Well, it finally happened, and I swear it was an accident.
First, though, a word about how I structure my days (it’s important to the story).
I tend to work out in the late afternoon or evening. I also like to milk my workouts to the latest possible minute, leaving myself little buffer to reach my next destination. I make overambitious calculations about how long it takes me to stretch, how long I’ll spend in the shower. This means that when I’m meeting anyone in the evening, I typically show up with a high body temperature from the workout and the shower, thirsty from both, my eyes swimming with chaos and hunger. I sink into my seat and let my heart rate descend. My friends know that my conversational skills will pick up as food and water are made available.
Another important detail: Because of this routine, I often leave the house with wet hair that I put in a loose bun that falls out by the time I reach the subway. By this point, my hair will have achieved a new level of drippiness, even after the initial excess water has been absorbed by my microfiber hair towel.
This was the situation the other night, when I was standing in the train doorway gripping a pole at the end of a row of seats. I was vaguely aware of a person sitting in the last seat, the one directly below me.
Something made me glance down, and I found that the occupant, a middle-aged man with a face like David Sedaris, had scooted so that his butt spanned the slight ridge between his seat and the one beside it.
He gripped a backpack on his lap and looked up at me with an amused, almost guilty expression. I looked away, because eye contact with subway strangers is generally inadvisable. However, a small suspicion was forming in the back of my mind. I glanced down again and saw what I didn’t know I was looking for: small droplets of water kissing the man’s jacket.
I realized what I had done and asked him if it were true: “Oh my goodness, am I dripping on you? I’m so sorry.”
He grinned sheepishly.
“I didn’t know where it was coming from at first.”
I felt the need to tell him that I was clean and that I’d just taken a shower. Generally, this is not information you should share with a stranger on the train, but again it felt warranted. It was the kind of thing I would want to know if a mysterious liquid had fallen from someone’s body onto mine.
He seemed gratified by the context and assured me it was okay but remained perched on the inter-seat ridge. I collected my hair over my left shoulder, where it dripped a pattern into my navy jacket.
I apologized for a second time when the train rolled into the Union Square stop, the station where the doors open on an unusual side of the train. It was his stop too, and the doors held for a second too long, leaving us standing shoulder to shoulder, bashful. I couldn’t help but think how well we’d both handled it, our mutual embarrassment making us both somehow adorable.
Then the doors opened, and we fled onto the platform like steers out of a holding pen. I counted my blessings that this was the passenger I had accidentally anointed –– others might not have taken it so well. To quote Lil Baby and Gunna, it was a case of “[dripping] too hard” and “[standing] too close,” and yet somehow we’d parted as friends.
If he were grossed out by my hair water, he didn’t show it. If the droplets made him upset, he saved his anger for the pedestrians on 14th Street. I’ll always be grateful for this: the night I met a great New Yorker.