The two of you took a train to get to a train so that she could get to a bus which would later in the evening leave the city. That bus, the vile and filthy Chinatown variety would carry her south, and into the mountains where she lives. You will stay behind because this is where you live.

New York City is no respecter of persons. It does not care that she’s spent 3 days here with you, and in those days you held hands and saw the island from the water, feeling both so large and so small. Oh, and in the nights you were tangled up together in your apartment, alternating big spoons, smiling a lot and, kissing like the couple that you’re not, but you want to be. This city doesn’t care that you got attached. New York City doesn’t care about your attachment because the immediacy is that she needs to get on that A Train to take her to where she needs to go and that train is not waiting.

Her hand is gripped around your arm, she doesn’t say it but you know the meaning; don’t go. The exchange that follows is summed up in that you will travel to see her soon. She wants to come back. She’s left a tooth brush in your apartment. The things you didn’t say are not important-there will be time later to say them. The only thing that matters is the way she felt in your arms, when you knew she was asleep, the smell of her hair which you hope never leaves your pillow and that you wrote this from a train that is both taking you away from her in the physical breadth of distance, versus time, which after enough passing will bring you back to her.