“Later they’d both wonder when their brains first registered the presence of the other.”
When I meet someone and realize we share a hometown or a city, I wish we could draw a map of where we were and when. I imagine Greenpoint with our little footsteps appearing as we walked. Did we ever set foot in the same park at the same time? Did we stand next to each other at a bar, elbows touching as we ordered a drink? Did I hold the door open for them and then forgot their face immediately? This is an easier thing to wonder about in large cities. In small towns if you had seen them, you would have known. They would not have disappeared into the crush of faces you must forget if you are to survive the day.
In Virginia, I tend to see the same people over and over again. It is not so fun to wonder about strangers here or to bring them up as a point of interest in conversation the way it was in New York. Here, you give three identifying characteristics and chances are the person you’re with knows them and you can no longer say anything mean or sarcastic or funny about them and you can’t lust after or admire them from afar because you’ll immediately be pulled in to close. There is a lack of secrets in this town and I love secrets. This, maybe is why I love books. With a book open, reading, I am in a secret conversation, learning secret things and secret language.
In college, I took a Modernist poetry class that was full of language puzzles and secrets. We read Mina Loy and H.D. and Eliot. We were served cocaine in cornucopia by a silver lucifer and looked at faces as fair as rain, people as gold as the half-ripe grain that merges to gold again. I half-remember these texts all the time, the lines come to me as if in a dream, the bewildering way these women and men, especially the women, wielded language.
My college was in a very small town. Instead of wondering about people and letting their faces fade in our minds, we hooked up with people and then walked by them the next day, knowing definitively the contours of their face (there were only 700 of us to know and the human brain can remember 10,000 faces). Because we were either too calloused or too afraid, too young or not young enough, we hardly acknowledged one another, instead walking by in false, heart-racing anonymity, not letting the other know we remembered spending the night with them. Because of this claustrophobia, one poem in particular caught my attention in that class: Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” It is short, two lines is all he gives you, and here they are:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
I longed to be somewhere where there was a crowd large enough that the faces would become petals, that the crowd itself would be thick enough and dark enough that face by face would appear as if lit up, the way a pink petal looks brighter on black than it does on white.
So I moved to New York City, where it is far easier to be anonymous than it is to be known. I liked being able to slip into another neighborhood and know no one, run into no one. I could shop for what I wanted, meet and talk to whoever I wanted, sit and look at the nothing, walk down the street crying. There was a freedom in knowing that wherever you went, only you knew you. One day three or four years ago, an aunt of mine said to me at Christmas time, it’s so exciting, you aren’t beholden to anyone, you can do anything you want! She meant it kindly; my single life was the kind of life she hadn’t lived (married young, kids young, move from parental house to spousal house) but I felt so tired. Freedom can be exhausting. It is taxing, this anonymity.
Something shifted in me. I would say it shifted that day, but I’m sure it had been shifting slowly, moment by moment, new face after new face. I only noticed it when I returned from to Ohio and had to, once again, explain what my life was like to my family. There is an easy traditionalism to my family that I do not subscribe to and aggressively didn’t when I was younger. Now I want that aloneness less, much less. Now I spend little time mourning the days I could go to a whole network of streets where no one knew me (though I do sometimes still grieve that life) and instead, I wonder about when, in all of that aloneness, I crossed paths with someone I would come to know.
Like the story a friend of mine told about filming his long hair being cut on the roof of his brother’s apartment one summer night. We used our roof sparingly—to watch the fireworks, to hold a reading, to sunbathe—but having somewhere else to go felt like luxury. It turned out his brother lived on the same block that I did and so, that night, we could have seen each other over the tarpaper and building edges. I wonder all the time about the two brothers in red t-shirts. Did I see them on the horizon, did we descend at the same time, walk into the same bodega to get a sandwich or a beer? Did some of his hair float by on the wind, land on my roof?
You look like someone I know. Have I seen you before? Have I? Have I?
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