When a man touched her on the subway for the first time,
she was less reviled than confused.
Amidst a current of people, pushing and pulling, humanity’s cyclical flow of commutation would continue revolving around her forever if she stood frozen to her spot like she did when it happened.
In fact, she wasn’t even sure if it had happened at all, in her limp ponytail, thick glasses and lumpy jacket that protruded in every unflattering place.
She remained silent- strangely calm, suspended in that striking moment of unclarity- as if the hand was aimed at the cloth and not flesh, as if nothing had changed, as if she had emerged an unoffended outlier. And something pesky about the injustice of the situation, of a singular and surreptitious derivation of pleasure, persisted for a moment.
But then she let it regress into a distant and quiet memory. Could she have been more feminine?