Tea for Two

Have you seen her? On the Westchester Parkway? At first, I thought she was a ghost from my past, a reminder, but I have seen her too many times to know: She is real. She is real, and yet, each time I see her, she is gradually shrinking from this world. Months pass and I watch her disappear. And police cars drive by her, and I wonder, this is an emergency, why isn’t anyone stopping? Why don’t they turn on their sirens, throw down their flares, and intervene? She is as thin as a character from a Tim Burton cartoon. She pedals in the hardest gear, standing up, as rigid as a robot, as calculated as a wind-up toy. She wears short shorts and a thick scarf and oversized sunglasses and tiny Band-Aids on her forehead. I know she must be somebody’s angel--we are all angels to at least one person. She is an angel, I think, and I must try to save her. Maybe I can flag her down, ask her to lunch. No, not lunch. Am I stupid? Tea. Tea is enough; tea is safe. I am well aware: My intervention might anger her. She might tell me to fuck off. I am okay with fucking off. But I am not okay with not trying to help. So I made a plan the other day, to stop her the next time I see her, offer her my number, tell her, simply, that I want to be her friend, that I need her to be my friend, that I know she is in pain because I have been there before. I wish I could Google her instead, find her on Facebook, somehow get a hold of her name, her email address. But this confrontation must be face to face. The day I made the plan, when I felt brave enough, she didn’t show up. But today, when I saw her, I chickened out. While she pedaled past me this afternoon, with airplanes taking off from LAX to the south, I wondered, what, exactly, is she trying to escape? Could she know that I want to escape, too?