The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 32: October 31

Today I received a text from a woman I have never met. She is the ex-girlfriend of the current girlfriend of my London friend, and this woman and I had both received free tickets to see perform in Berlin the girlfriend of my London friend’s really close friend. We are thickly connected total strangers, in other words. We needed a vector diagram like the one outside the MoMA abstraction show to understand exactly how we did yet didn’t know each other.

We planned, via text, to meet before the performance for a drink. I wrote, i will text you outfit deets once i have them — then you can find me. This is how strangers find strangers in my experience: I will be wearing a plaid coat, I am short/tall/pixie-haired/will be carrying a red umbrella. I am always curious to see how a person’s self-description is or is not helpfully accurate. It is the primary appeal of meeting up with total strangers.

Two seconds later, I received a text. It said:

This is what I look like….

Beneath the text was a photo of her face. I could see her apartment’s pink walls and black curtains. I saw the corner of a pine bedframe. She wore a sweatshirt.

I was horrified. I actually recoiled. A line had been crossed! Etiquette breached! You do not send a total stranger a picture of your face!

Then, of course, it seemed so logical that she would send me her picture, and so bizarrely coy and parlor gameish and prim of me to dangle the promise of a Haiku of my future outfit.

Still. I was miffed all day. I was miffed at myself for being miffed. I was like an old person crabby at an ATM machine for knowing my name. My process had been queue-jumped. I prefer to meet the constructed person first. Her photo jarred me so deeply that, once I got to the concert venue — far into a neighborhood I’d never before visited, reachable by a train called “the Ring” that ran in a circle around the city in both directions, and the act, on the platform, of committing to one direction over the other had already been such a draining leap of faith — I realized I was never going to find this woman. I scrutinized her text photo again. This picture of her face, I realized, was completely unhelpful; it was useless, in fact. She had shortish dark hair, pale skin, and no makeup, but who knew what she now had on her face or on her head? Her lips could be metallic; she could be wearing a chef’s toque. I stood on the sidewalk and stared at other people milling around the entrance. She could have been any number of them. I failed at finding her like I’ve failed so many multiple-choice tests. I failed with glee. A, B, C, D, I could argue with equal conviction for the rightness of each — and, because the form so irritates me, find myself feigning jubilant outrage at the limitless possibilities for rightness. She could be that woman or that woman; she could, at a squint, be that fucking man. I had to really stare at people and search in the dark for their faces. I felt like an identity pickpocket, rummaging through the nightclub’s exterior shadows to pull from people what many, for whatever reason, kept hidden beneath hats and hoods. If I’d known she was wearing a raincoat, or that she was tall or short, or that she’d be carrying an I ♥ BERLIN tote, I could have narrowed her down; I could have, less molestingly, better sorted her from these other strangers. I tried for fifteen minutes. But I could not find her.

A face, I thought to myself with some satisfaction, is not the best way to identify a person.

I gave up. I texted her. long + blonde + glasses + standing under a bright light.

I could have said “green coat” or “black bag” or “only idiot wearing heels.” To admit that I was long-haired and blond, I realized immediately after I sent the text, was to admit to being the last thing I usually want to be. I am not rebellious enough or daring enough to attempt prettiness in an unconventional way. But “long + blond + glasses + standing under a bright light” conveyed precisely how I felt on this particular sidewalk on this particular night. Glaring and out of place at a Berlin nightclub. Far from home, riding a train that travels in circles.