A great article from the New Yorker:
Four Short Crushes by Paul Simms
Well, well, well. Just look at you, walking
into this dreary bar and lighting the place up like the noonday sun at
midnight, twirling a lock of your long auburn hair pensively as you
search the room—for what?
For a soul mate, perhaps?
(I know, I know—I hate that phrase, too. Maybe that will end up
being one of those things we both hate.) Maybe a few weeks from now,
lying in your bed on a Sunday morning, I’ll ask you, “What’s your least
favorite word or phrase?,” and you’ll say, “ ‘Soul mate,’ ” and I’ll
laugh till you say, “What? Tell me!,” and I’ll tell you how I knew that
from the moment I first laid eyes on you, and then we’ll have sex again.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. You haven’t even noticed me yet. That’s O.K. I can wait.
Maybe when your gaze settles on me, and we lock eyes in that mutual
Hitchcockian tunnel-vision effect where the camera is, like, pushing in
at the same time it zooms out, or however they do that, you’ll come sit
down next to me and we’ll—
Now you’ve spotted the friends you came to meet. They look like good friends.
Maybe they’ll be my friends, too.
Our friends.
Your eyes just came to life like emeralds lit by subterranean
torches, and as you move across the room toward your friends you shriek
at them, “What the fuck is up, yo?,” in a voice so piercing that the
entire bar goes silent for a moment, and I have to check my glasses to
make sure the lenses didn’t crack. You continue to bellow your every
utterance (including the lines “Jägermeister is the bomb, dawg!” and
“Just ’cause I’m a white girl don’t mean I don’t got some serious junk
in the trunk!” and “Random! Random! Random!”), and the bartender leans
in and whispers something to his bar back, and they look at you and
laugh.
You must be a regular here.
(Duration of crush: seventeen seconds.)
Oh my. What have we here? A rainy night in the
city has cleared the sidewalks of all but the most intrepid
pedestrians, and those who didn’t brave the elements have no idea what
they’re missing. Because there you are, gliding along on your bicycle, just a few feet ahead of me.
You’re obviously not one of those tedious hard-core cycling
enthusiasts—no skin-tight black spandex for you. No, just a simple
white T-shirt (soaked through to the skin, clinging to the small of
your back) and a long blond ponytail, whipping back and forth like the
tail of a cartoon pony, as those long legs of yours pump the pedals and
you raise your face to the sky, letting the raindrops freckle your
cheeks with sweet diamonds of moisture.
Dare I try to catch up to you? I’m on foot, carrying a bunch of
shopping bags, but you’ve paused at a red light, and—what the heck? I
don’t know what I’ll say to you, but even the clumsiest of
introductions on these glistening nighttime streets will give us a
romantic how-we-met anecdote that we’ll love telling for years to come. Caught you! Here I am!
And there you are. I see now that you’re a dude. My mistake. It was the ponytail that threw me off.
(Duration of crush: thirty-three seconds.)
Another restaurant dinner with my boring
girlfriend, another lecture about how I never really listen to whatever
she’s yammering on about. But how can I listen—how could
anyone?—when across the room, alone at a table, reading the newspaper
and nursing a glass of white wine, is a silent confection like you?
You, with your jet-black hair (like a latter-day Veronica from
“Archie”) and your skin so pale that the bubble-gummy pinkness of your
pouty lips seems almost obscene, especially when you scrunch them up
the way you do every time you lick your forefinger and turn the page.
And I know you see me, too. Your first glance betrayed a glimmer of
recognition—as if you knew me but couldn’t remember from where—followed
by puzzlement, your eyes entreating me to silently remind you, which I
couldn’t do at the time because my current girlfriend was staring
across the table at me, apparently waiting for my answer to some kind
of relationship question that I thought was rhetorical.
And so it goes. For an eternity, it seems—through the entire meal,
until I watch you ask for the check, and pay it, and get up to walk out
of the restaurant, and my life, forever.
But what’s this? You’re crossing the room toward me? So brazen—just
as I knew you’d be. Are you going to surreptitiously slip me your
number, written on a sugar packet, perhaps dropping it in my pocket as
you fake-jostle me, like a spy handing off microfilm?
My heart beats like underwater thunder in my ears, until you tap my
girlfriend on the shoulder, and she sees you and says, “Hey!,” and you
say, “I thought that was you!,” and I realize that you are one of my
girlfriend’s college roommates.
After you leave, my girlfriend tells me a hilarious story about how
one time in college some guy broke up with you, so you found some
photos of him nude with the word “Patriarchy” written on his chest in
Magic Marker which you took for an art class, and you sent them to his
parents and then posted them on your blog, where you apparently like to
write incredibly detailed confessionals about the asshole guys you
always end up dating, and also, while you don’t use the guys’ real
names, everyone knows that the guy you immortalized as Pencil Dick is
actually a guy I used to work with.
(Duration of crush: forty-five minutes.) So silly does my impatience now seem, stuck as I
am in the Starbucks line during the morning rush. But that was before I
noticed you in line ahead of me. And now that I’ve seen you—with
your gossamer hair still damp from the shower, with your
well-moisturized ankles strapped and buckled into high heels that make
you wobble and sway like a young colt just finding her stride, with
your scent of lilacs and Dial, and, most of all, with your infectious
sense of calmness and serenity, which makes me wish that the world
itself would stop spinning, so that gravity would cease and we two
could float into the sky and kiss in the clouds, giddy with love and
vertigo—
Now you’re at the register, and the dreaded moment when we part
without meeting rushes toward me like a slow-motion car crash in a
dream.
You’ve been at the register without saying anything for, like,
fifteen seconds now, still scanning the menu board with those
almond-shaped eyes that would make Nefertiti herself weep with envy.
Seriously, you’ve been to a Starbucks before, right? I mean, it
seems like there are a lot of choices, but most people find a drink
they like and stick with it. And order it quickly.
But maybe I’ve caught you on a day when you’ve decided to make a
fresh start. To make a fresh start, to try a new drink, to walk a
different way to work, to finally dump that boyfriend who doesn’t
appreciate you.
O.K., even if that were the case you could have picked out your new
drink while you were waiting in line, right? I mean, come on.
Well, you’ve won me back, my future Mrs. Me—by turning to me and
mouthing, “Sorry,” after you finally noticed me tapping my foot,
looking at my watch, and exhaling loudly. Sensitivity like that can be
neither learned nor taught, and it’s a rare thing indeed. The rarest of
all possible—
Jesus Christ, you’ve ordered your drink and paid; do I really have
to stand here for another forty-five seconds while you repack your
purse, the contents of which you’ve spilled out on the counter like
you’re setting up a fucking yard sale or something?
That’s right, the bills go in the billfold, the coins go in the
little coin purse, the billfold and the coin purse go back in the
pocketbook—no, in a side pocket of the pocketbook, which seems to have
a clasp whose design incorporates some proprietary technology that you
haven’t yet mastered.
I think I hate you now.
(Duration of crush: five minutes.)
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