The Distance Between Strangers

The F train perpetually smells like morning breath, even on that Tuesday afternoon. Seats filled while the one next to me stayed open. It was starting to get warm in the city, the semester coming to a close, which I had been grateful for. This spring seemed to be a slow thawing. I found no yearly enjoyment of the increasing burn of summer. I found things impossibly lonely. It came from nothing in the night like dew on my mind, a distance to the world that couldn’t be closed. Sitting there amongst a crowd who appeared not to notice me I leaned as the train stopped due to traffic ahead.

Months before with ease I believed transferring schools would be better, that in a major I had liked I would find friends. Only I found myself in the same lonely city. I watched as passengers eyed a platform full of midday F train travelers, routines unshaken by the new weather.

Loneliness was always within me, moving to New York made it stronger. To be a freshman in college I had no job, no money, and no coordination of the city I was in. I could never quite get my barrings, always connecting mental maps and losing them again. My friendships were weak and lost within the space of an unanswered text. I had fallen into the trap while transferring schools, the ill-fated logic that leaving one place would exempt me from the problems I had at the other. When I arrived I felt abandoned, unable to take the classes I wanted at all. 

On warmer days past I would conceal this isolation and wander the city, stopping to stand outside restaurants and listen to the muffled chatter of happy hour diners. I enjoyed the way strangers were so easily projectable, the way you could connect to them for a fleeting moment. I envied their gravity to New York, the way they were tethered to a life with roles and responsibilities while mine were flimsy at best. I  could leave the city with ease, no one knew I was there, no one depended on my staying. 

A gentleman at the last minuted entered the car in the suit all F train businessmen wear. We shared the knowing look of seat partners. He nodded as to say, is anyone sitting there? Like we were at a cafe. I nodded to say no I am here all alone. 

“Thank you so much,” He said sitting feeling the warmth of another body close to mine.

I couldn’t say you’re welcome back. I hadn’t had a conversation all day and for a moment forgot how. 

He was handsome in the way that strangers on the subway are, the ones you pick to practice falling in love. He looked smart in his dark suit, crisp on the scratched orange seat. His hair was short and blond in the yellow lights. My eyes traced over the left margin of my book to try and look at him more before he turned to me.

“On the Road? An excellent book.”

I looked up at him surprised, glancing at my pages, and said the one thing I knew then to be true, “I don’t like it.”

“Really. Why are you reading it then?”

“I had a high school English teacher tell me I wrote like Jack Kerouac and said this was where I should start.” 

We talked for several stops about Kerouac and other books we enjoyed more. I told him what I didn’t like. There came an instant flow, a trust I hadn’t found elsewhere. Perhaps because most of the people I knew were twenty-somethings trying to figure out the city too and we didn’t talk about books together. 

His casual passion held me. There had been an emptiness, a desire in me for so long, to talk one on one with anyone about reading that I hadn’t even known I was empty. It was the secret compartment of my heart, the lever to reveal a place that needed filling, which I could never forget about again.

Moving away from books I thought we would quietly turn our eyes parallel to one another and the moment would fall backward out of our consciousness. This would be a nice story I’d keep for myself. Our time together was mundane, but I appreciated its casualness which required me only as I was. I hadn’t had time to lie about Jack Kerouac, I might have said I enjoyed it. I had gotten used to saying I liked things I didn’t like. I was so desperate to feel I belonged anywhere I cherished the falseness in any opinion at all. Strangers will take you as you are if you ask them to. He did, he took everything of me that I could give.

“You know I actually saw an older gentleman chasing his hat down the sidewalk in the rain. I ran up to it and gave it to him and he was so nice about it.” I said.

“Really? That’s nice of you. Someone would have grabbed it eventually.” He said “I cried all the way home after. It made me sad.” 

Our laughter at this was the first time we broke eye contact neither of us checking the subway stops as we meandered towards upper manhattan.

“Why because you felt bad?” He said

“Old people make me sad.”

His head in thought looked away again, “maybe that’s because you think they are helpless, which isn't true.”

I spent time between two stops flattered that he’d tried for a moment to understand me more deeply. For a moment too I let him understand me, relieved by its true fullness. I’ve never found the words to explain my perpetual loneliness to people I’m with. It feels shameful to reveal the people you love are not fulfilling you as they usually do. Its incomprehensibility is two parts. One is the space where I cannot figure out my own loneliness. The roots there are too deep, the feelings are too raw to make sense. There is also the incomprehensible way of describing this to someone else. You can try as hard as you want and still find you don’t feel understood. Even if the words existed, the metaphors arose, nothing would feel like anyone knew what you meant. We quickly had made sense of something together. His attempt to understand however minor left me grateful, to be something I suspected to never be.

“I actually know a woman who is 101,” I continued. “She lived in the city and she can tell you where she got her shoes, the store that was beneath it, and the importance of the designer like nothing.”

“That’s incredible. That she is still so aware.”

“I know. She just gave up her license.”

“She drove in New York?” He asked. 

“No. I’m from Connecticut. I just go to school here. I’m in college.”

“College? What do you study?”

“English.”

There can be something valuable in the simple questions you’re so used to answering, the curiosity of meeting someone new that didn’t require asking such things. He nodded that nod of appreciation that will not go on to ask me what I planned to do with that degree. In saying nothing he’d said everything. 

We left much of ourselves behind us. He didn’t need to know that I missed the classes I loved, that I missed my voice, and feeling like I had something to say.

I saw then how little it takes for strangers to see us in the world, to scoop us into a whirlwind, and leave us sated, to ground us to our lives which can feel insignificant in a crowd. Lives that feel like they were never ours because loneliness so easily erases the history of people who love our precise realness. Our conversation lasting some 10 stops could mean he’d forget me later, but I felt now there was proof of my self, a weight to the world that loneliness had not accounted for.

“This is my stop,” he said as we pulled into Rockefeller station. 

I was surprised. It felt rare that this would happen, that someone could come and ask you the questions you needed to be asked and could also be so casually taken away. I could see his regret in his having to go, the sincerity of wanting to stay. 

Yet we were no more than two people who sat next to each other on a train. Loss can be utterly pedestrian.

“It was so nice getting to meet you.” He said, reaching to shake my hand despite the fact we didn’t know each other’s name before he vanished onto the platform forever. I thought of him the rest of the day, the ease it took for him to see me when my sadness made me feel too far away to be noticed. Nothing between us was truly said, but everything was understood. 

In the weeks after my boyfriend will break up with me and I will be blindsided though in hindsight it was an obvious mercy killing, I’ll move to Brooklyn with new roommates. We won’t run into each other again. 

Loneliness is an irreversible diagnosis, it will continue to arise on days where I am deeply loved and cared for, while seeing people who also see me. 

The intertwining of lives between strangers I met I hold dearly, their singing voices in Washington Square Park, their compliments at a disco, their soothing notes passed to me on the subway while I cry. I carry them with me in my loneliness. Often it is our lack of connection which leaves us feeling isolated. When nothing can shake this sadness I at least remember who I have met and their unlikely tether, how taking the subway is not so futile or detached as I remember. There is an abundance of strangers whose grounding warmth unexpectedly finds me when I’m alone. I am no longer so burdened by the loneliness I still feel. Its arrival is one I understand. It comes less frequently and now I find myself with the company of the kind of friends I saw through glass years ago. Still, I look out the window when I’m eating with them and pause to listen to the chatter of the people around us, to notice the sound of various strangers being seen by one another. Turning, at last, to see my friends anticipating my participation, who wait to hear my voice.