On the tube today I sat across a girl who looked nice. There are girls who look pretty, and there are girls who look good; but this girl looked nice, and in this book, girls who look nice are better than girls who look pretty and girls who look good put together.
In this way, you could say that this girl was a Supergirl. Supergirl wore a wing on her ear, which was the first thing I noticed. The way it moved as the carriage stuttered along, as though it was waving at me, the way the swans wave at tourists in Hyde Park, beckoning for food in exchange for a photograph, in exchange for a moment. This was the way I was drawn to the way she ate her co-op sandwich, neat and tidy, the way I am never able to do.
I have a friend who studies art in New York and he came over to London a few days back for spring break. It is funny, this, the way spring does actually break the winter, the way the sun breaks the clouds so that we march into April, so that we may become June. Anyway, this friend of mine was teaching me to draw, and explained to me the importance of finding the ‘time of the figure’ because this gives you the gesture, and the gesture will give you alot.
So I looked across at Supergirl and found her face at half past six, which was about the time the sun rises these days, and just around the time it sets as well. She stared blankly at the ground and dawned upon the last bit of the sandwich, which was eaten in triangles. All this time she took less blinks than the average person (however many blinks the average person might take) and all this time I was thinking of what she might be thinking of. I was also wondering if she knew that I was subconsciously working round the clock – at three I looked right at whoever might have come on the carriage, even if the train was still in motion; at six I looked down and read a line from my book, and each line from Jonathan Safran Foer told a story; at nine I looked to see which stop we were at, obviously so I would not miss mine; and at twelve I looked to see if she was looking back at me.
Each time I noticed different things: the way her hair was not brown but was also not quite auburn; the way her blazer looked like velvet and looked like silk, but was probably not velvet, and probably not silk; the way I could not make out if the stripes on her bag were that of a zebra, or a tiger in a sixties noir; the way she fiddled with the nozzle of her Evian water bottle in the way that I did back when it was fashionable to do so in class; the way her freckles gathered around her eyes, as if they were waiting for a story; the way her eyes did not seem to have any story to tell.
I thought about an extraordinarily large number of things for a casual ten minute train journey. Then again, I usually think of alot when I think something casual. I thought most of all that I would like to tell her that she looked nice, and that I liked her earrings, even though I could only see one side of it, and no one – not even an angel – could fly with one wing. I thought about doing so when I’d get up for my stop, when I would walk past her and say to her in a casual fashion ‘hey I like your earrings and I think you look nice’ and promptly walk away so her ‘thank you, that is awful nice of you’, would be faint and I would seem casual like the movies, and fashionable like the movies.
‘Paddington’ came and I reached down for my bags, but of course as I did so she stood up too and walked past, revealing the other side of her wings, now flapping majestic. This is the way Supergirl took flight, and this is the story of how I have seen many come, and how I will see many go.