Chance Encounters

So, I'm riding the subway home tonight, coming up to my stop, and I glance down at the other end of the car, and there's a reasonably attractive man standing at the door, waiting for the same stop, who makes brief eye contact. I look away. I look back...he makes eye contact again. I look away again...look back to find him looking at me again. If this were a gum commercial, this is where I would frost up the window with my minty breath and write my number in it as the train pulled away from him at the station, (not to be confused with the similarly minty-fresh Mentos commercial, in which I would probably mysteriously lose my pants in a danish-related mishap and, in a minty candy-fueled moment of clarity, turn his coffee cup into a miniskirt in time to walk the fashion show that is about to begin on the platform) but that only works if only ONE of us is getting off at the next stop. If this were an episode of Sex and the City, this is where he would charmingly sidle up to me after getting off of the train and hit me with some cheesy pickup line, to which I would make a clever retort before he asks if he could take me to dinner sometime because he has a feeling he won't be able to stop thinking about me. But this is no gum commercial... no episode of It's not television, it's HBO... nope, this is Real Life. In Real Life, he takes one staircase, I take another, we go our separate ways, and I'm left wondering if he was looking at me because he thought I was cute, or I look like his Aunt Madge, or I still have wing sauce on my chin. Or maybe he was just thinking, "DUDE, why does that chick keep LOOKING at me???" Chance encounters, the stuff of Sandra Bullock movies and soft-core porn, just aren't all that exciting in the harsh glare of reality. But at least it makes the train ride a wee bit more interesting.