Dating

They had met out of necessity, having been pressed rudely together in the surge and crush of commuters moving on and off the train; the currents opposed and the two of them caught in the midst. She seemed vaguely subcultural, her hair dyed a deep black and her eye shadow a bit heavier in its application than could be considered stylish. He seemed intentionally unshaven, his sweater ill-fitting; the kind of guy that had a tattoo, but only one, and certainly of nothing outrageous. He had made some joking remark, now forgotten, upon being first forced against her and she had smiled sympathetically. His timing was poor and the joke clichéd, but he was attractive enough to warrant a smile. Names had been exchanged along with, perhaps, a remark about the weather before they had lapsed into a silence that seemed final. He thought briefly of all the other attractive young women he had met in circumstances similar to this only to have them disappear moments later into a world too large for coincidence to ever bring them together again. It was a surprise, then, when they found themselves stepping through the doors together, expelled quite forcefully from the metal opening of the train and the mass of commuters inside. The conversation began anew. More smiles. More jokes. He, stumbling over his words, asked her out to dinner. She haltingly agreed. Phone numbers were exchanged.  

A handful of weeks had passed and they found themselves now lounging naked on top of the covers, all in disarray, on her bed. The room lit only by the soft, incandescent glow of old Christmas lights strung haphazardly across the ceiling. He traced soft circles and figure-eights over her hand and arm with his finger as he stared absentmindedly at a French poster she had tacked to her wall; for absinthe or something else. A robed woman, drawn in the Art-Nouveau style, poured a large decanter of green liquid into the sky, the contours and curves of the liquid matching very nearly the contours and curves of her flowing golden hair. He was suddenly struck with the uncanny feeling of existing within a memory; not deja vu, per se, but an honest-to-goodness recurrence. The feeling came from the past. It was a nostalgic feeling. After a moment of reflection he remembered that his first girlfriend in high school had stuck the same poster up on the wall of the small room she had lived in above her parents' garage. She had strung some old Christmas lights in a similar criss-across her ceiling. And he had laid in this very position, naked and slightly stoned as she awkwardly fellated him for the first time. He had not spoken to that girl in nearly six years and he could not help but wonder where she was and what she had become. He thought that he had loved her and he wondered if he was falling in love again.

It would, of course, end eventually a few weeks later. They would become entirely too familiar with the shapes hidden beneath each others' clothing; her bare breasts no longer provoking for him sudden erections. His sexual inadequacies becoming over time less and less hidden behind or overshadowed by the newness and excitement of the act for her. He would quickly run out of amusing anecdotes to relay to her and would resort to simply pretending that he had forgotten he had told them before and would tell them again hoping for the same adulation she had heaped on him the first time around. But he would be met only with exasperation and curt reminders that he had told her these things already. And she would soon grow anxious in silences that increased exponentially in length as they sat across from one another in the same restaurants they had been going to for months now, feeling as though their inability to converse reflected something fundamentally uninteresting about the two of them, or more specifically, her. And so it would come as a bittersweet relief to them both when she, drunk and fed-up, would go home one night from a party with a guy with an eyebrow piercing. She would meet him the next day at his apartment and say, almost hopefully, “I slept with someone else last night.” He would remember later feeling mostly relieved; but, understanding the importance of maintaining appearances, would launch into a rant so furious that she would almost believe that he was actually upset. They would then hug for the last time as she stepped across the threshold of his door and, turning, would say, “I hope we keep in touch.” 

They would not. And the only evidence that would be left of their ever having touched at all would be the few pubic hairs they would inadvertently leave between each others' sheets.