Uncut

New York is always thought to be a pretty big city right? The tallest sky scrapers, the best public transportation, infinite landmarks, the greatest baseball team, and oh yeah billions of people. There are more people in this city alone than in some entire states in America.  You would think with all the hustle and bustle of the city day in and day out the odds of running into someone you know randomly are slim to none. I mean sure it’s easy enough to tell where people are with all of our global positioning, four square and tweeting, but the chance of the unbeknownst encounter is still almost jarring in city so large. However, a well-known secret to any real New Yorker is that this city is actually the largest small town ever. The most uncomfortable and awkward of run-ins are frequently known to happen in unlikely places, creating flabbergasting scenarios with previous employers, past hook ups and former best friends everywhere.

I am well versed in this knowledge, and have more often than once done a complete turn around down a crowded street after having spotted someone I’ve slept with and never want to speak to again. I’d like to think I’ve become pretty good at this game, noticing a trap before walking right into it, saving myself the embarrassment. However this past Sunday I met my match, an encounter I never could have foreseen coming even with all my expertise on the matter.

It was a rather unenthusiastic Sunday, I woke up to it reluctantly early after getting home at 4:30am the night before from working at Bowery Electric, a bar on the Lower East Side. The task of rolling out of bed by 10am was not an easy one and only done so by the motivation of a promise to see a few friends perform at Angels and Kings that afternoon. If you know anything about me as a person you would know that this bar is unfortunately one of my regular haunts, I don’t however usually go there during the daytime, for shows with under age children and strictly non-alcoholic drinks, this was quite a chore. But because of this unusual arrangement at least the count of people I’d made out with in attendance was down, a mere two instead of it’s normal standard on an any busy night. After evading a few come on’s by one of the said two, I was out of danger and on my way to the gym for some afternoon aerobics.

This same Sunday also happened to be the annual New York gay pride parade, hyped up even more that year due to the recent passing of same sex marriage. The West Village streets were infused with daintily rainbow-covered men and women happily roaming the streets in their post parade glow.  I was slightly oblivious to the sea of colors around me, trapped in my own thought as I am often am known to do when wandering by myself. And right there on University Place, only a few blocks from the safety of my gym I was stopped by a most unlikely candidate.

There standing in front of me was my first actual boyfriend, sophomore year of high school was staring me right in the face and I had no idea what to say. This was not supposed to happen, the guy moved off to Pennsylvania about nine years ago, hadn’t seen him since, and to make matters worse he was with a woman and a gaggle of children…

I have never really had a normal relationship in my life; I guess I set myself up for that with this first one. I was about fourteen years old at the time, hardly knew anyone since my family had only relocated to Staten Island the year before, I was full into my pop punk swing and regularly got called Avril Lavigne. He was three years older than me, one of the most popular guys in school, but certainly from an entirely different crowd. What a pretty boy Puerto Rican kid saw in a little punky white girl I still don’t know, but for some reason I was curious, probably just in an attempt to piss off my parents. There was not a day in that year without a more fitting female from his own crowd glaring at me and condescendingly asking about the validity of our relationship, confirming the absurdity.

The most attractive thing about him to me was that his name was Angel, at that time I was (and still am) a die hard Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. The name Angel was enough to make me swoon. And so the bizarre relationship evolved, he was a bad influence of course, we would cut school and go hook up at my house, he literally one time had to jump out of my window to avoid being caught by my mother, who he never managed to meet. I was being called “baby” and other awful pet names before I even knew the first thing about relationships, though who am I kidding? I still don’t. He wrote me lengthy letters with girly handwriting and even worse, drawings of hearts, but I never remember being particularly taken with him. I’m sure I told him I loved him, because that’s what you do at that age, and I even let him take my virginity, but genuine interest? There was little of that.

Still I felt immensely odd as he introduced me to his children and the woman who I assume birthed them. I thought to myself at least I looked some what decent since I had come from a prior engagement and not the dishelved mess I usually am when going to the gym. As if this was not an awkward enough he then told me he recognized me from the ancient social networking website MySpace, not from high school or our nine month relationship for that matter, but I suppose I looked different then. Even his concubine chimed in that I looked different from my MySpace photos, which all must have been at least five or so years old. Why she had seen my pictures? I did not know, nor wanted to for that matter. Another question I would prefer to leave unanswered was why they had come all the way from Pennsylvania for the gay pride parade, as he informed me they had and how their many rainbow flags proved. Now I am all for gay pride but for it to warrant such a trip would suggest it had more personal signification, which I did not even want to try to factor into their family dynamics.

I think the scariest part of the whole encounter was seeing someone I had once been intimate with so settled in a permanent and inescapable lifestyle, something I was terrified of. I enjoyed being a free agent, to weave in and out as I pleased, adulthood and it’s baggage are a far off notion to me, something still set years in the future, this was a realization that perhaps that is not so far off.