The Only Other Person I Knew in New York.

I moved to New York with Julia, who had been accepted to Columbia Law. In the summer before we moved, Julia had taken to quoting a statistic that eighty percent of existing relationships do not survive the first year of law school. I had spent a lot of time reassuring her that we would beat those odds until it became clear, during the second semester of her first year, that she had been quoting the stat more as a way of laying the groundwork for what was to come, rather than seeking affirmation of our resilience. She had been citing precedent, building her case. She was going to be a great lawyer.

At the time, I knew one other soul in New York, an old friend of mine from St. Louis named Mike. Mike lived in Brooklyn. As things got worse in my relationship, I found myself making the hour-and-a-half trek from Morningside Heights down to Prospect Heights with greater frequency. The return trip became more and more steeped in intoxicated sadness, as I began to resign myself to the fact that the home I was going back to was not a happy one. Mike would always offer me his couch, but somehow it seemed important that I be physically in the presence of the person who had most come to resent my presence in order to save my relationship. I got it into my head, somehow, that the foundation to us fixing things lie in me being there every morning when she woke up, that she see me as a constant. And with that in mind, I would stumble in, drunk and exhausted and morose, at 3am and climb into bed next to someone who had to be in class at 8am. This was like shoveling snow on the Titanic. It made exactly that much sense.

One night, I was on the train, drunk and depressed at one in the morning, when I saw a woman at the other end of the train who looked familiar. She looked just like a regular who used to come into the coffee shop in St. Louis where I had met Julia. Unfortunately, she was very far away, I had never really known the woman well in the first place, and I was a little blurry-eyed from the booze. And if it was her, well, only under the most desperate circumstances would that be a good thing. The woman I remembered had been kind of on the opposite side of a circle of friends, and that seemed to be by mutual agreement. She would come into the coffee shop or show up at parties and before you knew it, everything would be a political discussion that was veering toward conflict. She seemed to be able to turn any occasion into a bitter debate and, when I was in St. Louis, I had learned to actively avoid her. 

Now though, she might be one more person I at least kinda knew, in a town where the only two people I certainly knew were sick or me and sorry for me respectively. I was so desperate to see a familiar face. Just anyone who knew my name. Someone who might remember me from a time when I was not so lonely and pathetic, because I was certainly losing my grip on any memory of that, myself. It would have been amazing to run into someone who knew a better me from a happier moment. And that is definitely what that last year in St. Louis had been - working in the coffee shop, just beginning to date Julia, surrounded by friends. It was one of those times in your life that is so special you know how special it is while it is happening to you. That was when this woman would have been a regular. If she was the woman I remembered, that memory would have been from that happy year.

She was just too far away though. And I was too blurry. I couldn’t quite be sure. It had been too many years and I couldn’t lock it down. I just kept staring at her, trying to figure it out. My brain was operating on an alcohol-induced binary, bouncing back and forth between, “Is it her? Is it not her? Is it her? Is it not her?… Is it her?”

Then the train began pulling into Union Square. Before it came to a full stop, she got to her feet, marched halfway down the train, took a wide-legged stance while pointing her finger at me and declared, “I know what you are doing! I will not be intimidated! You stop it right now!” She took back the night right then and there and then exited onto the platform just as the doors were closing.

I thought, “Yep. That was her.”

That was the only other person I knew in New York. And she did not know me. Although, apparently, she would be able to identify me in a line-up, if it came down to it.