The touch of strangers
I came home from Brooklyn for the holidays and spent New Year’s Eve watching a ball drop in my new home on a shitty TV in my old home. Times Square is a horrible scene in the best of times: headache-inducing neon lights blazing day and night; the zombified, mutilated corpse of Elmo trying to corner you aboard a double-decker tour bus. On New Year’s, the horrors only multiply. Thousands of tourists and drunkards shout and blast vuvuzelas, cough and shove you. And yet on the screen, they all are elated, waving and cheering and kissing despite all the fresh hells the new year will surely bring.
I am, quite frankly, lonely. It’s so easy to be lonely in New York, yet not so much easier than everywhere else.
True, start acting odd in this city and everyone will subtly avert their gaze for fear of being stabbed or shoved or pissed on or just plain annoyed. True, lay down on the sidewalk and don’t get up and people are just as likely to step over you as to offer you a hand up.
And yet there is kindness here, as there is everywhere. It’s just warier, quicker, simpler and more impersonal.
Help someone carry a stroller down the subway stairs.
Hold a door for someone and do not make eye contact. Barely ever make eye contact.
Exchange amused glances with your subway seatmate over the man with the huge bundle of slowly popping balloons, or the woman who one moment is evangelizing and the next is proclaiming that Sensodyne is by far the world’s superior toothpaste brand. Let your thigh brush theirs and do not move away. Melt into them, if only emotionally.
Feel the warm, benign touch of a doctor’s hand in transit. Know this is not a friendly touch, nor one given out of warmth or kindness or even pity, but know that it is, at least, human. Human-to-human contact. The type of mild, fleeting and innocent physical closeness that is more possible here than anywhere else. I am not a toucher, so for me this a reprieve, a small trickle of lifeblood.
I do not talk to strangers. I never have, and certainly will not here. But I watch them more than I care to admit. Certainly more than any native New Yorker, it seems.
It is wise here to turn against instinct, the evolutionary urge to startle like a deer at any sudden noise or movement. To be caught staring is an invitation for unwanted attention of many different sorts.
Yet I can’t help staring, perhaps because I have paid no consequence. And because I have always been a crow, easily distracted by a bright shine in the corner of my vision.
I, like many, wear headphones in public, but as often as not, they are silent. As often as not, I am on my phone, and when I glance up, so is everyone else. It is a bit Black Mirror-ish. They scroll or watch TikTok with the sound on — in Spanish, mercifully, so I can’t pick out words against my will.
It is late, and it seems like everyone in the world is also trying to get back to Brooklyn from the city. All these people from far more walks of life than I’d experienced in New England, standing all around me, our fingers brushing on the poles. I’m watching an airplane high in the sky, watching cars drive by, wondering where everyone is going.
I wonder more and more these days what it would be like to be someone else. I touch strangers so frequently, so briefly, in this crowded city and imagine our consciousnesses traveling like electricity between our brushing fingers, up our forearms and shoulders and necks, our eyes widening with the realization. Beyond that, what? A body swap or a mind meld or just a switch as if we had always been the other, with no one, including ourselves, the wiser?
Do I wish to be someone else, or do I simply forget that everyone has tumultuous inner lives?
