Invisible String
Isn't it just so pretty to think!
“Hi Simon and Madeline,” the inaugural message in a new group chat read, addressing me—Madilyn—and a person I’d never met before.
“Consider this a virtual introduction 😊!! You are both the offspring of two of my favorite people in the world, which makes you two of my favorite by default!! 😊🤣”
Needless to say, we were off to a really strong start.
The sender was my mother’s best friend, Lee: a larger than life woman who built her empty nest alongside my mom’s, with a bald determination to enjoy herself—and with an open invitation for my mother to join her. Both single, postmenopausal, and with big, frizzy, bottle-dyed red hair, they’ve accompanied one another through their middle age ever since—to all the events their friends bring husbands to.
When Lee heard I’d be moving to New York City, she jumped to tell me she knew someone there I should meet. He was Simon: the son of her late friend from another state, marriage, lifetime ago. I was in no position to deny myself a friend, acquaintance, anything, so when she offered to connect us I readily agreed. I was still surprised by the word “offspring,” though.
To our credit, Simon and I took the earnest introduction and played it pretty cool.
I still had a couple of weeks until I landed in the city, and he had upcoming travel plans, so we traded vague “I’m always down to meet new people”s and “let me know when you get settled”s before agreeing on getting coffee sometime in the near future.
Then, what’s more, we actually followed through. When the day finally arrived it was with scattered rain. My roommate’s mom was in town and taking us to brunch that morning to meet her family friend, a fellow New Yorker. Everyone in our lives—I realize now—was making an effort to help us get settled.
I texted Simon to let him know my timeline; we’d not yet decided on a firm plan:
“Heading to brunch now so I’ll keep you updated, but we’ll be in Kips Bay/Murray Hill area and I’m living in LES so I can pretty much meet you wherever! Lmk if you have a convenient spot near you or where you’re coming from and we can figure something out :)”
I was already out in the rain, after all, and I didn’t know enough about the city to suggest anything that was worth his commute. Better to let him decide, I’d thought.
Sounds good! I’m in Hell’s Kitchen so anywhere in midtown would be ideal if that works
I hadn’t been in New York long, but I knew enough to know that Midtown Manhattan was a horrible suggestion.
That works! Do you have a spot in mind?
Bluestone lane is pretty good we can try there unless you have something else in mind
So, we were going to the Midtown Manhattan location of a national chain.
No that’s great! Which location?
Is this okay?
He sent me an Apple Maps pin that literally had the words “Times Square” in the address.
Yes!
I said and gave an ETA, obviously.
Our being around the same age and of opposite genders, there was a natural ambiguity to what we were embarking on when we agreed to meet. It was, essentially, a blind date—whether romantic or not, we were yet to see.
Romance not yet out of the realm of possibility, though, I’d done a customary Google search to find out what I was working with. A private Instagram’s profile picture revealed a brunette guy with circular framed glasses—nerd, I thought. His LinkedIn page confirmed it. We could work with that.
I pulled the heavy coffee shop door open, wet humidity frosting the glass. I wiped my feet on the mat, umbrella dripping at my side, and saw the side profile of someone who resembled the photos I had found of Simon on social media. Here goes nothing.
“Simon?” I said to the shoulder blades of the stranger.
He swiveled where he sat on a metal bar stool at a high top. “Madilyn? Hi.” He smiled nervously.
“Hey,” I said, once he’d slid off the stool to face me. It would be a no-hug greeting.
We made our way to the register awkwardly, weaving between the tabes and chairs, too aware of each other’s bodies—like when you follow the hostess through a restaurant and she has to walk in slow, stilted movements on behalf of your trailing party. “So what do you like from here?” I asked, eyeing the menu.
“Oh, I don’t really come here that much.” He said. Then why did you make me? I thought. “Lately I’m trying to get off coffee, it kind of hurts my stomach.”
“Oh, okay…” I said, turning away from him to cough into my elbow—I was in the final stages of getting over a cold.
“What can I get you, miss?” the aproned barista asked cheerily.
“Um,” I said, clearing my throat. “I guess I will just do a latte? With cinnamon, if you have it.” I began pulling out my wallet.
“No, I’ve got it,” Simon said.
“Oh, are you sure?” I asked. Surprised and slightly concerned, because on my part, this was feeling less romantic by the second.
“Yeah, of course,” he said to me. Then, to the barista, “Can I get a chai latte?”
Steaming paper cups in hand, we found seats at a high top by the floor to ceiling windows, the opposite side scattered with beads of rain. Outside, people were avoiding puddles and fighting the wind with their umbrellas, but—to Simon’s credit—inside it was fairly quiet.
We shed our puffer jackets and started talking about our respective college experiences, comparing notes: mine at a football school, his at an Ivy. Conversation flowed easily, if not in the style of an interview.
About five minutes in, someone came to the edge of our table, loitering wordlessly. Since we were at a high top, our eyes were all level—Simon and I avoided the newcomer’s, but tried to communicate with ours silently.
After several beats of uncomfortable silence, the man said, “Are you talking about college?”
Simon and I looked at each other quizzically, visibly uncomfortable. The man didn’t appear to be unhoused or asking for money, but my mind—in its already socially anxious position—couldn’t slot him. “Yes,” we said reluctantly.
“Are you in college?”
“No…” Simon started.
“No, we graduated,” I said. Was he trying to sell us something? I felt an itch in my throat and avoided the urge to scratch it with a cough.
“Oh, are you 22?”
“No.” I uncomfortably croaked, trying then to be as short as possible. I registered that something wasn’t normal, but my mind was scrambling to figure out how to navigate it alongside Simon, who was only less of a stranger now that we’d been presented with someone more strange.
“Oh, are you dating?”
We both avoided each other’s eye contact and fumbled through the answer: “No, we just met.”
“Are you going to date?”
I spoke over Simon this time. “I don’t know, probably not. We just met.” I felt guilty for friend zoning him in the first ten minutes, but I figured answering in negatives was the easiest way to get this guy to leave. I then erupted into coughs.
“How do you know each other?”
Well, we don’t. My Mom’s best friend was his late mother’s best friend, I thought between gasps of air. “We’re family friends,” Simon said over my hacking. I really needed to go get some water, but I didn’t want to leave Simon alone with this man, and I had the vague worry that if I left my bag it could be stolen.
Then, just to Simon, the man asked: “But do you want to date her, eventually?”
I cut him off before Simon could answer. “What are you doing, dude?” I asked, through the wheeze of a smoker.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m being an asshole,” the man said, completely changing his tune. “That was a rude thing to say. I should not have asked him that. I’m sorry.”
That was when I finally realized he was neurodivergent. But by then, the train was already bent on crashing.
“I just don’t have any family friends my age,” he continued. “I don’t have women… I don’t know a girl that’s a family friend that’s my age. I am—my family is Chinese and we had family friends, but they are white… they are American, and they were two and three, and I was six and my sister was seven, but we don’t speak any more. I don’t know what I should do. Do you know what I should do about that?”
I had already resigned myself not to reply—to at least let the man pick up on the awkward, unwanted silence—but Simon, taking pity, responded: “You should reach out to them.”
“I don’t have a phone any more, I had to sell my phone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said without much feeling, eyeing my phone on the table and hoping he wouldn’t ask me to use it.
He continued. “Yeah, I used to have ten laptops, but then they all got taken because I was watching porn—sorry.”
That was enough for me. “Okay! We just met. Do you mind?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry,” he said before scurrying away.
Simon and I looked at each other in awe, our eyes having doubled in size. My throat felt like sandpaper. “I’m gonna go get a glass of water,” I rasped. “Watch my phone, I guess,” I tried to joke.
When I returned with a tiny paper cup, the man was still within earshot, directing his random inquiries at someone else. Thus, Simon and I attempted to pick up our conversation where we’d left off, both of us only half there/half processing what the hell had just happened.
When the gentleman finally left the premises or was escorted out, I brought it up: “I’m sorry, that was crazy?”
“Yeah, I’m not very good at handling those sort of situations,” Simon said.
“Typically I am,” I said. “But I don’t think I handled this one very well.”
He said it had been one of the craziest things he’d seen in the city so far, and again, I hadn’t been in New York City long, but I was certain there were crazier.
Still, I was thrown by the random encounter, and by mine and Simon’s inability to right it for one another. With a close friend, I could talk through and metabolize the most bizarre of things—“that guy was an asshole” suffices for most—but, with Simon, we didn’t know each other. There would be no shared understanding of what just happened, no closure.
It’s not like we had absolutely hit it off in the first place, but we trudged on through the rest of our meeting like that: unable to ever fully shake the perturbed spell that man had brought over us. We asked each other about our jobs, our roommates, our respective neighborhoods—but, at least for me, the unsettled nature of that encounter kept coming to the surface, like an intrusive thought.
On the bright side, when I told him I was living in the Lower East Side, Simon said he had a childhood friend who lived in the area named Zoe—who was super fun, always throwing parties, and who he thought I’d get along really well with.
When we parted ways, still accompanied by the rain, it was with the ambiguous agreement to see one another again, in one of these group settings.
On my way home, slightly lost in the Times Square train lines and battling the rain, I sent a voice memo to my best friend: “He was really fun. Well, I was really fun. He was pleasant to speak to. But I’d see him again, you know, if he invites me to hang out with his friends.”
He never texted me again.
A year went by—a New York minute. I’d found and lost friends, joined two book clubs and a gym. I’d built a life for myself. My 25th birthday was approaching.
Winter again, February in New York City was proving difficult to coordinate a place big enough to hold all the people I wanted there to celebrate. All my dreams were, honestly, incompatible. I cared most about having a nice dinner at this quaint, rotating set menu spot in Brooklyn, but had aspirations of going to karaoke afterwards. The problem was, asking thirty-ish people—many of whom did not know each other—to show up to a private karaoke room did *not* seem like the vibe. You had to ease them into it, right?
My ingenious solution was an 8pm dinner in Brooklyn, a 10pm meet up at a random games bar in the LES, then midnight karaoke to follow. Quite the ambitious itinerary. (We were, in fact, late to every reservation.)
At the expensive dinner place, gratuity included, we accidentally double tipped. The games bar had no record of our reservation. To the karaoke place—which had called me the previous day to tell me they were double booked and would stick us in a smaller room with a round of free shots to compensate—I unexpectedly showed up with my full party. We sat on each other’s laps and sang too loud to hear each other say goodbye. I didn’t realize until after we closed out that we’d been overcharged.
The next morning, I was riddled with hangxiety. Why did I have to do so many expensive things? Why wasn’t I born in June so thirty people could just, I don’t know, come to a picnic?! Why didn’t I make enough money to just cover the difference—why did this come down to complex math and Venmo requesting people, on my birthday of all days?!
I sought comfort at my gym, not to workout, but to see the people that frequented the Saturday morning class—a few of which were with me at my party the night before, but apparently had been far less imbibed.
I walked in smelling like alcohol and regret, wearing my—recently gifted—Juicy Couture track suit and toting an obscenely large Dunkin coffee. We chit chatted and used the white boards to work out the math problems of my bank account.
“Wait, do you know Simon?” my friend Zoë randomly asked, eyes glued to her phone.
“Who?” I asked.
She flipped her phone around and I saw it—a photo of me at my party, replied to by that tiny profile picture of the guy I’d met at the Times Square Bluestone over a year before.
We cackled as I told her the story of Simon and I meeting, the sheer awkwardness of having to navigate that situation with him. Knowing both of us better than Simon or I knew each other, she affirmed me the ways he couldn’t. We marveled at the miracle of it; that he failed to introduce us but we found each other anyway. Invisible string theory.
In the months since, I’ve seen Simon several times—through events coordinated by Zoë. We small talk, we catch up, but we’ve still never brought up the weird interaction of our first meeting.
Zoë, me, and the Universe herself, though… we laugh about it all the time.
my invisible string 💘💘💘
We love a man bringing two icons together!! I was at the edge of my seat reading this.