I didn't know was what to do about it.
There is always a fear I have that with whichever girl I have a relationship I inevitably end up being asked to be their best friend, only. And in this case, I feel we are more like a couple married for ten, twenty years. We are sweet to each other. I still write and leave a poem for her every morning that I leave. I still surprise her with flowers. Our embraces are deeper and longer. And it goes without saying that we are always very happy to see each other. I have a feeling she missed me. She talked about what I missed there, that I would have liked it. (I didn't go because she had no room in her car. But then again, am I her boyfriend?)
But what's missing here, in this nearly picture-perfect poetry of romance, is that basic connection between a man and a woman. That flame was there that Labor Day weekend, but that was it. That was three weekends ago. Now we are always tired when we get to bed. And I always felt her physical wall when I try to approach her. And when that happened, the fear of let's-be-friends returns.
There are many couples out there, even in this day and age, who don't have sex until they get married, who believe in taking things easy. But I didn't think we were that kind of couple.
On a layer deeper than the fear of let's-be-friends is the fear that I am in the mode of nothing-is-enough. I finally have someone who likes being with me, lets me sleep in her bed, spends a lot of time with me, and let me do all these romantic things for her, and occasionally, expresses her own romantic attachments to me. And yet, I want "more". I am not sure if it is "more". A part of me thinks without that basic connection between a man and a woman, I am not sure how we are "dating".
That fundamental dilemma is haunting me again: when am I asking for too much, and when am I giving up too much of what I want? Am I demanding too much because deep down I want something else completely different, like approval, like assurance? Or am I justified to believe that what she's offering me really is just a very cute and deep platonic love?
The best way out of this is to talk to her, I believe. Get the stuff out, rake the muck, put everything out in the open. Maybe she doesn't want to go fast because she has had more than her share of that kind of relationship in short span of the past few years. Maybe we simply don't have the energy and time to make that connection; we're always so tired and we're both very busy. If this is the case, is it acceptable to me? With my schedule, which already has sacrificed significant time for tango and kung fu, not to mention other things I like such as photography, can I realistically believe I have time for dating? If by "dating" I mean a girlfriend I do more with in bed than just chat until we fall asleep? I need to figure these things out, perhaps with her help.
I missed the train because I stayed in bed a few minutes too long in contemplating this, because I brushed my teeth, because I wrote her another poem. I am on the local train to Stamford; I will be a little late today. But at least in this slow train, among strangers, I had the time to do another thing I like: writing.
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