Rush Hour Crush: Small Love That Passed Like Ships

I took a flight at dawn, during a still memorable July. A flight that left and landed according to schedule. The irregularity came not from any intrinsic detail pertaining to the flight itself, but from the man across the aisle. The C to my F. The predestined brevity of our shared existence jolted into memory every other story whose ending was swept away like the fallen petals of a blossomed tree when summer bursts through, saturating and devouring all signs of delicacy into confident shades of green. The browned edges of the pastel springtime birth curls into itself before it ultimately dissipates.

It made me think of friendships that evanesce like the night, ending before they ever started. Ending without any entitlement to even the softest shade of sadness, because there’s never been a secret: day follows night, and you don’t mourn the night. If an hourglass is inverted at the start of a friendship, do you grieve when the final grain falls on the peak? Or do you make peace with the transience of a story that ends in media res? Do you take solace in that the question mark which ends the tale on a soft note? Pianississimo. You’re left with an ellipsis and an inhale and mono no aware: the pathos of things. A bittersweet wistfulness, a sad yearning, when faced with the realisation that the Kabuki show around us will come to an end.

My hand luggage on this flight consisted of a weighty tome, the word and world of Judaism emblazoned across it like a flame. A new book with the spine intact, bought the day before after a crossed legged hour sat in front of a bookshelf poring through pages to find a book that had the right set of words. An irrefutable click meant by the first evening I’d burned through a hundred pages on the notion of prayer, a slick one sixth of what I had left.

The book was my rope out of the hole. The hole was the irrational fear of flying that sprung out of nothing that same winter. A fear that left me with clenched teeth until the final chorus of unbuckled seatbelts. A fear that necessitated distraction, like an insolent infant. Following the rope up, or perhaps down the well would take my mind to the high streets of Golders Green and Hendon, and away from the imagined heightened proximity to death.

I wasn’t thinking about the book when I sat down. I was thinking about the sticky crackle of the blue pleather seats and the downward facing shuffle of the passengers in the rear seats. I was thinking about the daunting drumroll of the plane speeding along the tarmac and lifting itself away from safety with an uncertain tilt. I was counting the minutes until the seatbelt signs pinged off and a sigh of relief wafted through the jet stream.

“How are you finding the book?”

I let my head follow the voice. A man who resembled my high school IT teacher and an accent that could go either way. Definitely the Atlantic, but whether he was American, or Irish was not immediately clear. I let the pages fall against my fingers.

“I like it a lot. It has everything.”

The pages clamping down on my fingers concerned the importance of Saturday. Shabbat is a bride. Sunday has Monday for a wife, Tuesday has Wednesday, and Thursday has Friday. Shabbat, however, is the wife of the Jewish people. I slipped my ring finger between the pages. I let my hand hold that thought.

You were raised in the word of the Book. An American, it transpired, with sugared almond eyes that teetered away from each other. Maybe I did stare for too long, but I was trying to place where I had seen them before. Like a conversation I was sure I had once had, but with no certainty of with whom.

The lottery of seats allocated passengers at whim. To find someone with your interests was the jackpot. A rollover. You were a student of domestic Judaism in Medieval History. The normal footprints in history trodden by ordinary men and women, those whose rivers ran like veins through the valleys between the peaks upon which stood Maimonides and Anne Frank. You were reading a book on the ancient Hebrew scripts uncovered in a cave in Cairo. The book I’d read one day if the name didn’t slip away from me like the fear of flying, and like you.

Even though there was you, and there were our books, the plane still had to leave. I dug my hands into the dimpled plastic of the arm rests.

“I developed a fear of flying this year. Out of nowhere.”

Does it make me crazy to have noticed the glide of your eyes? One smooth, clean evaluation. An unspoken word of approval. I could have melted into it, but we had an hour, or we’d have as long as it needed to end in a disaster. Shattered glass around our feet and the question: how did we end up here? If we drew the line at just the right moment, the moment might have always been right.

“Seems like you travelled a lot.”

The answer always slips off my tongue like my name.

“Well, my mum died in 2016 and-”

They say

Oh I’m so sorry

But not you.

“Mine too! How old was she?”

“Fifty eight.”

“Fuck! Mine was fifty seven! These coincidences are-”

Something to listen to.

“Totally crazy! Was it cancer?”

“Cancer.”

The crudest game of snap. Two joker cards slapped down on top of each other. The bigger hand clamps down on the smaller, and both of us take too long to move them away. Jittering glances towards each other, then snatched away because possibility weighs heavier than anything that could fit in the cabin of a low cost airline.

Our shared bereavement made me know of which conversation you reminded me. Another American, with which I had passed a balmy Autumn. An American I met and let myself enchant and be enchanted by in Spain. He too was raised by the five books of moses, in a Doomsday cult, and both his parents died within a period of around a year. His mother in 2015. A death by suicide. When it slipped off my tongue, his response was so alarming it was almost funny.

“Oh yeah? Well, both my parents are dead.”

He wins, I suppose.

When his hooded eyes, just like yours, gave their appraisal, just like yours did, I melted into it. I had nothing better to do than collapse into a situation that was terrible for me. A situation that burned, a brand against the skin I dared not repeat.

“I’ll be studying in Jerusalem for a year, starting next month. Have you ever been?”

You swung the question across the space between us, quickly and tentatively, like gliding a letter under a door with furtive uncertainty and running away before the response can be given.

The anonymous legs of the flight attendants cut across the vignette. We swayed our heads like puppets but there became an unspoken agreement that on a plane, there are times when the conversation had to surrender to the the journey. I swung my legs into the aisle when I could see you again.

“Never. I want to, but I have some very political friends and… yeah. I think I have to accept that if I go, I will lose those friends.”

You smiled, something reluctant like an admission of the complexity sewn into the soil of the Holy Land.

“I would never pretend it’s not bad.”

“No, not at all.”

We nodded into nothing. The men who flanked us on either side shifted their heads towards us, witnesses

“Yet,” You smiled. “There is something beautiful being surrounded by the Hebrew language. This was a dead language, and to hear it spoken, to hear it being sung… I don’t know. It’s a very special thing for me.”

“Agreed. I wish there was a definitive answer. A definitive way I feel about it. I don’t know, and I don’t think I’ll ever know.”

“I don’t think anyone will ever know.”

One hour and twenty minutes and the plane was making a twisting descent into Dublin. My flight to Italy, yours to America. As you check your blood pressure, informing me you’re diabetic, I begin to ask myself the question. Does this conversation end, does the sentence get a full stop, does the paragraph get a line break, at the moment the plane lands? There are questions I still want to ask, but do you want to be asked?

The plane came to a skidding halt along the tarmac, trumpets sounded and one man gave riotous applause. We turned to face him with amused disdain, and then we stood up and took our baggage from the compartments that hung above our heads

You were an aisle away. We stood in front of our seats and smiled. A question should be asked. The conversation might continue. But it won’t.

“Well, it’s been a pleasure. Have a safe onward journey. I’ll see you again some time.”

L’shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim.

Next year, in Jerusalem.

In the years before the flight, and the book, I worked in a department store that stretched and carved itself into the most elegant London landscapes. It was seven floors that dripped with gold, and the fumes of oud swirled up the dramatic escalators that flowed like the Nile right up to the sixth floor. Hundreds of thousands of Christmas lights are affixed to the building as soon as the weather dips below the teens, and in those months, the night sky wears a twinkling cloak of magic.

I was a student, working twelve hours a week that felt like criminal overwork. The four hour shifts stretched out across the day, distorting my sense of time keeping and making me consistently late to everything. Or perhaps it was more related to how my bedtimes aligned with the sunrise and my morning alarm could ring out deep into the afternoon. I was interminably single and spoke my feelings of love on pain of death.

My department was on the second floor, the source of the woody, cinnamon scent they pumped through the building from November onwards. One could walk through a labyrinth of rooms selling Christmas ornaments and cheap souvenirs to find at the end, a simple and unenchanting bookshop. For any shifts longer than four hours, I spent my lunch break meandering between the shelves to find a discreet corner where I could flick through a book. Owing to my unspoken crush on a charming Mauritian with midnight eyes, optionally taking longer shifts was common.

Almost two years earlier, I had discovered Les Misérables, and the recording had been in constant rotation since. In English and in Spanish. The following summer, I read the book – not in its entirety, I skipped the chapter in the Paris sewers. One lunch break that broke up a ten hour shift, I found the book, thrown in with all the other books they called classics. I retrieved it like a rescue animal, running my fingers across the ridges of the hardcover.

“Have you read it?”

Again, you were American. Bearded and sturdy, with dark hair and glasses, and I needed a moment to breathe you in.

“Last summer.” I smiled, dropping my hands to my side and leaning against the bookshelf. Like a domino, you affected the same lean.

“It’s one of my favourites.” You said.

“Mine too. I read it over four weeks, and I cried at the ending. Have you seen the musical?” I asked, taking the book into my hands.

“Never.” A literary man. A man of authenticity. “I’d like to. I’d really like to.”

All I ever wanted, really, was someone who loved the book and the musical as I did. Someone who would walk down Shaftesbury Avenue with my hand in theirs, singing the other half of the duet. If he took Valjean, I would take Javert.

“Next time, you’re in London, prioritise it in your itinerary.” I told you, and it made you laugh. “It’s a really brilliant show. The cast at the moment is pretty excellent.”

The time crept up on me like a sudden shadow and hit me like a sudden dawn. There too was our allotted time. There was a job to be done, America to be returned to, and a slow goodbye.

“Enjoy your shift. It’s been lovely.”

“Also for me.”

“Next time I’m around, let’s go to see the show.”

We put a lot of faith in finding each other again

There is one final point of the triangle that ties them all together. If two stories share the opening line of a book, two stories also share the opening line of the finite nature of transport. If books have a final chapter, upon the ending of which leaves a feeling of loss and disorientation, the ending of a journey thrusts one into a territory and even for one minute, leaves you asking, where am I right now and which direction is mine?

A March that fell between the two stories was especially and unexpectedly cold, and it was during that time that I travelled to Berlin. Snow had fallen for some short hours the day before, melting away in the night and really, there was no reason my flight wouldn’t leave. The gap between home and the airport was underestimated, but not so much so that I needed to worry until I needed to take the train to the airport. These were all cancelled.

The underground train from home to the station was a journey of half an hour, and after one stop, you got on. You leaned against the glass panel and I looked between you, all the other new passengers, and the clock that seemed to be speeding up the fall of its hands. When a seat became free at the next stop, you shuffled in, eager and soft, and I watched you. I realised you were watching me, and you smiled. A deliberate and soft smile.

Your hair was red, and you worked in construction. Rough trade, they call it. The new passengers were of no consequence to me now, and I looked between the time and every new curl of your thick rose pink lips. On what could have been the ninth or tenth smile, we let ourselves laugh at the absurdity of this silent game.

Camden Town, and you got off. A final smile over your shoulder. You’re a certain man, and you waited in the window to see if I was still watching. That was the confirmation you needed for the question you wanted to ask. The whole thing was as orchestrated as a silent film. You waved to me and beckoned me off the train.

But the flight, and the snow. A risk that couldn’t be taken. Not for the sake of possibility. I took a deep breath, visibly so you knew it wasn’t a decision I wanted to make. I had no choice but to shake my head. You stayed there and our gaze stretched away from each other like chewing gum stuck to a shoe.

I made my flight within a hair’s breadth of less than a minute. Were it not for the queue of other latecomers, held up by last night’s melted snow, Berlin would have been a misfire. I spent four nights under the wool of two jumpers and two shirts and two pairs of tights under jeans. I returned from Berlin to London’s two degrees and delighted in the balmy subtropical climate. I took that same train to work five times a week, changing each time at Leicester Square, the gateway to the theatres and debauchery and shameless tourism of Soho.

The rabbit’s warren of tunnels, burrowed under the sultry heart of the city were a familiar route of pilgrimage. By the topography of the tiles and stairs and sounds, I could walk between the platforms blindfolded. Northern to Piccadilly, with a confident and swift turn around the corner, a bold strut down to the end of the platform. A calculated path to board the tube at the spot where the journey from exiting the train to exiting the station was shortest.

Dodging the other passengers was an optional slalom that never required slowing down. Never paying attention. In London, other people are just ambience. Yet you feel when the atmosphere changes around you. A shift in the static, a rise in the mercury, in the face of the inexplicable. The city of eight million, where bumping into a friend happens once half decade, I had cause to take a second glance at a face. A face powerful enough to stop me in my tracks.

You.