Missed Connection — w4w

Yesterday, the Internet was awed by a Craigslist missed connection, calling it “actually the most beautiful love note ever written,” a “powerful short story” and an “epic, wrenching piece of personal ad literature.” I too was deeply affected, not just personally but also professionally, in terms of my craft. How could one writer do so much with literally the littlest amount of action that’s ever happened in the world? In the hopes that my humble words may too be able to reach across the impossible (in the sense that it is nonexistent because of speech) divide, I’m reaching out to a certain editor, a woman who may never really know that I exist.

***

I saw you once, in June. You were wearing a navy blue tank top and jeans. I guess you were wearing boots too. They were black. Low heels.

I remember thinking, that day, as the sun slanted in like golden syrup from the late afternoon sky above Hot Bird, that I’d once been the sort of girl who’d worn boots in the summer too. A tough girl. A tough girl like you. That day I was wearing leather sandals, with an ankle strap, and it was unlike me. But you’d never know that, because I was only in New York for the week.

Twice we opened our mouths at the same time. I didn’t know if you’d planned it. I tried to track the meaning of your clavicle’s rise and fall, the peaks and valleys like the data of daily web traffic. I thought about the unbearable distance between us, between all people. Three centuries passed as an eyelash of yours fluttered like a feather in the wind.

We didn’t talk about the website.

Our friends talked around us, and they ordered drinks. They ordered a whiskey, and a beer, and a white wine, and then another white wine, and someone else might have had a second whiskey. I think we all had beers at one point, a brief and trembling second of simultaneity, and in that second I felt the weight of another century passing and I stilled myself in the hope that my actions would not ever affect the world. Brooklyn rose and fell around us, neighborhoods built and razed to the ground as the floodwaters came in from the Atlantic and the crowds shifted fashions under the trees in the back patio as the sun dropped lower and lower and lower, we got our friends to order us chicken, we talked about things I can barely remember today.

We didn’t talk about the website.

But we drank some more, beers tilting down our throats and bottles set back down on wooden tables. We saw groups of friends come in and groups of friends leave, some wearing jeans, some boots, some sandals. There were times when our eyes met and a certain electricity — SEO, we were thinking, #content — crackled silently between us. It all seemed so small, and then so big.

I thought, I’ll bring it up soon. The Hairpin. I looked at you and imagined you telling me I could post whatever I wanted. Far away from us a school of glittering trash fish surfaced in the Hudson River. On the train somewhere, a teenager wrapped a sweatshirt around his girlfriend’s vulnerable shoulders.

And the two of us, the two of us were silent.

I came to know you in this peace. I came to know the child you had been on the lake shores of Vermont, and the girl playing soccer in Umbros — would you have been an Umbros girl? It was too late to ask, too late, always too late for everything — and now, a woman, and though we would both hesitate in the future I dreamed that we would pretend we knew what we were doing and we would write the ventricles of our hearts out proudly through the keys of our laptops every day as the strands of our hair turned a dignified grey.

We would sit here, or other places, together, or separately, in states and cities, atop chairs or stools or benches, fitting our bodies to the various configurations of atoms that envelop and suppress our lives, and I would ask you whether or not we wanted to do this piece at 2:15, and we would witness human life in the way that everyone witnesses human life on a subway car or a back patio at Hot Bird or in the neon futurism of Tokyo or underneath the hallucinatory gaze of the Sphinx. Perhaps today would be important. More likely, as with everything, it would not. And yet I marveled at how stunning it was to be in the presence of another human. Perhaps another day I would be in the presence of another human again.

How amazing it was, how much more beautiful to not do anything than to do anything at all. To drown in this social paralysis — ah, but then to write about it afterwards. On the website. Would you ever see this, Emma? Is Emma even really your name?

What is my name?

I wondered about it through wars and tragedies and earthquakes and a million babies being delivered into the tearful shaking arms of their families. I wondered what my name was, and if anything was knowable, until the sun went down and the whole sky was blackness and we waited for each other, for our friends to get their bags, and we said goodbye as I descended for the train.

We never talked about the website.

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