Lately, I’ve found myself overthinking a lot of things – almost everything. Maybe it was the middle-aged rite of passage that is the colonoscopy that set the mind into extra motion. Maybe it’s the anniversary of last summer quickly approaching and reminding me of heavier days. Maybe it’s the quieter start of the season, and its tumultuous roller-coaster of weather that has the mind spinning. All of it has pushed me back into the overly-analytical and obsessively introspective mode that once formed the baseline of daily life. I thought I had moved beyond that, but maybe I haven’t quite yet. And so the coquette summer, only so recently begun, lowers its veil of lace – to obscure my excessive analysis, to quell my insufferable introspection.
Beautiful stranger sitting right there Looked up at me and my dark curly hair Looked up for a second, didn’t want to be rude I tend to fall in love on the tube Beautiful stranger sitting right there Reading the newspaper, stuck to his chair I swore that he smiled and I felt my heart drop Heard the doors open, came to my stop
Beautiful stranger sitting right there It’s fate we collided right then back there I wonder if he felt the same thing too Innocent crush on the morning commute
Bedtime used to be around 10 PM on the good night, when I could quiet my brain and calm that pesky train of thoughts. The past few months have found it moving after midnight, and when I finally do put myself down, sleep doesn’t always come immediately. I find myself regressing to the nights when insomnia ravaged and ruined the next day. That’s when things start spiraling, and shadows lend shadows to shadows. My youth was spent mostly living in my mind, conjuring stories and adventures from my imagination, too scared to set anything real in motion outside of the safety of my head. As if that was any sort of safe space…
What if I would’ve stayed on the train Dared to stand up and ask for his name Maybe we would have exchanged a few words A fairytale moment could have occurred But my beautiful stranger will have to remain A stranger until I see him again Unless I never will
Beautiful strangers passed around me in those innocent days, on trains or subway cars or airplane cabins. Glimpses of handsomeness, coupled with the occasional spark of a wink, induced a queasy promise that I might one day thrill someone without worry or discomfort or hesitation. My mass of neuroses, which would likely save my life for all the precautions and care it caused me to worriedly exercise in the years that followed, mangled and tortured the way I moved through my early twenties. Those were the years of the beautiful strangers, and all their beautiful fantasies – unfurling so perfectly because they never quite unfurled at all. Nothing real ever happened because I was too frightened to let it, and so everything took place in the mind. My overwrought, over-wrung, overly-taxed mind. I made it all so much harder than it had to be.
A coquette summer, with all its frilly silliness, might go some way toward providing enough distraction to gently shake one out of too much thinking… rounding our little lives with that beautiful, elusive sleep…
My beautiful stranger will have to remain A love that came and left with the train My beautiful stranger
