Milk Chocolate Love
They get on the train at 14th st. Immediately he opens his bag and pulls out a Mr Goodbar and hands her a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate. Be speckled, tennis shoes, jeans, practical shoulder bags. Professors, editors or researchers. They excude giddy excitement, need, for such medicore production of what could be perfection, it is endearing. They eat their chocolate the same way. Breaking each square off one by one, along the pre-determined lines, each piece is bitten in half and their incisiors are already on the next half before the throat muscle contracts to swallow the previous. This is not the first time they have eaten chocolate together. He offers her some water. She declines and pulls out a bottle of Candaian Dry from her bag. She doesn’t take her eyes off of him. He is animated. He is telling her a story about something and she is riveted. For the next 150 blocks they do not see anyone else other than each other. He leans in to her; she unconciosuly touches her hair and her neck. I watch them eat their chocolate in sync with each other and I wonder if this is love.
Something is off in this confession. The trains speeds uptown and I watch them like a silent film, trying to decode this story through their body language alone. They never touch. They come close to one another but the hand never strays far enough to land on another’s skin. As one track ends and another beings, I catch half a phrase in between, “it is so good to see you” and with that I notice their wedding bands do not match. He is not for her and she is not his.
Irrespective. They unwrapped their admiration for each other in the brown and yellow plastic of Hershey’s chocolate and swalloed it square by square.
