Posted January 31st, 2003 by Michelle

So I was going to go on a rant about being single in New York, but really, even though I’ve been dating since I was a zygote I’ve also always, really, been single, so why is New York so different? In the end, it’s not really.

Tonight I went to a suprise birthday party for a very good friend at work. I absolutely rejoiced in seeing so many people I love loving each other. Arms slung around, hands on smalls of backs, so very wonderful. And thinking about my lover, who in the end is… well, I don’t know, it’s not simple. There is a man I know and love, in my own way, and in that knowing I struggle in the undefined. There are a thousand things keeping us apart and very simple things pulling me to his apartment once or twice a week. It can’t be and yet it is, and most of the time it is terrific. Once in a great while it makes me terribly sad but for the most part it is, well, lovely. It’s not often that I meet a man smarter than me, and even if he isn’t smarter, he knows things that I don’t, and that, folks, is sexy. He is hot and cold and sweet and distant and delicious and frustrating. So you see why I’m still there.

But I digress. I left the party, reluctantly, untying the ballons that had been wrapped around my pigtails all night. I walked to the subway at Union Square and ambled down to my beloved Q train. I am in the middle of a passionate love affair with a train. My sweet Q, who delivers me from Park Slope to Union Square in five stops, fifteen minutes, who sails over the Manhattan Bridge, who skips all the boring streets and leads me to my second home. I have a great love for Union Square as well. My job near there has made all of the difference since moving to New York. It supported me through one of the worst breakups in the history books, helped my pass my EMT class, gave me beautiful people to love, the people I saw tonight. It was also a place of gathering after 9/11. I love it.

So I’m down in the subway with about 150 other late night New Yorkers, all of us yearning for our beloved Q. I can’t pull out my book because I’m still too lost in the party, so instead I wrap my arms around one of the pillars supporting the network of concrete and wait. And then I start my favorite subway game: rat-watching. Sometimes you’ll see a whole family down there. I waited for at least fifteen minutes before spying a lone rat, a smaller one, dashing around the innards of the subway rails. Finally, in the distance, I see my lover, my speed demon, rushing towards me, “Q” all ablaze, and I actually say aloud, “sweetness, you’ve come”. And then whisper to the rat, “Shoo, fool…”

And then I get on the trail, fall into “Kavalier and Clay”, and find my way home.

A warning to you all: these will be my blogs when I have Newcastle swimming in my blood.