mind of mencius

Her tangled, curly mass of hair remains oddly stable to spite the potholes. She is unshaken by the attention. She an artist and musician, he a filmmaker and fashionista—a seat’s separation filters between them love’s first overture. Borne of a struggle against the final two permutations of a rubix cube, the mathematician’s daughter now leans to the aspiring director’s seat to explain her ambitions—Making It Big and Staying In Touch with Her Roots. He speaks softly. She leans in to “what?!” This is romance.

His mouth moves again now as he jots a few offhand notes on sheets of unruled, white paper bound with a paper clip. Vocal chords apparently fail him. Every sentence elicits a demand to repeat from the back-seat love of his life—her body language a study in practiced indifference, all perpendicular to his attempts to steer a parallel course along the Feng Wah Express. She is playing hard to get, he must be thinking, even as she thinks of making herself less available.

But reality never checks love’s ambitions. The sheer force of his feelings blind him to the complex permutations of her polite refusal, rob him of all voice… and now she is leaning painfully, perpendicularly in to grasp at his words with head shakes and quick nods. His shoulders roll forward now, closing distance to the seat-gap and now he shakes in the silent, earnest throes of love. Rapt in the silent, maddening movement of his lips she fidgets with unease.

The BQE bumps beneath them in a chorus of winter potholes as the French-speaking Vietnamese family surrounding them both erupts in argument. Manhattan is now in full view and tension between the seats rises in frustrated silence. Without wild gesticulation he attempts to silently convey his deep love and interest in her Goals and Ambitions, her Music and Art and Activism and how well she listens to him.

Her hair is a study in the science of Aqua Net, its rigidity belying the tension in his voiceless overture. She fumbles in her bag for her book or an excuse. He leans closer now, his nose penetrating the seat gap in thinly-veiled metaphor. As the suspense builds to its terrible, inevitable climax, the Fung Wah barrels off the Manhattan Bridge past Canal Street to its final destination. The Franco-Vietnamese family explodes into the aisles, trapping the Aspiring Director and Musician in a crossfire of love’s language. He swells in quiet confidence as she shrinks in a flurry of bag packing.

And now they are up and she is off. Pen in hand, he extends a polite offer to take her phone number, which she politely can’t refuse. And they are politely, awkwardly walking the aisle in silence, to which they are now well-accustomed, into the city and their lives beyond the bus.