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NEELA

In comparison to office goers during week days the weekend crowd of passengers was cheery. I made my way to the empty seat holding two shopping bags filled with vegetables and groceries. The subway train was partially full with denizens traveling towards Manhattan.

Two elderly gentlemen sat facing me; they were scratching lottery scratch cards with child like enthusiasm, which soon turned to disgust on obtaining undesirable results.

On my right, were a group of four teenage girls, laughing and posing for photographs with a small digital camera. They looked gleefully oblivious to their surroundings. The girl who was handling the camera stood up to gather a better view of her seated friends and balanced herself by holding onto the vertical metal rail with one arm. I glimpsed at a long gash on her arm running all the way from wrist to elbow. I turned my eyes away from the group, allowing them the privacy of these few precious moments of happiness.

Instead, I stared at the undergraduate students wearing graduation gowns in the Community College ads. Their faces projected an empowerment that only sheer achievement could bring. They looked like they could win any battle from that day onwards.

Did my degrees offer me such consolations, I wondered? I was still insomniac like before, still afraid of confrontations, still afraid to forge new relationships. On the other hand, my degrees had merely allowed me a distraction to force myself to think about the present and push back the demons of the past.

I got off the train at Roosevelt Island and escalated upwards to the street. The late October wind jabbed a volley of icy needles on my face. Here I was a woman in her thirties, wearing a long woolen coat with two bloated shopping bags, waltzing towards my apartment.
How were you planning to spend another weekend missy? I thought, well it was already well past noon, I could brew a cup of Darjeeling tea with some cardamom and ginger and then I could read a research paper on Genes and Proteins for the Journal club next week. After that I could walk down to the Public Library and borrow some delectable fiction to read at night.

And what about Larry? I countered myself.
Well, I was meeting Larry the next day for a Halloween party at his apartment and needed time to compose something appropriate to tell him in case the need arose. Specifically, if he felt that we should see each other again not as mere friends but as something more.
I had met Larry during a New York Academy of Sciences

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