Love: Hate
Yann Rousselot
Winter 2010
Winter 2010
I see this girl on the metro. Two stops into my ride she sits right in front of me and looks away. Auburn hair cascades onto the page of my book when she leans down to retrieve something and I almost die. She has mischievous eyes and a pair of tits like something out of anime porn. Smells of coconut, coffee, and cigarettes–and she just looked at me. She is young, my age, well-dressed; I am good-looking, clean-shaven, awake, alive. This could be the beginning of Life, Love and The Future. I re-read the same sentence a hundred times before blurting out: “Does this metro line go to [insert random metro station here]?”
She does not hear this question and that might be a good thing, I muse, since (being so terminally idiotic a pick-up line) it would spare her the pain of actually talking to me. But I am determined, unbreakable. I know she will haunt me forever if I fail.
“Pardon?”
“I was asking if you are into painting or sketching, architecture or something.” I point to her massive art bag seemingly in the metric tonne range and try to smile.
“Your lips are so hot.”
“Pardon?”
I smile and turn back to my book. Did I speak English to her? Or just bad French? What have I done? The page I am by now staring a hole through is no longer making any sense, despite being in plain English. These innermost thoughts should be known to only myself and yet, like most beautiful women and carnivorous predators, she can read my mind. And suddenly her smiles make sense.
Metro conversation is, by definition, like a slow-motion stroboscope: 70% of the time you cannot speak for the grinding noise, so that gives you time to think about what to say when the next station looms and the brakes start screaming. That’s the signal. I decide to lunge across the void, charge into battle, swing at the dragon’s head with my pathetic dagger.
“I was wondering–”
Noise resumes. She is staring at me, intently, her half-smile stabbing into my ego. And I see it surfacing: disdain. Fuck. My thoughts peter out like the last, stinging drops of dark urine when you’re dehydrated. That’s what my mouth feels like. I suddenly get a stroke of genius, pull out a pad and start writing: Hello, I would really like to meet you around a drink. Here is my number: XXX-XXX-XXXX.
It seems a fancy idea, something pathetic. It’s beautiful to think so, I read in a book somewhere. It’s true though. You cannot talk to strangers in public transport unless drunk or faced with something that dramatically breaks the routine–this is a rule.
She keeps looking at me like I just shat in her purse, and yet still with the smile, which begs a question: do smiles even mean anything? My ears are burning and I am torn between two polar opposites: a desire to lavish this girl with kisses and luxury; and a craving to cave her head in with a fire-extinguisher and then, with relish, shit in her purse, while the commuters around me scream and vomit in sheer terror.
I tear my note up.
I cannot stop staring at her until she leaves, slightly distressed but above all unaffected (per decorum). I just didn’t meet this girl on the metro.
I realize this is a daily happening, in some shape or form, that opens my eyes to the cold, steely reality of being a single male twenty-something in the City of Love.