Trying to Fall in Love

and wet socks, clean sheets, rotisserie chicken

I first visited Central Park five years ago, to meet a boy I thought I could fall in love with. I was in college at the time, and he was too. He studied mechanical engineering at Columbia University and, when we first met, we sat on the steps outside of Columbia’s Butler Library and he told me about the aerodynamics of cars. When we met months later in Central Park, at the northwest corner nearest Columbia, I told him I was in New York to visit a friend of mine. A high school friend, I said, who was also a student at Columbia and was studying computer science. I really did have a friend who studied computer science at Columbia. But I did not at all intend to visit her. Really, I was in New York because I wanted to see him. I had taken the Metro-North down from Connecticut, where I went to college, to Grand Central, and then the subway up to meet him on the Upper West Side.

Central Park, at the northwest corner where we were, seemed oddly empty that day. We saw only a handful of women walking their dogs and a few fathers walking their toddlers and I remember thinking it should have been busier, louder even. The park seemed strangely peaceful, as if it were made in an introductory Photoshop class, its silent trees and quiet lampposts sloppily snipped and dropped against a blurry black-and-white city background. I had only been to New York City a handful of times, but this was not what I thought it was supposed to be like.

I followed him onto the grass, past a little chihuahua on a long leash, to a large rock overlooking a crowd of cold shrubs and a distant series of New York City buildings. We sat on the rock, far enough apart such that our knees weren’t touching but close enough together so that I could easily bend my knee to touch his if I wanted to. We talked about restaurants and parties, things that twenty-year-olds typically talk about. He asked what type of car I wanted to drive when I was older. A Jeep, I said. Because every other brand I knew sounded too fancy and because my parents used to drive a Jeep. He said he wanted to drive a Jaguar XF, then fell silent as a woman walked past us, speaking into her cell phone, telling somebody to buy a rotisserie chicken and a bottle of tequila. I figured it must have been her husband and that later that night, they would share the rotisserie chicken in their tiny New York City apartment before slipping beneath their clean sheets and falling asleep.

He and I first met in a Shake Shack in Morningside Heights. It was six months before our meeting in Central Park and I was in New York with a group of friends, one of whom knew some people who studied at Columbia. He was attractive to me in a boyish way, his hair falling so far over his ears that his mother had surely told him many times to get a haircut. I too was probably attractive to him in a girlish way, my jean skirt patterned with small pockets and metal buttons and zippers. We fell away from the rest of the group, walking down the sidewalks of New York City, dark if not for the streetlights and the headlights and the trillions of little lights coming from cell phones and advertisements and store windows. The nighttime made everything more intimate, in the way it usually does, and so I followed him all the way to Columbia University where we sat outside Butler Library until the sun came up and I had to go back home.

Central Park, being strictly a daytime place, does not allow for the intimacy of the night. His hair was still long, but in the daylight of Central Park, it was less charming and more unkempt. I pulled my sweatshirt over my head and, for a moment, my T-shirt rose up on my chest and the park’s air hit the skin on my belly. He started telling me about his summer plans to work in Midtown and so we talked, for a long while, about New York City apartments, which I knew little about.

Eventually, it started to drizzle and I wondered if those toddlers were crying because they hated the rain. We kept talking about New York City apartments, about how expensive they were, about how to meet new roommates, about how to move out of a college dormitory and where to donate old clothes, about how tiresome it would be to find an apartment in New York City. I worried that the rain would ruin my hair and make my socks wet and that I would have wet socks on the train ride back, and that their wetness would soak into my shoes and make them smell worse than they already did. I had already washed the shoes twice, by hand, in the bathroom sink of my college dormitory, and I worried that if I washed them again, the stitches on the insoles might start to fall apart. He kept talking about the apartments, the roaches in his friend’s place on the Upper West Side, the troubles with landlords. I realized, somewhere between him talking about city apartments and me thinking about my wet socks, that I had come all this way to Central Park just to sit on a big rock overlooking tall buildings and talk to a boy about Jeeps and New York City housing.

He asked if I was hungry. I said yes and followed him off the rock to a small Thai restaurant where we ate drunken noodles and I ordered an iced tea that was too sweet for me, before I told him I had to meet my friend in the subway. She’s bringing me to the train station, I told him. He said okay and I wondered if he believed me. We hugged briefly, his collar bone pressing into my neck, before I walked to the nearest subway station where I met no friend and rode alone to Grand Central Station, thinking all the while about changing into dry socks and slipping beneath my clean sheets.