Thursday, Jun. 06, 2002 - 10:28 p.m.
A Love Story

As per usual, I was reading the New Yorker on the subway tonight. Deep into an article about the horrific assault by NYC cops on a Haitian man while in police custody, I barely noticed the thirty-something woman coming nearer. The train was coming to a stop. She’d been sitting at the other end of the car, and walked purposefully toward the door near where I sat (bypassing the exit closest to where she’d been sitting).

“Can I talk to you?” she said, loudly, her voice intense and affectionate, soaked with a strange knowingness.

I looked up, and was relieved to see she was not addressing me. I was vaguely aware that a few guys sat directly behind me, talking, but it was the Asian guy on the opposite side she spoke to.

Quickly sensing something wacky about to transpire, I averted my eyes, pretended to read, and cocked my ears.

There was a pause. “Okay,” said the Asian man, with a bit of a laugh in his throat.

“I just wanted to say that I love you,” she said, sing-songishly.

Mortified, I felt my face flush red.

“I do,” she continued. “I love you. Do you love me?”

The silence hung thick. I began to sweat.

The subway stopped at the next station. The three guys sitting behind me disembarked. “I love you guys too,” she sang as they walked by.

“Yeah, yeah,” laughed one of them.

Back in transit, it was now just the woman and her intended and me sitting at our end of the car.

“Have you been following me?” she asked the Asian fellow.

I could hear a shrug in his voice; his throat caught. “I’m just an old Chinese guy,” he protested.

“I love you,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to make something more of this than it is.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

Please please please don’t talk to me, I thought.

I couldn’t not look up at this point. I glanced at the man; forty-or-fifty-something, he looked amused and frightened; the woman was pale and plump-faced, in blue jeans and a sweatshirt. There was nothing deranged-looking about her.

We were coming to my stop. “You look like you’re in pain,” she said to the man.

“Pain?” he said.

“Pain,” she said. “You look like you’re carrying a lot of pain in your heart.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I love you,” she said. “And…” her voice broke, “I hope you love yourself.”

“Okay,” he said.

I disembarked the train, relieved. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so mortified. I wondered how the guy would deal with this strange lady.

Like her, my imagination feeds off strangers. I like to watch them and sense their energies. Sometimes—the imagination being what it is—fleeting emotions reverberate inside me as I watch and fantasize and sense.

I usually keep such imaginings to myself. That’s what makes me sane, I suppose. Or perhaps it’s merely how my insanity differs.