Wedding rings
I have spent hours staring at shoes on the train. It is not polite to openly stare on the New York City subway. Eyes avert to ads, feet, shop names on paper bags. So, New Yorkers keep their shoe game On Point as public service. The 6 is less a mode of transit than a strange and changing garden that we grow together, one stitch at a time.
As I get older, I grow braver and my gaze travels up. I read along with bookish strangers, watch kids beat Angry Bird levels. Most notably, I examine people’s hands for evidence of love. There are hundreds of stories one can read from wedding rings and lack thereof.
Men deep in conversation who turn their rings while they think, families always with them.
Pretty girls who wears cheap geometric stacks on their ring fingers, because a modern woman owns her own hand, after all.
Foreigners who have migrated to America and wear their wedding bands on the right hand.
Hipster mothers with painfully cool toddlers, a single sliver of gold as the evidence of their vows.
Young men with blindingly bright platinum bands, still shiny with honeymoon newness.
Middle-aged CEO ladies with big clear diamonds, clutching Blackberries on the train.
The ones that really pump my heart, the elderly men with scuffed old rings, on gnarled, wrinkled hands.
This is what I love about New York. Everyone will fiercely insist that they belong to themselves, but in truth, New Yorkers all belong to one another. Quarters are so close that they decorate and entertain merely by moving through the city. Each person is deep, unknowable — an entire novel of which we can only judge the cover.
