snowing by cesar coraizaca

That winter it snowed more than usual. Only four or five feet overall, but it never snows much in New York City, so it was more than we were used to. It was snowing the night The Strokes were playing a show in a club down in Bowery and though neither one of us was fond of the snow, I knew that Sarah wouldn’t miss it for the world. As we walked the three blocks from her apartment to the 6 train on 110th, I tried to think of different ways to describe the snow but couldn’t come up with anything - back then I was always thinking of new words for the things I saw and jotting them down and adding them to the stories I was writing. I was in my last semester of an MFA at Hunter College and Sarah had just started her Masters in Engineering at NYU Polytech in Brooklyn.

Sarah was an intern for the MTA that year, helping to optimize their train schedules, and they’d given her a badge and a special MetroCard that allowed her to ride the subway and buses for free, which meant that sometimes I got to ride for free as well. She handed me her card and I went through the turnstile and she flashed her badge and smiled at the agent in the booth who buzzed her through the black metal gate. No questions asked. After nine months of dating her, I had learned to tell the difference between her real smiles and the facsimiles she sometimes gave to others. It was almost imperceptible, like the difference between pure white and the off-white shade of snow, but I could tell, and that knowledge made me love her even more.

The platform smelled damp as we walked along the faded yellow caution strip at its edge. I could feel the little bumps through my shoes. The train entered silently into the station, letting out a high screech only when it was forced to slow down and stop. We boarded in the first car because Sarah liked to stand near the forward-facing window and look out onto the tunnel ahead.

“You know we’d be the first to die if there’s an accident,” I said, tapping the cold glass with my thumb.

“At least we’d be the first to know,” she said and stuck out her tongue.

I didn’t know how that could possibly be a benefit.

She always had something interesting to tell about the subway, like how back when before MetroCard’s were used, thieves would put their mouths on the turnstile slots and suck out the tokens so eventually workers had to carry around chili powder and rub it on the holes in order to deter them. She didn’t know whether that had actually been successful or not. I always wrote down her anecdotes in hopes that in the future I might turn them into a story of some kind.

As we neared the 103rd St station, a white circle of light formed in the distance. I watched our reflections in the glass, and I got the sense that the people looking back were not really us but another couple on the outside of the train staring in. I looked at the reflected Sarah, translucent in the window, and noticed that she was frowning. I turned and looked at the Sarah next to me who was frowning as well.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m trying to remember a song,” she said. “A song my dad used to play in the car when I was a kid.”

I reached out and took her hand and she looked back out towards the tracks.

“What was it about?” I asked.

“I think it was about a train,” she said.

She told me the only words she remembered.

“Trouble something, trouble something,” she said, and hummed a tune that could have been anything really but I tried my best to decipher it without luck.

Sarah’s father was one of the firefighters who died in the World Trade Center in 2001. He had belonged to Ladder 105 in Brooklyn. She didn’t like to talk about it and even though I wanted to know more, to understand her, I didn’t push. She rarely mentioned him but on the anniversary of his death, when we had been dating almost three months, she invited me over to her apartment and put on a faded CD of Is This It in her room.

“This album saved my life,” she said.

Then she grabbed my hand and pulled me under the covers and we listened to it over and over without saying another word until we fell asleep. I had my arms around her the whole time, tightly, as if I were holding her together so she wouldn’t break apart or vanish, but also gently, as if her body might suddenly crack and shatter with too much pressure. It was the saddest and most beautiful moment I’ve ever had with anyone, and my first experience of having a person feel so close to me, but also so far away.

As we pulled into 96th St, people standing in the platform streamed by, their faces hidden underneath black skull caps and scarves. When the doors opened two people got off and a girl who I thought looked like Sarah entered. She glanced at us and went to sit at the other end of the car.

“Did you know the train operator has to point to a zebra-striped board on the platform at every stop?” Sarah said, smiling.

I wondered if she really knew how much I craved her stories.

“How come?” I said.

“It’s a precaution,” she said. “If they don’t see the board in front of them, it means the train isn’t all the way in the station. They’re required to point to it before opening the doors to make sure they don’t accidentally open them when the train isn’t all the way in and then have some idiot fall out.”

I made a mental note to write it down in my notebook when I got home. Then I closed my eyes and wondered about her mystery song as I listened to the rhythmic sound of the train picking up speed. It sounded like the heartbeat of someone running.

A few years after that night, as I was riding an Amtrak in Southern California, as I hummed that same tune in my seat, as I had grown accustomed to do, a voice from the window seat next to me said, "Casey Jones.”

I turned and looked at the woman who had spoken.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“Casey Jones,” she said. “The song you were humming. It’s that Grateful Dead song, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yea, about the conductor who died trying to stop his train from crashing into another. You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

“That’s a weird song to hum on a train.”

"I didn’t know,” I said. “All I knew was, trouble something, trouble something,”

“Trouble ahead, trouble behind,” she said, and smiled.

Sarah and I exited the subway on Bleecker and walked west to Bowery St and then south towards the club, stopping by to look at where CBGB was supposed to be. We had been too young to go to any shows there before it shut down and when we stopped by that night, the space had been turned into a John Varvatos store. It made me sad to think that all of that history, in a way, had vanished, and I imagined the ghosts of rock and roll bands appearing there night after night and instead of finding a stage in which to play their instruments, they’d just end up confusedly trying on the clothes instead.

"Damn,” I said, and then Sarah bent down and sat on the ground, right in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Are you okay?” I said, but she didn’t answer so I sat down next to her on the snow.

“You ever listen to The Velvet Underground?” she said, tapping her foot.

“Yea, sometimes.”

“Motherfucking Lou Reed,“ she said, and traced something in the snow with the tip of her shoe. "Sometimes I wish I’d been born in a different decade you know, like in the 70’s or something.”

The snow kept falling and against the night sky it resembled static on a television. I looked at Sarah and though I couldn’t see much more than her black coat, I could tell she was shivering. I wanted to hold her hand but she was wearing some oven mitt gloves so I shoved my hands in my pockets instead. Suddenly I felt the urge to hear another one of her anecdotes about the subway system but I didn’t say anything.

“Can I ask you for a favor?” she said, after a while.

“Of course.”

“Do you think I could go to the show by myself?”

“What?”

“I think I’d like to be at the show by myself.”

“I don’t understand. You want me to go home?”

“No. You can go too, but could we go separately?”

“Why didn’t you ask me this earlier?”

“I’m sorry.“

After a moment I said, "Okay. If that’s what you want, sure.”

Then she leaned in and kissed me. My lips were numb and I couldn’t taste her.

“I love you,” she said, and smiled.

And when she smiled is when I finally understood something. Something like: you don’t notice how much you’ve really aged unless you run into someone you haven’t seen in a long time and only then realize that if that person has changed so much, then so have you.

Then she got up and disappeared into the snow.