Boston v. New York

The thing about Boston is, it’s all very intimate. I know what you’re thinking: how can a huge, bustling, always constructing and building city be intimate? Just look at all the one way streets which have you so tangled that by the time you find out where you actually are you’ve lost yourself somewhere along the way. How can that be intimate? Well it is.

I was there the other day and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. I was standing on the subway, then I was standing waiting for the bus, then I was sitting on the bus, and the whole time I was uneasy. The snow was falling and the light was dim and there were people around. That is not unlike New York. The standing and the busses and the subways and the sitting are not unlike New York. My mood was not unlike New York. Being in an unfamiliar place was not unlike New York.
Then I noticed it. Everywhere people were watching, looking, noticing, glancing, talking TO me, not around me.
That is not New York.
Mostly no one notices in New York. You can go days surrounded by nine million people and never be noticed. You don’t ever quite catch someone’s eye. You might be sitting, standing, walking, running, subway, bus, apartment, but no one is quite looking your way. Sometimes you think you’ve gotten half an eye, but you’re the one who looks away first.
In Boston my hand slipped on the subway between Park Street and Harvard Square, and the girl next to me turned, checked my hand position, and asked me if I was all right.
I told her I was fine, then spent the next three stops trying to figure out why and what she had meant. In New York touch means you shift your position to look through their position a little differently so that you don’t touch anymore.
In Boston you touch. You look. You are noticed. You make full eye contact.
This makes me uneasy. This is intimacy that I’m not sure I care to take advantage of. It is not unpleasant and threatening. It is just there.
In fake New York people live alone.
In Boston they are intimate.
At least they were that one time.