Loading ...“Do you ever think about the seasons? I understand that you understand, but I’m asking if you ever take a moment and give conscious thought.”
“The fact that one day you wake up, and you look at the sky and see it all blue, which is a change, you think. That you get out of bed and click on to the weather, and it’s eighteen degrees outside. The indeterminate reaction of the city people, some of them still wearing coats, others in t-shirts. And that all this is made possible by a spinning, circling ball. I am asking, do you ever think about the spinning and the circling?”
I can’t say that I think about the spinning or the circling.
“You take the entire thing for granted, yes?”
I take the entire thing for granted, yes.
“Yeah, me too. I never think about the spinning and the circling.”
I am unclear if this girl is simply a noisy thinker, or if she’s inciting a conversation about existence, or maybe – this is what I hope – she’s got a loony, off-piste route for trying to win my affection. I wonder whether to ask for her number, and I wonder how long I’ve got.
“I was asking, because we’re coming into spring now.”
Yes, I’ve noticed. I’m one of the t-shirted multitude, sneering at the bundled multitude, the two multitudes leering at the new weather, but the skimpy ones shivering when a shrill breeze blows through, and the wrapped ones cursing their coats when the sun emits a luminous trumpet blast. Her name is Graziella, and she is Italian.
“Which do you prefer, spring or summer?”
What if I like winter? (She laughs.) Seriously, how do you know I’m not a die-hard Canadian who would pick ice hockey in Thunder Bay over Venice Beach volleyball?
“Hell,” she says, “I’d pick Thunder Bay over Venice Beach too, but that’s not what I asked.”
You’re full of loony questions, I say with a grin. She smiles and tilts her head – if I know anything from pop culture, I know about the head tilt – and that slice of Italian black hair comes down, like a guillotine, and obscures half her face. One eye glitters at me from across the tracks.
“So which is it, spring or summer?”
Graziella, I say – I pronounce it with an exaggerated Italian accent, and I move my arms in an outward embracing motion, encompassing the Metro station and the six am solitude and the sleeping bum ten feet away – Graziella, I like the time exactly between spring and summer, when the verdure is still reaching for a climax, but the sun is as strong as a good August heat wave.
She laughs at my pantomime and the prolixity of my answer. I assume that’s why she’s laughing, as a compliment to my charming goofiness. I assume and I hope. I move us on: did you enjoy the party?
“Oh yes, yes. Smashed French guys and dancing Latino girls, always an absurd combination.”
The guys kept trying it on, I observe. But they eventually passed out. And so the girls just danced together, because there’s no way they wouldn’t dance.
“No way in hell, is exactly right. Latino culture seems based on dance.”
We are speaking in the twenty minutes before the first Metro shows up, the very beginning of Sunday, in the vaulted chamber of the station, across the two lines of tracks. I wonder how long I’ve got before the first train ends our conversation, and I wonder whether to ask for her number.
“I feel like this could be filmed.”
How do you mean?
“I mean, a conversation between two people across train tracks, this is a very visually generous setting, and if we were scripted well, I feel this could be filmed.”
I think we’re scripting each other fairly well.
She laughs again, it is a glittering cascade of sound, it is what Ustinov called the most civilised sound in the world, and it is clear like a glass of water. I grin at her laughter, and as I hear the wheels across the tracks, I ask for her number.
Bookmark: 
I’m in love.