I've been falling in love with women on the subway recently. First a few weeks ago (months? Days?). She was with a guy, some nondescript yet clearly phenomenally lucky guy; a man I hardly noticed but for the hot envy that welled up in me. She had dark hair and Russian features; she looked a lot like J. but better somehow, more self assured. She had a small, perfect mouth that made a little frown all the time and she had pronounced, slightly slanted eyebrows. She had the slightest underbite. What struck me about her was her control over herself and the ease, the authority with which she interacted with the world and others, whoever they might be. She and her boyfriend were evidently accompanying friends from out of town on a tour around the city. She declared that they had to have New York style pizza, of course, and in the morning of course they had to have bagels. With that delicious underbite. Her eyes half closed the whole time, her eyes, half-closed.

And just the other day there was a Hispanic girl across the train from me who was one of the most beautiful humans I've ever seen in my life. She wore wire-framed glasses; she had flowing, elaborately styled hair that was red at the tips and black at the roots; impeccably flawless olive skin and a sensuous mouth framed by such a complex and ravishing mechanism of dimples, muscles and subtle creases that every expression she wore seemed to be definitive of some aspect of man's longing or perhaps of truth itself. Her spectacular face lent her a talent for smirking. She was accompanied by a taciturn Hispanic kid, maybe her brother or cousin (her boyfriend? Maybe, but he was overweight, and so standoffish and dismissive of her that I could not imagine he saw her the way I did), and once when she turned to him to react to his mumblings she said "Serious?" in such a streetwise-homegirl way and with such a wry, wicked smirk that I nearly lost consciousness. But it was when she was at rest that I found her the most alluring. She'd look blankly the other way, away from her neighbor, her hands deep in her coat pockets, and as her face softened into a curious mask I was left only to imagine the meanings and powers of its potential forms.