‘I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife
It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight,’

‘And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no, no, no, I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone’

Someone is singing “Rocket Man” on the opposite side of the BDFM stop at Broadway-Lafayette. The black pillars stand tall, sprouting like steel trees from the train tracks and holding up the street as the singer’s guitar competes to be heard over a trumpet wailing from the far end of the platform.

The uptown train blows its horn, a loud f-sharp, and through my earplugs it sounds like an amplified cello. I look up, expecting to see a cellist somewhere and wondering if it’s someone I know, someone I went to school with. And I think of you and the day you played your cello outside in Central Park and how that beagle stopped and wouldn’t leave, holding his owner steadily in place, ignoring every tug and pull to head home. Children and animals stopped and stared the most, entranced.

When you and I were still students we found a shaded spot in the park and played there all afternoon. Young mothers with strollers, schoolchildren laughing, businessmen in suits trudging their way across to the Eastside. It was the first real day of spring and the freshly cut grass smelled like hope. We played Beethoven and Mozart and Playel and Mazas and LeClair and we played a million wrong notes and a few right ones.

Around three o’clock, a crowd of kindergarteners formed a semi-circle around us, sitting Indian-style with their hands folded in their laps. Mothers and nannies waited, standing behind them. Unnerved because we hadn’t expected people to stop and really listen, we became reverent in the light of our young audience’s gaze. We tried harder and soon it seemed as though even the city was hushed, respecting our efforts and the attention of our small guests.

Time stretched like a bubble but soon our fans left as quietly as they came, into the evening light. We ended up making about a hundred dollars in those hours and we counted our stash sitting in the grass, gleefully stacking piles of coins and smoothing out wrinkled dollar bills against our knees. Near the bottom of the pile was a note: ‘Thank you for your beautiful music.’

We ate out that night, drank wine even. We still had some money left over and as we walked home through Chinatown, we held hands without gloves for the first time since winter. You walked on the outside of the sidewalk nearest to the curb and a delivery man whizzed by on his bike, so close his plastic bag of food grazed your knee. You turned to cover me and we stopped, my face buried in your chest. You smelled like cedar and bread and you said, ‘marry me’, into my hair. When I looked up I saw myself in your eyes and wished for the certainty I saw there, shining and hopeful. I felt a thudding and I could not tell it if was my heart or yours.

‘I’ve been roaming around
Always looking down at all I see
Painted faces, fill the places I cant reach’

I love this song, Kings of Leon. I drop a dollar into the singer’s guitar case and the whites of his eyes and teeth are brilliant as he smiles at me, still singing.  A well-suited man drops in a twenty-dollar bill and tells him he has a nice voice as the train arrives to whisk us off to various destinations.
‘You know that I could use somebody
Someone like you, And all you know, And how you speak
Countless lovers under cover of the street’

The soulful sound of his voice pulls at me and for a moment I consider waiting for the next train, so I can stay and listen to him. The train door dings open and I turn to wave and thank him for his song. He waves back, his handsome face cracking open again to reveal those straight white teeth. This is charisma, I realize, this is what stardom looks like.

You can’t look away and you want to stay with him forever.

‘You know that I could use somebody
You know that I could use somebody
Someone like you’