Into The Galaxy

I was on the subway train (Red Line) from Union Station into Hollywood when a girl caught my eye.  She had a “je ne sais quoi” about her.  She was not a girl that I would ever approach for conversation, as she wasn’t seemingly my “type”.  Not that I have a type, nor do I believe that imposing restrictions on who you’re allowed to talk to/like/fall in love with is normal.

She didn’t have the self-consciousness most passengers on the train had, she was absorbed into her own world.  She tuned the rest of us out by wearing clamshell headphones, that despite being oversized, could not contain her giant pink pigtails.  I may have thought she looked like a badly dressed Hot Topic model with her thigh-high pinstripe socks leading into her frilly black skirt, but there was something undeniable about the way she carried herself onto that train full of strangers.  She didn’t act like one of the regulars.  She didn’t have a care in the world.  Or maybe her only care was her destination and the party she was about to rage into.  Somehow she had managed to find an entire row of seats by herself.

I needed to talk to her.  Although we live in an age where flirtation and creepiness is the norm, I didn’t want to hit on her, I just have a genuine interest about certain strangers.  Whether or not I act on that interest, and the manner in which I act on said interests, determines my creepiness.

So there I was, indifferently playing Brickbreaker on my phone and jotting lines of nonsense onto my notepad when I was supposed to be writing ideas for my “meditation on infinity”.  When the only thing that was truly holding my interest was this fascinating girl who’d just entered what I felt was MY universe, MY train, MY world.  The only thing that was truly holding my interest was the back of fascinating girl’s head.

Then my ears perked up.  It was unmistakable.  She was listening to Into The Galaxy.  I quickly scribbled onto my notepad, “is that Midnight Juggernauts?” and bounded up the aisle to be seated next to her.  She was startled for a moment, but she quickly focused on the notepad I was holding up at arm’s length from both our faces.  I don’t know what I expected her reaction to be.  Maybe I thought she would pull her headphones down around her neck and offer them to me and say “you gotta hear this one song, it’ll change your life I swear”.

She read my message and nodded.

I then held up my finger as if to say, “one moment” and drew

😀