Missing Connections

Continuing with my subway theme and in light of our next Symposium topic, I found myself feeling very self-conscious of my eavesdropping on a conversation on the F train last night. What never fails to grab my attention in public places is Russian speech.   So there they were – a couple, in their thirties, discussing … and this is where I get tongue-tied because I couldn’t quite get the context of their conversation. I heard, “She goes to all the popular places in Moscow. … Why they’re together is a mystery to his parents, and to hers as well!” And then, oh how I hoped the guy would repeat the subject of “was the biggest mistake of my life. It was, really was the biggest mistake.” My curiosity about what my comrades residing in the parallel universe of Russian Federation consider their biggest mistakes in life wasn’t fulfilled. But, I was reminded of a wonderful passage from Rachel Cohen’s essay “Lost Cities”:

Walking in cities is an accumulation of small fragments of loss. A woman you want to keep looking at turns a corner; two people pass and you hear only, “It cannot be because of the child”; you look through a window at a drawing that looks like a print you have seen somewhere before, and it’s obscured when someone pulls a curtain across the window; a woman turns ferociously on the man standing next to her, but by the time you reach home you can no longer remember her face. – “Lost Cities”

Craigslist, of course, has attempted to assemble those fragments of loss in its “missed connections” section. Do you ever read that stuff? Doesn’t it make for a fascinating research topic?