my friend telling me about a shop that we need to check out...

"What's a lifestyle store? Like kitchen stuff and dildos?"

"No.  Shoes. And couches."

vig·i·lance

“You saw that, right?” Casey asked when we’d got to the platform for the train we were transferring to. It was Saturday night and we were going to go see a play.

“No, what?”  I asked.

There had been a guy standing beside the pole. I’d walked behind it to avoid passing by him.  I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe he’d looked our way. If Casey had asked me to guess, that’s what I would have said.

But Casey said, “On the escalator.  You were standing on the right and a guy came up and literally stopped on the same step you were standing on and just stood there smiling at you for the entire rest of the ride up.”

“What?” I said. “No.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.”

“He was standing beside you!  He was staring at you and smiling!”

I shook my head. I had been trying to remember if the southbound train was on the right or the left side and was sort of reading the posters on the wall. I genuinely had no idea that there was even someone standing beside me, beyond the usual awareness that I was in public and there were a lot of people around.

“I thought maybe you were ignoring him on purpose,” Casey said. She kept staring at me, dumfounded. I noticed her looking at least.

The play was called All The Sex I Ever Had, which was not as amazing as the title would lead you to believe.  It was a bunch of seniors talking about their actual lives: a little bit about the sex that they’d had and a lot about random other things.  It felt self indulgent. That’s such a great premise though. Imagine telling a whole story of a person’s life just by describing the different times they’d had sex.

After the play we went out for a drink.  She asked if I wanted to leave it up to chance to decide where we went by taking whichever was there first, the streetcar or the bus.  “Let’s do it. Jesus, take the wheel,” I said, probably too loudly.  It was the streetcar.

Casey’s a really slow drinker. Almost everyone drinks slower than me (I wait until something is the perfect temperature and then basically finish it all in one gulp so it doesn’t have time to get warmer/colder/ruined), but Casey really drinks slowly.

Tonight, she finished her first drink before me.  

“When the pod people take you over, I’m going to know immediately,” I said when she pointed out her empty glass.  “But I’m not going to make the mistake that everyone does on tv and in movies. They’re always like, ‘oh, no, you’re a pod person, bla bla, what’s happened?’  I’ll know, but I’ll pretend that everything is fine so no one will know I know. I’ll get away.”

“Because I’ll finish my drink before you?”

“Dead give away.”

Casey’s boyfriend showed up. We told him that we’d left which bar we went to up to chance.  She said that she was happy we’d gone to this one, because she didn’t like the vibe of the other one as much.  “Too many douchebros.”

I shrugged.

“You’d be like, ‘Oh, some douchebros,’” she said. “But then if they looked at you, you’d be like, ‘oh, a wall.’”

“Is Laura blind to love?” her boyfriend asked.

“She’s blind to anything that involves her,” Casey said.

“It’s not love,” I said.

“They don’t know if it’s love yet,” Casey said.

“I’m going to get better at noticing,” I said, but I’ve been saying that for years.

Once my boss was talking about someone we’d met at a work event, and I couldn’t remember meeting him.  “He was staring at you all afternoon,” she said.  Sometimes I think my friends might be making things up a little to try to boost my confidence, but there was no reason for my boss to make up a creepy middle-aged man.  

“The man in the suit standing by the door?” I had asked her.

“The man standing by you. All afternoon long. He was undressing you with his eyes.”

I had shaken my head. She had looked at me the same way Casey did, like I was either crazy or lying.

“It’s like Sliding Doors,” I said to Casey and her boyfriend, going back to our choice to let transit decide the destination. And then I thought for a minute.  “No, it would have been exactly the same no matter which bar we went to.”  A little too dark, a little too loud, one craft beer or another, the same animated conversations about nothing. 

 

“I finished my first beer before Laura did,” Casey said to her boyfriend on the way home.

“In fairness,” I said, “your first beer was actually my fourth one.”

“True, but you sobered up during the play, so it didn’t count.”

“When you do turn into a pod person, I’m going to be ready,” I said.

“But what are you going to do if someone tries to make you into a pod person?”

“I’d pretend they succeeded and continue on. They’re never going to get me.”

Casey laughed.

“You forget that I work in Corporate Land,” I said.  “Every single day.”

“So you’re already used to staying strong behind enemy lines?”

“Constant vigilance.” I said.