To the Couple I Watched On My Middle School Commute
Seventh grade was not a good year. I suspect it isn’t for most people, though each in our own way—Tolstoy might as well have been writing about middle schoolers, not families, when he wrote that every unhappy one is unique in their unhappiness.
In my case, seventh grade had delivered the information to my peers that I was gay, but not yet to me. Words piled up around me—lezzie, dyke—and I can’t help but marvel (though that word suggests a far warmer emotion than the one I feel) that even today, hearing the word lezzie is like being prodded with a sharp needle. A new girl transferred to our school and I was proud to be her assigned buddy, but when she realized my boat was not a good one to tie her own to, the invitations to eat lunch together disappeared.
“Something about you drew me close every morning. Something about you gave me some of my own quiet.”
If there was any grace that year, it was you. Every morning, I took the F train to Jay Street, where I crossed the platform and waited with bleary-eyed dread for the A or the C to take me the final leg to school. Like most New York City school kids, I took the same train every morning—the 7:57 from Jay Street, let’s say. And so, it seemed, did you.
You were a couple; ageless to me at the time, since you were adults and that’s what mattered—although looking back, you can’t have been more than thirty. One of you had that kind of soft-butch hairstyle that was popular in the early 2000s, the shortish barely-a-bob cut that you tucked behind your ears like Clea DuVall in But I’m a Cheerleader. The other had long, curly hair and perfectly manicured eyebrows that I can still picture as clearly as if I had run into you yesterday. Since I saw you every morning for a year, I encountered you looking different all the time: Sometimes both of you had wet hair, and I imagined you showering together and rushing out the door, eating hastily buttered toast on the walk to the train. Other mornings you looked sleepy, leaning into each other like you wished you could be back under the covers rather than hovering next to a subway pillar covered in six layers of pee and chipped paint. Sometimes you were talking intensely, a conversation I imagined had started in bed that morning or even the night before. Sometimes you barely spoke to each other. Now I understand that maybe on some of those silent mornings, you’d had an argument; everyone fights, after all. But at the time it just seemed like one more kind of intimacy, to stand next to someone in silence on the train platform, to be together even in your solitude.
I didn’t know I was queer yet—in fact, faced with the accusation, I vehemently denied it. And yet something about you drew me close every morning. Something about you gave me some of my own quiet.
It was only in recent years, well into my thirties, that I suddenly remembered you. I hadn’t thought of you for decades. Since then I’d come out, had girlfriends, moved in with one of them and taken the train with her on many sleepy mornings. Moved out, ever so painfully, too. I saw you in my memory: standing on the Jay Street platform, murmuring to each other as you so often did. Were you still together? I wondered. I had to admit the chances were good that you weren’t. Would I even recognize you if I saw you? If I wanted to find you, what kind of crazy ad would I post on whatever app people are using to find each other these days? What would I even say?
And then, the obvious question: Is there some 12-year-old on the subway looking at me? On the plane even, watching from a few rows back as I write this, romanticizing my messy life? I want to say I hope not, want to warn that person that I’m not the adult they should fantasize about becoming. I search my bullies’ names on the internet more often than I should. I catch myself chasing approval from women who remind me of them. I’m still trying to unearth parts of myself I buried all those years ago. I’m no one’s source of quiet.
“But maybe that’s not how this works. Maybe you don’t have to feel settled to settle someone else.”
But maybe that’s not how this works. Maybe you don’t have to feel settled to settle someone else. You, for example: I know better now than to think you were a perfect couple, living in some kind of queer domestic bliss. I know you. You’re my friends who broke up and got back together sixteen times. Every time you show up at the party, you look like you’ve just had sex in the elevator, and we love that about you. When you dance, we all scramble to take a picture because of the way you’re looking at each other. One of you spends too much time on her phone. One of you shuts down every time you argue. Sometimes you bicker at dinner and it’s awkward, but it’s also okay. You might not always be together, and that’s okay, too.
I rode that train every day for a year, watching you, transfixed though I couldn’t say why. It’s only now that I understand who you were: not perfect, not even close, but a reminder that the train was going somewhere. Strangers who made it through. When I picture that 12-year-old on the platform, I remind myself: she did, too.
About the Author
Naomi Gordon-Loebl is a writer whose work has appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, New York Magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere. They are the recipient of residencies and fellowships from the Puffin Foundation, the International Women’s Media Foundation, Lambda Literary, Monson Arts, the Studios at Key West, and the Vermont Studio Center, and hold an MFA in creative nonfiction from Washington University in St. Louis. They were born, raised, and still live in Brooklyn, where they are the deputy publisher of Jewish Currents magazine.
Read Naomi’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Anya Tchoupakov.
Header photo by Adrian Hernandez.
